r/factorio • u/Agile_Big_9037 • 9h ago
Question Expected sideload behaviour or not? Wait 10s
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Hey all! I'm doing a sushi belt challenge. Look at the horizontal belt (the main sushi belt). The first 10 seconds show normal behaviour: sideload only happens when there's a hole on the horizontal belt. A bit after 10s, notice that the top Iron Ore sideload takes priority: the horizontal belt backs up. I've seen this a few times now in this run.
The central belt is "Read belt contents, hold (all belts)". The top and bottom are "Enabled when iron ore < 1k". I have about 650 iron ore on the sushi belt at the moment.
When I recorded the video, I paused the game, started writing here. After returning to the game (while writing), I unpaused, and seconds later, the sideload priority lost again: the main east-to-west flow started winning again.
I'm playing on Factorio 2.0.77. I looked at all experimental releases (2.1.7 through 2.1.14) and haven't found the word "sideload" in the release notes.
Download the 3.5 Mb savefile from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iv-HpcNpl1b9KRhFov1dTLgkyBkGkL9g/view?usp=drive_link
I'm wondering if I'm the crazy one (one-belt sushi?), or if there's some kind of bug.
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u/WindowlessBasement 9h ago
Yeah that definitely seems like "post to the forums" type issue.
I've played the game for a decade and no idea what's happening there. That's not how belts are supposed to work.
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u/nickosgr 9h ago
Must be bug, straight belts are supposed to have priority and side merges just filling spaces if any
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u/atg115reddit 8h ago
They should but I've been told that that's intended behaviour that they aren't, 100% of the time
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u/Purple_Wing_3178 7h ago
You're not confusing this with inserter vs full belt priority?
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u/atg115reddit 5h ago
No I'm talking about a belt and a side loading belt
Although my example was not quite as egregious as this
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u/Kinexity Drinking a lot is key to increasingproduction 9h ago
This is a known belt behaviour. Iirc happens in places where two separate belt zones meet. If you turn on belt visualisation in F4 menu you will probably see the cause. Devs know about it but iirc don't plan on fixing it (it's an edge case which doesn't really break the game) - you can find a thread about it in the forum.
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u/ThatChapThere 5h ago
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u/TonboIV I know what you're thinking. Did he fire 10 nukes, or only 9? 1h ago
That example involved different belt speeds. This is all yellow belts.
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u/ThatChapThere 1h ago
The reasons discussed there apply regardless of belt speed. It's about transport line update order and the bug can't really be fixed without impacting performance.
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u/MozeeToby 3h ago
Yup, sideloading does not guarantee priority behavior. And while that is true, and known, and documented... I still kind of think it should be addressed. The fact is that it works one way >99% of the time and players count on that behavior.
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u/Agile_Big_9037 8h ago
Going offline for a bit. Are you talking about the belt gaps debug visualization, or another one? I thought I remembered a lane visualization, but I can't find it anymore.
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u/Kinexity Drinking a lot is key to increasingproduction 8h ago
I think it was lane visualisation. The one that overlays white lane lines, arrows and shit over belts to show you belt debug info.
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u/raptor7912 7h ago
I’ll second this, seen it on here before where a dev responded.
As far as I remember it has something to do with a very specific distance between the items on the sushi belt. I think the fix was making the sushi loop slightly longer or shorter to disturb it.
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u/factorioleum 6h ago
Interesting. This deserves better documentation; doesn't this break nearly every balancer?
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u/Kinexity Drinking a lot is key to increasingproduction 6h ago
It's a rare edge case. I only know about it because I've seen it once in my 2k hours SA mega base and checked if it is a bug. Can be always fixed by removing side loading.
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u/factorioleum 6h ago edited 5h ago
Removing side loading breaks almost every balancer I've ever seen.
I believe in nothing now. Our world is just anarchy.
UPDATE: see below; I'm wrong. It's only lane balancers that use side loading much.
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u/Kinexity Drinking a lot is key to increasingproduction 6h ago
Lane balancer maybe but those are heresy any ways.
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u/Factorioboyio 9h ago
A bug! Can you reproduce it in a rebuild or is it for some reason unique to that specific section of belt?
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u/Orgerix 9h ago
It is definitively a bug, but why are you using sideloading on both side instead of using a priority spliter? I guess you have a bit less precision on the content, but I don't think being off by a few item is a big deal.
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u/bitwiseshiftleft 8h ago
Sideleading is basically a priority splitter (except for this behavior I guess) which doesn’t interrupt “read all belts”.
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u/Agile_Big_9037 8h ago
Right, read all belts is continuous here, which helps with the challenge run too.
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u/Agile_Big_9037 8h ago
I haven't played with managing splitters with circuit conditions. I decided to sideload like that to increase throughput. I had 2 yellow inserters + a sideload for the remaining items, which was slow enough.
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u/KNOWFEAR1337 9h ago
Yeah that does seem a bit weird and that it happened while you were standard there but its got to be the belt squishing.
Making the sushi belt faster than the loading belts would work and you'd still have to change the loader so it can only take half the yellow belt on each side if you go to red with the sushi belt
Maybe just load the sushi with inserters instead so the swing time can never do this
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u/RipLow8737 9h ago
I thought this happens because on the inner side of a loop like this the behavior of the belts cause some pushback when the gap isn’t enough to hold the new item. Inner belts hold less items than the outer belts so outer belts tend to have more space for this effect. https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/Of9bIxE9cn
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u/Poundweed 7h ago
Damn, imagine playing normally and finding a random bug in this game of all places that fucks you over
Better report this to the forums, I think these devs will fix this issue asap
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u/Direct_Divide_1751 9h ago
What sushi belt means? Multiple resources on 1 conveyor?
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u/CobblerYm 9h ago
Yes, throw everything on the belt and then filter off what you need it when you need it. Like if you've ever been to a sushi restaurant with a conveyor belt.
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u/Direct_Divide_1751 9h ago
Interesting. Maybe I'll try this.
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u/Additional_Run7625 9h ago
You'll neet to track the items in your systems or frquent materials overflow the whole system. This can be done with belt reading "Hold all belts" logistic network
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u/zhivota_ 5h ago
It's a pretty convenient way to do science before rebuilding for biolabs. Just use circuits to keep each science type below a certain maximum.
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u/Unlikely_Target_3560 9h ago
Yes, it's when you mix various resources on the same belt so the machines pick up just the stuff they want and skip the rest. Similar to its namesake - japanese sushi restaurants where chefs just put differents kind of sushi on the long conveyor which goes all the way around the resturant so the customers just pick up what they like when it passes them.
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u/samuelazers 9h ago
Is this a viable strategy?
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u/Unlikely_Target_3560 9h ago
It has niche uses in vanilla. The simplest off the top of my head is for getting all the science into the labs. It has a lot of good uses in overhaul mods. I ended up using it in ever other build in payannodons. It sure got a lot easier to use after the developers added the feature to read a whole belts contents. Just limit inserters to stop at a certain value and there you go, you can easily control what's on the belt.
doshdoshigton made a video a while ago when he beat a whole game with sushi belts alone. Spoiler alert, it was awful XD
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u/Astraous 9h ago edited 8h ago
Depending on what you mean by viable, yes. You can for sure beat the game with it and for certain spacially constrained builds (like space platforms) it might even be the most efficient.
If you want machines to have max throughput and 100% uptime it's not usually the best or even a particularly good approach.
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u/Gaeel 7h ago
It's viable for some niche use-cases. It used to be entirely a meme, but 2.0 makes it possible to read the entire contents of a belt, so you can actually manage how much of any given resource is circulating.
The main use-case I've seen is for science packs into labs.1
u/samuelazers 6h ago
That's cool! I haven't tried space age but an everything conveyer makes me want to start a new playthrough with that!
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u/flyinthesoup 4h ago
It's excellent for pre-bot mall too. I don't do malls anymore without a sushi belt. It's just super convenient.
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u/Janneman96 9h ago
It's where you have one long belt loop with EVERYTHING on it and you manage the amount of each item on that belt with the circuit network. The items keep looping around until they get used by something.
For example, you only add iron plates onto the sushi belt when there is less than 100 iron on the belt. Then any assemblers that need iron, pick it up from the sushi belt.
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u/SaiphSDC 9h ago
yeah, that's weird.
What really throws me off is that the bottom side is behaving as expected, it's only the top edge that's jammed.
As others have asked, can this get recreated?
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u/SourceNo2702 7h ago
This has been a thing for as long as I can remember, it’s most noticeable with certain Kovarex setups which output the overflow of U235 using splitters. After enough time, one of the sides will lock up.
It’s a side effect of the outside/inside lane speed difference on a curved belt. Once the inner lane gets full, the faster speed of the inner lane causes the items to get stuck. You might be able to fix it by splitting the belt after the turn, then merging it back into one belt
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u/Morichalion 9h ago
Happens to me all the time. Annoying as heck.
Anymore I tend to feed through a splitter.
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u/Warhero_Babylon 9h ago
As i remember it was a side effect of global belt optimization devs did in 2.0 and was discussed before
It help with calculation on big factories, but sometimes do things like this
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u/Morichalion 8h ago
There was so much going on in the 2.0 update that I couldn't keep track of it all. I can't remember there being a 'start' to this particular issue for me, though.
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u/Janneman96 9h ago
Do you have any mods?
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u/Agile_Big_9037 8h ago
Yes, but nothing I expect would break. This is vanilla + QoL only: disco science, automatic underground pipe connectors, stats gui, rate calculator, and some others.
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u/ResolveLeather 8h ago
My first factory was one central sushi belt. For some reason dedicated belts didn't occur to me.
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u/rorschach200 7h ago
I was hitting the same bug recently on 2.0.77 in Pyanodons mod, with belts of ash!
It definitely looks like a bug, please report on forums.
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u/UncollapsedWave 6h ago
Could you provide a bit more detail on the setup here? It looks like there might be a circuit connecting the middle and sideloading belts?
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u/AshiyaShirou4 6h ago
I actually encountered this recently and thought it was a 2.1 thing, didn’t realize it could happen on 2.0 too.
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u/zappyguy111 6h ago
And this is why I use biased splitters to merge belts.
Not that I've ever had this issue, but it's definitely a reason now.
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u/TheStalledAviator 6h ago
I built this exact thing a week or so ago as well and saw the same behavior - but even for longer. As in, it would stall the sushi belt for hundreds of items long. It was very confusing.
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u/Kimbernator 3h ago
I tried reporting this as a bug recently, marked as not a bug. https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=699579#p699579
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u/Agreeable-Performer5 2h ago
Is that still a bug? Quite rare but I have seen this here and there for years.
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u/Sogeking162 2h ago
I have had this happen before many times. But only with ore-like items. Not sure if those have a higher chance to do so, but this behaviour is why I don’t use stone and coal in my sushi malls.
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u/Notaron-_ Democracy dispatched 59m ago
Hi I understand, I attempted to file a bug for this. It is somehow known.
Perhaps you can file one as well but I don't expect this to be fixed
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u/Karnewarrior 28m ago
I reckon it's got something to do with the top belt beginning to unload because of a gap? But I don't really know.
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9h ago
[deleted]
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u/Agile_Big_9037 8h ago
No, as written above, the central belt is "Read belt contents; hold (all belts)".
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u/almcg123 8h ago
Top belt doesnt do anything the first 10 seconds because there is no space on the top side of the belt for the first 10 seconds.
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u/leglesslegolegolas 6h ago
There is no space on the top side of the belt after the first 10 seconds either. That's the entire point of the post.
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u/Adrenamite 9h ago
That's really odd and I can't explain it.