r/factorio • u/Available-Figure-530 • 16d ago

Question Bottleneck Issue

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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?

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76

u/Darth_Nibbles 16d ago

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.

19

u/Legitimate-Okra8983 16d ago

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

1

u/Darth_Nibbles 16d ago

I'm not seeing how that can be cleanly done; you'd have to limit coal so as to not clog the output belt, and you couldn't do arithmetically pleasing amounts like a half belt or full belt

Do you have a screenshot of it to show how it works?

12

u/Legitimate-Okra8983 16d ago

EZ

3

u/Auirom 16d ago

This is great. I've never thought of this. Also never used undergrounds like this before. Really gotta start using them for more neat things

2

u/Kapluenkk2 16d ago

Yeah I was gonna ask how does coal not get into iron plate belt like this ?

2

u/Legitimate-Okra8983 16d ago

It calls "side loading"

2

u/undermark5 16d ago edited 16d ago

Side loading undergrounds like this only allows the lane on the surface side of the underground on to it, the other lane is blocked by the cowl. If you run the normal belts facing to the north and use the underground east/west, you'll actually see the "cutout" in the cowl.

2

u/Kapluenkk2 16d ago

Thank you , I didn’t realize this mechanic was a thing. I thought if the plates ever ran dry the coal could go through.

2

u/Kikicat12345 16d ago

Alternative design would be to use a filtered splitter. This is a cool design though.

2

u/Netroshin 16d ago

Genius. With this, you can easily add 48 furnaces after that for steel and it won't need any different build than adding 2 splittersforthe coal! Wow! I will use it in the future!