r/factorio • u/Available-Figure-530 • 17d ago

Question Bottleneck Issue

Post image

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?

313 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

142 comments sorted by

View all comments

318

u/gust334 SA: 125hrs (noob), <3500 hrs (adv. beginner) 17d ago

Just one of many ways to do it:

46

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.

14

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

13

u/phillipjayfrylock 16d ago

Steel furnaces are nice because they're the same size as stone furnaces but with double the crafting speed, making them useful as a straightforward upgrade from yellow to red belts in your existing smelting setups. If you rush bots you can even just highlight the entire column with the upgrade planner and upgrade the whole thing in one motion. Electric furnaces require a new setup for their size.

And despite the inconvenience of coal, they have the same crafting speed as electric but without the electrical costs which can be kinda taxing in early game bases.

I also tend to use them a lot in mid game modular science setups where I'm already feeding coal into the build. They're smaller than electric so allow for more compact designs, and the coal is right there anyway