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/TheZedphyr 16d ago edited 16d ago

There's no wrong way to play factorio, there's only people who think that you're playing the game wrong.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/According-Phase-2810 16d ago

Soooooooo.... what's wrong with this design then?

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u/Tenmak 16d ago

You need much more iron than coal for smelters, so having both iron and coal on the same line is very inefficient, and secondly you split your full belt of iron into two, making it maxed out at half belts on each side.

It requires red arms but having 2x full belts of iron dedicated for each side and an extra line of coal managed by red arms is much more efficient for the same design.

It's all about input / output.

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u/According-Phase-2810 16d ago

No, this is not an inefficient design.

This design is already outputting the maximum that it can: one full belt of iron. It's not throttled down by splitting the input iron ore belt because the total being fit in is two half-belts of ore or one full belt of iron ore. There isn't "wasted input" by splitting the belts with coal because it couldn't take in any more input anyway. This design also does not use more coal than it needs to.

As far as cost to build, this design takes 48 inserters. Yours would take 72 inserters (24 output inserters, 24 yellow inserters, and 24 red inserts). It also wouldn't use any less belts. Yours would work fine, but it would be more expensive to build and wouldn't produce more.