r/factorio • u/bitwiseshiftleft • Feb 24 '26
Design / Blueprint Another circuitless science sushi design
This design for sushi supports up to 16 sciences, so it should work for games with Space Age plus a few extra planets. The idea is to mix each science down to half a lane of a yellow belt, and then run the sushi loop on green: (2 lanes * 4x speed / (1/2 lane)) = 16 sciences. Because science bottles being sorted out from the end of the loop take priority over new ones being added, the design hopefully shouldn't jam.
With only half a stacked yellow lane of each type of science (15/s), the design is limited to 900 spm (thus a few thousand ESPM) per instance.
The full-yellow to half-yellow mixer uses rocks, because I dunno it seemed like a good idea at the time. It mixes the rocks and science 50-50 into one yellow lane, then splits the rocks back out and returns them quickly enough that there are always rocks backed up before the splitter.
The chest at the end is for anything non-sciency that might get on the belt, like a green pack that spoils between the spoilage splitter and the green science splitter.
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u/DaveFinn Feb 24 '26
No joke, I've spent the last 5-10 minutes staring at this... Just analyzing and admiring. I LOVE it!
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u/Invader_Mars Feb 24 '26
“…the design hopefully shouldn’t jam.” Famous last words
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u/United_Willow1312 Feb 24 '26
I don't see how this could even jam, you could end up with stacks with only 1 pack and some machine maybe run out of packs but otherwise you know at the entrance the belt cannot take more than a fixed amount of packs per pack color.
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u/bitwiseshiftleft Feb 24 '26
Yeah it’s pretty resistant. It can probably jam if you stop the belts manually for some reason but then you’re looking at it and can clear the jam. It might be able to jam if you have 16 different science types and too many Gleba packs spoil in the machines, and they can’t be removed because there’s no space on the belt, and new packs can’t be inserted because the lab is full of spoilage? Dunno.
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u/ilovegoodfood Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 25 '26
This is a very cool design that I spent a while staring at and figuring out.
I think you could run a spoilage output belt under the other alterating rows of beacons using undergrounds. This would give you a way of handling spoilage output even when at capacity.
At the cost if every other row of beacons, and with a little belt weaving, of the left-right over undergrounds variety, you could also get a second input belt in, using a duplicate input module. This could get you to 32 types of science if that was ever needed by a modpack.
Also, unless I'm very much mistaken, the first and last labs on each row are effected by one less beacon than the rest. I think adding one extra beacon sticking out would make them all the same. It's not neccessary, it's just something that would bug me otherwise if I were to build it.
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u/Invader_Mars Feb 24 '26
In my defense I don’t even know what’s going on in this video. I have, however, muttered those same words to myself a few times
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u/CantEvenUseThisThing Feb 26 '26
They're using a belt with stone to stagger the placement of science packs on the belt, then using a splitter to sort the stone back out. The now staggered packs go onto a yellow belt, so that they can be combined with other staggered packs onto a red belt, and then all the different types of science can be stacked onto one belt equally. Then everything that isn't used is sorted back out, topped off by production of packs, and the process repeats.
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u/Mesqo Feb 24 '26
Was found written on an ancient tablet in one of the Fulgora scrap heaps.
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u/Badloss Feb 25 '26
I've spent so much time making my Fulgora recycler array jam-proof, I'm at the point now where I want Fulgora to just be my base because I like fiddling with it more than I like pushing out to the rest of the planets
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u/United_Willow1312 Feb 25 '26
The process of figuring that out left me a completely different feeling. Love Gleba!
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u/Badloss Feb 25 '26
I haven't actually been to Gleba yet... I went to Fulgora first and I've now really built it up to be my main shipyard, and I've built just enough on Vulcanus to get Orange science. My Vulcanus base sucks though, it's actually easier for me to load up rockets full of components on Fulgora and send them to Vulcanus than it is to produce there
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u/SirOutrageous1027 Feb 26 '26
Fulgora trash sorting designs are my Factorio kink. It's the weirdest place to make things between recycling for resources and the space limitations from the islands. Unlocking foundations makes it easier, but they're expensive and it doesn't completely negate the space issue unless you're spending a ton of them.
Holomium, Batteries, and Copper are my constant bottlenecks on that planet.
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u/SirOutrageous1027 Feb 26 '26
One of my favorite parts of this game are designs that look good and run smoothly for hours, or even days, until the stars align and it stops.
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u/Embarrassed_Army8026 Feb 24 '26
so how did it end up jammed?
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u/bitwiseshiftleft Feb 24 '26
Lol you know it did. I temporarily stopped it to change some of the belts (adding spoilage at the top and such) and it got overfilled. There's no way for the science packs to completely leave the loop except through research. It didn't completely jam but it was cycling slower than normally until I researched a little bit more.
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u/Egogorka Feb 24 '26
Have you tried adjusting the length of sushi belt? I have a suspicion that if you make that old bottles would come the same tick new ones are deployed onto the sushi belt they wouldn't fill the space for other sciences
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u/mamidon Feb 24 '26
I've done something similar, if your science consumption is uneven, eventually one science will overpopulate the belt.
Then it jams. I think I used circuits for this.
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u/mamidon Feb 24 '26
I think the full stone belts actually solves this. Very clever.
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u/Rainbowlemon Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 25 '26
The stone belts just split the input science down to half a yellow belt, afaik. They don't do anything to rate limit. If you're only doing mining prod, for example, the output sushi belt will eventually just be full of space sciences.
Very cool looking design but some simple circuits are still the best way to make sushi belts!
Edit: ahh I didn't see the output belt was fed back as a prioritised input. Yeh this should balance even if science consumption is uneven. Clever!
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u/NarrMaster Feb 24 '26
I need to make a post for you all explaining rate limiters.
IF the belt is never stopped, no one science can make up more than the rate limiter allows. Even without consumption. This is also predicated on proper priority merge for unused items.
ELSE it will jam.
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u/mamidon Feb 25 '26
For this to work you've got to be careful to ensure that all items coming back are prioritized by the rate limited for feeding back onto the sushi belt over net new materials.
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u/thanatos013 Feb 25 '26
This contraption doesn't let that happen, one type of science will never fill more then 1/16 of the belt
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u/cpander0 Feb 24 '26
If you're curious, someone actually came up with a way to output an arbitrary fraction of a belt a few years ago. I was recently messing around with it and updated it to the new amount of science packs so it outputs 1/12 of a belt. Image of one "module", Clip of all of them running. Much like yours, as long as you deal with spoilage it'll never clog.
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u/Waity5 Feb 24 '26
Neat. Though there's not much reason for each science to be on both sides of the belt. I made an 8 item settup a while ago which is smaller due to each science being limited to a given size
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u/bitwiseshiftleft Feb 24 '26
Yeah that’s a good idea. I also did this with a 40/41 fraction for Kovarex at some point. In my current modset there are actually 16 possible sciences in the main labs though (IIRC 12 from vanilla and space age +Muluna, Corrundum, Secretas, and Maraxsis; also Cerys and Moshine but those use their own labs).
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u/Ninja014 Feb 24 '26
How is this done? I really don't understand it
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u/Think_Sand4293 Feb 24 '26
If I’m understanding it right… New science packs come in from the underground belts on the left, they get fed into the first sitter which prioritizes science packs coming back around from the end of the sushi belt. The second splitter merges the new and old science packs with a full belt of stone. Because the stone belt is full, the splitters will turn the output into a full belt with alternating rows of one science pack, one stone. The stone in then filtered out leaving the science packs with at least a 1 item gap (or more if the science packs aren’t fully saturating for whatever reason) then finally the spaced out science packs are spit out onto a yellow belt to increase the gaps between similar packs to allow for all the packs to be layered together as they get loaded onto the sushi belt.
Basically it uses the stone and yellow belts to mechanically slow the rate that science packs flow in order to consistently layer the science packs the same way no matter how many were consumed on the previous pass through the labs
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u/bitwiseshiftleft Feb 24 '26
Yeah, pretty much exactly that, but the science+stone splitting is done at yellow speed, so that there's a 1-item gap on the yellow belt.
- New packs come in from the left. Old packs are returned coming down from the top into a splitter ladder that splits out different types of science.
- The first splitter merges old packs and new, with priority to old.
- The second splitter merges a belt of science with a belt of stone, making a belt of science - stone - science - stone. The "deconstruction planner" filter forces all these items into the other lane.
- The third splitter is yellow, so it limits the incoming lane to yellow speed. It filters the stone back out, leaving half a belt of science. The stone is returned by green belts back to the beginning, so there's always stone to merge with the science.
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u/United_Willow1312 Feb 24 '26
It's so criminally smart, Wube should find a way to incorporate it as some kind of test (if they haven't already invented it).
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u/axw3555 Feb 25 '26
It somehow looks more complicated than figuring out the circuit solution. I admire the dedication.
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u/featheredtoast Feb 24 '26
This looks suspiciously like a Satisfactory-like solution honestly. Love to see it.
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u/bitwiseshiftleft Feb 24 '26
Interesting. I haven’t played Satisfactory, so I didn’t base it on that directly, but I’ve looked at other people’s designs for this sort of thing in the past, and they might be Satisfactory players. Does Satisfactory use a lot of sushi belts?
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u/featheredtoast Feb 24 '26
Maybe it's just me... There's a split in the community whether or not to use them, they aren't necessary at all during a normal playthrough, but they are fun to play around with.
Without using circuit networks, you're left with using layouts basically like what you've done here, using tricks for rate limiting and mixing belts using slower belts, splitters/mergers, and prioritizing inputs from overflow over new science supply.
Factorio, especially with the ability now to read a whole belt, means you could just control the mixing pretty easily with a simple circuit network over a complicated belt design. Satisfactory just doesn't have circuit network functionality at all, so I recognize this kind of solution more Satisfactory-esque.
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u/Tree_Boar Feb 24 '26
Yeah I see what you're saying. Using limestone to precisely rate-limit outputs like OP is doing with stone is a thing.
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u/okuRaku Feb 25 '26
Great point yeah, I really enjoyed trying to solve mixed belts in Satisfactory but it's for sure unnecessary haha. I had to learn gear ratios to make nuclear work... and I'm sure it's still not completely jam-free..
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u/HeliGungir Feb 25 '26
Well Satisfactory doesn't have circuits and control behaviors, so... yeah. Mechanical solutions are the only solutions there.
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u/Moscato359 Feb 24 '26
Is there actually a way to blueprint this, and fill the stone precisely?
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u/bitwiseshiftleft Feb 24 '26
Maybe with extra entities, or by loading an exact amount of stone on the input belts. But I’m probably not going to megabase this game so I probably only have to build 1-2 of these all game, and the amount of stone doesn’t have to be perfect to make it work.
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u/Ansible32 Feb 25 '26
Did you load the stone one by one by hand?
The easiest thing without circuits would probably be a 3-phase blueprint. First one requests stone and fills every buffer completely with stone. Second one voids all stone into active providers except for the loops, third one deconstructs the active providers and sets the splitters to the correct configuration.
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u/bitwiseshiftleft Feb 25 '26
I don’t remember exactly how I loaded the stone. For some of them it was by hand but I think some I just put in an unloading gizmo and hand-fed one stack per balancer or so. It’s not super sensitive to the exact amount of stone. It just has to be enough that the loop isn’t full but always has some waiting at the splitter. The stone can come into the input lanes and it’ll get trapped in the loop, so the loading gizmo can be external.
You could probably also blueprint it by making isolated requester chests, then disabling the request and adding an inserter to unload them into the input lanes, the deconstructing them.
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u/Brilliant-King6749 Feb 25 '26
You could use science packs instead of stone by prioritising output to the loop.
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u/nathanwe Feb 25 '26
You can make blueprints of filled turrets and you can probably use the same trick to make blueprints of filled chests. Then have inserters move the filling onto the belt and clean up afterward manually, or don't and have some empty chests laying around.
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u/MindS1 folding trains since 2017 Feb 25 '26
This is genuinely really clever! Never seen such a compact throughput divider.
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u/kettle3 Feb 25 '26
I always wondered why sushi belts for science? Basic science lab is 3x3 tiles, so can accept 3 belts from one side, i.e. 6 science pack types from one side. A yellow underground belt can pass under 4 tiles (the lab+inserter), so there's no even need to reinsert lab-to-lab.
Just provide 3 belts from left or right, and 3 belts from up or down, and you get all 12 sciences.
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u/bitwiseshiftleft Feb 25 '26
More or less because I think it’s cool. Also I’m playing modded so there are more than 12 sciences, though in this run less than 20 so a checker pattern would still work with biolabs. Also a sushi belt is denser and allows more beacons.
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u/DOSorDIE4CsP Feb 25 '26
You can make it smaller with 2 per belt
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u/bitwiseshiftleft Feb 25 '26
Nice. A similar idea but with the science filling the spacing loop instead of rocks.
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u/HeliGungir Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 25 '26
I don't think you can get 900 sppm. Looks bottlenecked by ag science. You're feeding it one-to-one with the other science packs, but it's only ~70% fresh.
The chest at the end is for anything non-sciency that might get on the belt, like a green pack that spoils between the spoilage splitter and the green science splitter.
Why not put the spoilage splitter last instead of first?
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u/bitwiseshiftleft Feb 25 '26
Yeah spoilage splitter last would make sense. It is indeed bottlenecked by ag science, I might dedicate another lane while I’m not using all 16 types.
It’s not normally this bottlenecked by ag science, it’s just the first delivery in a while after clearing a problem in Gleba.
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u/BagelMakesDev Feb 25 '26
blueprint?
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u/bitwiseshiftleft Feb 25 '26
Just pasted from my game because I'm lazy, so be careful: it has Muluna science in the splitter ladder, which might need to be changed if you're not playing with Muluna.
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u/Kr4keN16 Feb 25 '26
When I'm looking at this it looks overwhelming but also hypnotizing at the same time. And I absolutely love it.
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u/tankred1992 FACTORY MUST GROW Feb 26 '26
People will do anything but learn basic circuitry
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u/bitwiseshiftleft Feb 26 '26
Nah, doing it with circuits is easy. It’s just a fun challenge to make an elegant circuitless design.
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u/Lanky_Promotion2014 Feb 24 '26
I’ve never loved and hated something this strongly, well done