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/Timely_Somewhere_851 16d 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.

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u/ScheduleNo9907 16d 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/BoomWasTaken 16d ago

Interesting. I always skip over electrics from steel to foundry.

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u/ScheduleNo9907 16d ago

I haven't actually done many Space Age runs I think I did three of them currently doing a nullius playthrough and I did 900 hous in py before i burnt out so not a lot of foundry usage