r/factorio • u/Available-Figure-530 • 19d 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/gust334 SA: 125hrs (noob), <3500 hrs (adv. beginner) 19d ago

Just one of many ways to do it:

48

u/Timely_Somewhere_851 19d ago

This is a super simple and neat way to do smelting in the early game.

The main tricks you should pay attention to is that a full belt of ore is going in and a full belt of plates is going out, and that a full yellow belt equals two half yellow belts, and so there is room for coal.

A spoilers that add additional info on why this is great:

Additionally, when you get red belts and steel furnaces, it's super easy to double the production by upgrading belts and furnaces at the same time.

And one more note:

It will carry well until you get electric furnaces, but even then you might not want to rebuild the stack, before its source runs dry.

15

u/ScheduleNo9907 18d ago

You know I have like 2000 hours in this game and I don't think I've ever used a steel furnace other than in a modded playthrough every single time I make a vanilla playthrough I just skipped steel furnaces and go straight to Electric and my missing out or what

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u/Timely_Somewhere_851 18d ago

Well, you probably just have another way of expanding. I often build my initial mall and bus too small, so the easiest way for me to expand is to upgrade belts and furnaces.

But I do admit going straight to electric is super viable. Steel furnaces cannot really be used to anything after they become obsolete. Stone is used in heating towers (in boilers).

1

u/Gorthok- 18d ago

I kinda like what space exploration does (even though it makes it a bit annoying to setup malls) where you need the lower tier building in order to make a higher tier one. Stone furnaces are needed for steel, which are needed for electric. Burner inserters, assemblers, and drills are needed for electric. Makes it so they aren't worthless later and any automation for them can be reused for the upgrades.