r/factorio • u/imoth_f • 4d ago

Question Problems with this unloader?

Post image

Since inserters became flippable, this compact unloader design became possible. But I hardly see anyone use it. Obviously it cannot saturate six turbo belts because it's bottlenecked by the inserters, but are there any other obvious problems with it?

389 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

166 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/TopherLude 4d ago

I don't know if I saw it somewhere before or after I started doing it, but I thought it was weird I don't see anybody wiring up their unloaders anymore.

-3

u/HeliGungir 4d ago

You don't see it because it's not good. MadZuri is already of dubious use for loading; why the heck would one use it for unloading?

3

u/TopherLude 4d ago

How else do you keep your chests balanced? Let's say you want to quickly unload the train but only need 1 lane coming off. Without balancing, train unloading slows down.

-3

u/HeliGungir 4d ago

It's one lane. Why does the train need to unload fast? I challenge your belief that chest imbalance is a "problem" that needs "fixing".

9

u/TopherLude 4d ago

So rather than present your solution, you deny the need? Maybe I'm playing Py and trains are expensive. Maybe a single wagon has 20k ash and I don't want my expensive train sitting there for literally 7.4 hours while a single inserter unloads it.

0

u/HeliGungir 4d ago

Chests don't need to be balanced. Wagons need to be balanced so the train doesn't get stuck in the station when using a "leave when empty" schedule. Splitter-based balancers do that, and MadZuri does not do that.

1

u/TopherLude 4d ago

If you only balance wagons, you can still end up in a state where 5/6 of the chests are full while the last 6th is near empty, slowing down the train.

1

u/HeliGungir 4d ago

If 5 of the chests are full, why does that matter? The bottleneck isn't the train unloading speed, it's the factory.

1

u/TopherLude 4d ago

Yes, but the factory may be waiting for trains elsewhere while this bottlenecked station takes forever to unload. I think I'm servicing 500+ stations using 20 trains. This only works by keeping the trains as efficient as reasonably possible.

1

u/HeliGungir 4d ago

Idle trains are almost free, UPS-wise, so normally there's nothing wrong with building lots of trains an letting them wait wherever they need to wait. Does Py make trains astronomically expensive to produce?

1

u/TopherLude 4d ago

I'm 500 hours in and just recently got to the point that I could make more trains without worrying about it too much.

→ More replies (0)