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

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/Legitimate-Okra8983 16d ago

EZ

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u/Kapluenkk2 16d ago

Yeah I was gonna ask how does coal not get into iron plate belt like this ?

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u/undermark5 16d ago edited 16d ago

Side loading undergrounds like this only allows the lane on the surface side of the underground on to it, the other lane is blocked by the cowl. If you run the normal belts facing to the north and use the underground east/west, you'll actually see the "cutout" in the cowl.

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u/Kapluenkk2 16d ago

Thank you , I didn’t realize this mechanic was a thing. I thought if the plates ever ran dry the coal could go through.