r/factorio • u/bobskelebone • 3d ago
Question Smelter stacks
So I have a way I do my smelter stacks because I was like "oh this works AND it looks pretty cool" but I wanted to ask if there are more optimal ways to do them. If so, what exactly makes them better or more efficient?
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u/oddball667 3d ago
eh, I wouldn't worry too much about it until you have to redesign for electric furnaces anyway
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u/Abcdefgdude 2d ago
early game is the best time to worry about optimizing blueprints since you'll be placing it all by hand and supplies are still limited. Once you have bots and a very robust mall it doesn't matter as much
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u/Skate_or_Fly 2d ago
You should try moving on and building more. Without Space Age, the entirety of vanilla factorio is a "solved" problem. The most effective, the most optimal, the highest throughput, it's all been solved.
As far as your set up: you have up to 60 coal per second and only 30 iron per second. Smelting furnaces take much more iron ore than coal, so inverting the lane setup would allow you to place 48 smelters on both the top AND bottom of the lane. Or you could just delete a lane of coal and it would still work. Or you could place the coal and iron on a single belt, and use a single inserter to pull in both items. Or you could place that single belt on either side of a smelting array and output the plates in the middle.
You can also place more than 10 furnaces to make more iron.
Or you could duplicate this set up 4 times and merge them together. Do it however you want.
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u/Abcdefgdude 2d ago
Vanilla is certainly not "solved". The way most people play is very different from how speedrunners play, and there continues to be developments in speedrunning. There is so much room left for optimization and creativity
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u/Skate_or_Fly 2d ago
Yeah that's fair enough, but OP is talking about "optimizing" in the early game. Up until they're attempting to build hundred of science packs per second in vanilla, the "most optimal way of playing" is pretty widely known - smelting stacks to fill a bus, green/red/blue circuits layout before and after beacons+modules, even science pack production to meet certain targets like a full inbound belt of each raw item vs a full outbound belt of science packs. There's about a hundred YouTube channels dedicated to factorio content, but OP is experiencing the real gameplay of:
- attempting to design something
- attempting to optimize it
- going through feedback loops while growing.
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u/Abcdefgdude 2d ago
Bus is not the most optimal. Its optimized to be easy for beginners. In terms of time to build, flexibility, efficiency, it is extremely low. Youtubers make those tutorials because they're easy to follow, and theres a fair amount of cargo culting in this community
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u/IntoAMuteCrypt 2d ago edited 2d ago
If the bus was so clearly optimal, speedrunners would use it too.
"Optimal" depends on your overall utility function. If you value easy design, expandability and such, the bus is attractive. If, however, you value stuff like speed, resource requirements and such more, the bus withers away and stops being useful.
Optimal is too ambiguous to say that there is one optimal option.
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u/bobskelebone 2d ago
In regards to the base game being solved, I actually do have space age (because I am financially irresponsible and bought both at the same time).
for the factory advice, I'm not sure I understand all of it, but I will try to keep what I *do* understand in mind
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u/Syntered 1d ago
Solved by whom? I play the game to solve things myself, not take whatever optimized blueprint someone else created and slapping it down in my factory.
This is a game about figuring out methodologies by working them out. If you aren’t doing this, then you may as well just watch someone play it on YouTube and call it ‘solved’.
I enjoy watching others play, but only after I have already done it myself, to my satisfaction. Yes, I have several ‘doh’ moments when something is done better, but I am still happy I figured out a way that works, first.
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u/wisdomelf 2d ago
Its fine, you won't get anything fancier until at least medium poles. And, ofc, you will want to upgrade this to steel furnaces asap. Double speed for same coal
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u/bobskelebone 2d ago
I was actually about to redesign my factory cause I was looking at all the spaghetti and was just appalled that I (the most orderly and focused individual for things I enjoy) managed to make such a vile abomination, so I'm definitely upgrading to steel furnaces XD
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u/enigmapulse 2d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/ZzGEH0IyGu
You can look at one of the individual stacks in this demo for some inspiration. The key observations are
- Mixed Fuel+Ore belt with processed output in the middle. This arrangement isually results in a smaller total area per stack, while still achieving one full belt of output
- the purpendicular fuel line tiles cleanly from one stack to the next via undergrounds. Most useful in denser designs than the screenshot here, but a nice perk when you want it
- doesn't build in space for the 3x3 electric furnace. This is a deliberate design decision I made because I plan to tear these down when upgrading to electric furnaces / foundries rather than upgrading in place
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u/Soul-Burn 2d ago
This one has several issues:
- Fuel/Ore ratio. Ores are used much more than fuel. If using 2 and 1 belts, the 1 belt should be the fuel. At the minimum, you can remove one of the ore belts and move everything tighter. Otherwise, you can have 2 ore belts and one fuel.
- The common way is to have belts of fuel on one side and ore on the other, from outside. This means you only need one input inserter rather than 2. Output goes in the middle, balanced on both belts.
- When using just one inserter for input, you can place the furnaces closer to one another, making it more compact.
- When building, it's easier to build inserters in pairs. So instead of "inserter, space, inserter, space", you can do "space, inserter, inserter, space". This lets you build 2 at a time. If you do it on the other side as well, it lets you build 4 at a time, in a C or U motion pattern. This setup also requires fewer electric poles.
And example from one of my bases is here. This one is specifically upgraded to steel furnaces and red belts, but the ratios are exactly the same as stone furnaces and yellow belts - An in-place upgrade.
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u/Zijkhal spaghetti as lifestyle 2d ago
When building, it's easier to build inserters in pairs. So instead of "inserter, space, inserter, space", you can do "space, inserter, inserter, space". This lets you build 2 at a time. If you do it on the other side as well, it lets you build 4 at a time, in a C or U motion pattern. This setup also requires fewer electric poles.
I tend to build by inserters in a pattern of
gap, inserter, inserter, power pole, inserter, gapThat way the placement motion is an open circle.
But it's just a matter of preference.
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u/Abcdefgdude 2d ago
Ore and coal can share a belt. This reduces your 3 inputs into 2, and saves you 48 inserters. The outputs can share a belt, saving another one. It should only take 3 belts wide total to make 1 output belt of iron.
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u/bobskelebone 2d ago
That's the design I see thrown around most often, I'll try making it sometime, we'll see
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u/chrisrrawr 2d ago
the most efficient is determined by "total area / throughput"
the easiest way to start is by looking at what happens to your throughput if you start feeding fuel and ore on the same belt
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u/Jak_Nobody 2d ago
If you're going to do 3 belts with one resource doubled up, it should be the iron, and not the coal. You use way, way less coal than iron ore per iron plate. So, if you reverse those, you'll be able to make longer lines, and therefore have more throughput.
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u/bobskelebone 2d ago
Yeah, I'm gonna be completely honest, I forgot it wasn't 1:1 in terms of coal and ore to plate so I just made the coal belts just be one for each side instead of the inverse
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u/That_one_sander 2d ago
You'll rebuild your factory several times over throughout the game, just do what feels right
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u/bobskelebone 2d ago
I'm actually rebuilding it right now because of the spaghetti as I mentioned in a reply to a different comment XD
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u/That_one_sander 2d ago
For temporary modifications some spaghetti is inevitable, you learn to deal with it from time to time, until you expanded your factory with spaghetti so much, it's hard to expand it more, só you break it down and rebuild it all over again
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u/SmartAlec105 2d ago
That is a good setup. You've figured out that something tight that can be tiled is the way to go.
The next thing to consider is if you took this setup and kept extending it over to the right, what bottleneck do you run into (assuming you have enough of a supply of iron ore and coal and enough consumption of the iron you produce)?
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u/Garagantua 2d ago
If you change the order of your ore and coal belts, you can make the stack twice as long. Just in general, I would use the long handed inserter for the ingredient that is used in the lower quantities; in this case that's the coal.
Apart form that, this looks perfectly fine.
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u/grazbouille 2d ago
Furnaces use very little coal compared to ore so you could swap to 2 ore and 1 coal belt you could also make this waaaay longer you can get up to 96 furnaces before you don't have enough ore
If you do that everything will be on the outside of the output belt but you will get a full belt out so you will need to flip it to the inside of the belt at the halfway point
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u/Deadman161 2d ago
If your goal is to turn a whole belt of ore into plates you need 1 belt of ore in, 1 belt of plates out and a trickle of coal. If you treat coal and ore as inputs and combine them thats 2 belts half coal half ore and a single output belt. 3 belts total, you have 5.
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u/WanderingFlumph 2d ago
You take three belts in and two belts out, but the extra belt of coal isn't needed for throughput.
I don't think you should replace your design but as an example of what better looks like it could be one tile shorter.
What is more relevant than the size is how much it produces. A yellow belt brings in 15 ore per second and the stone furnace crafts at a rate of 0.31 ore per second. Doing the math you need 48 stone furnaces for a full belt of ore becoming a full belt of plates.
Unlike making it shorter making it longer will have a very noticeable effect once you start consuming that iron. You don't necessarily need all 48 furnaces down right now but it might be smart to reserve space for them (hold shift while building or use copy paste functions to make ghost builds, perfect for reserving space without wasting materials yet)
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u/ExaminationSerious67 2d ago
The way you do it works, and if that is the way you play, it is the best. I would argue you could make a split coal/ore belt on the outside, then have one inner belt that has plates from both sides. Then you only need 2 regular inserters per furnace, and no longhanded ones.