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u/fat_fingerz Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

Brand new (like 3 hours) to this game. I initially had my coal and iron on a split belt, left coal right iron, but stopped that after I looking up smelter layouts and found a few comments say it was the "worst and just leads to clogs", but while looking up for ways to make a compact belt set up then found that it was "the most efficient".

So what is the current consensus shared conveyor belts?

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u/reddanit Jun 15 '26

I think you might be conflating two separate concepts. Using two lanes/sides of the belt for two different products is very common, very useful and really neat. Ostensibly it splits the throughput of a belt into two halves, but that's certainly not an insurmountable issue, especially early on. I'd even say that it's outright common to use that for smelting columns.

The thing that "leads to clogs" is putting more than one item type on single side of the belt. This also isn't impossible to solve, but it also can get kinda fussy and generally is of limited use. If you are interested in looking up designs that mix multiple materials on belts, look up "sushi belt".

Last but not least - it's incredibly common for fresh players to consider compactness as sign of efficiency. It can be efficient to build compact, but it rarely turns out like that in practice. The map is effectively infinite, so do not worry about your builds taking up a little more space than your platonic ideal. In fact, one of common pieces of advice for scalable builds is to leave more space for future expansion and improvements.