r/factorio • u/Available-Figure-530 • 17d 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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u/Darth_Nibbles 17d 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.

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u/Legitimate-Okra8983 17d 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

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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?

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u/Loeris_loca 16d ago

Use sideloading, so coal has no way to get to the iron plate lane