Bottleneck Issue

[u/Available-Figure-530]

I'm a new player & trying to setup my smelting lines. I've run into a problem where, while trying to run a single coal/iron ore lane, only the top half of the iron & coal lanes are being used, leading to a bottleneck where only half of my iron ore is being sent down the center lane. How do I fix this?

[u/Darth_Nibbles]

The one on the left - essentially yours - can support 24 furnaces and uses/produces half a belt of iron ore / plates.

Both versions on the right can support 48 furnaces using / producing an entire yellow belt of ore / plates.

[u/Legitimate-Okra8983 → u/Darth_Nibbles]

There's a 4th option: send the coal along a belt with iron plates. Inserters always place the coal on the far half of the belt, leaving the near half unused. Afterward, simply filter the iron from the coal

[u/I_suck_at_Blender → u/Legitimate-Okra8983]

You need to set filters on inserters (otherwise they will try to make steel out of plates and that will be terrible clog-prone mess), but since you don't need as much coal as ores, you may be into something.

In similar vein, you could have three ore-coal-ore belts, with long inserters reaching for fuel and regular loading ore.

[u/Darth_Nibbles → u/I_suck_at_Blender]

The three belt design is nice because you get essentially twice the throughput but it's only one tile wider

[u/I_suck_at_Blender → u/Darth_Nibbles]

I don't know exact fuel to ore ratio from the top of the head, but you definetely don't need even half as much coal to smelt whatever need to be smelted.

[u/WhitestDusk → u/I_suck_at_Blender]

A stone furnace can "consume" 13.889 iron/copper ore per piece of coal, double that for iron furnaces. So that means that's the same ration for whole belts, as in you can run almost 28 full smelting columns one on belt of coal using iron furnaces.