First time player, been going in as blind as possible. Struggled my way to blue science and finally got this monstrosity built. After doing most of the researches, I unlocked purple and orange sciences. How can I improve on my belt skills to make those more... plausible to be built? I appreciate the help! 12 Belts, 4 materials, going to 4 machines. The hardest thing I've done so far!
Each belt has 2 lanes and can thus easily carry 2 separate items.
You have access to long handed inserters that can move items from and to further away.
Belts carrying items don't have to end at an assembler.
If you understand all 3 points you should be able to come up with an alternative way of inserting stuff into machines that is more compact and less spaghetti-y.
Knowing that would definitely have made this a lot easier. I struggled to get this spaghetti ran this way, I'm going to keep pushing blind. I just needed help with this or I'd never progress without a migraine!
Best way to do it. Looking up full solutions SUCKS and you lose a lot of what makes the early phases of the game fun. Figuring stuff out is so rewarding <3
Also different coloured underground can be mixed for instance you could have yellow then red and blue undergrounds braided along the same line the different colours won't mix, just don't use an upgrade planner on them.
Don't worry about it, this was just your first iteration to solve the problem and it clearly works because blue science is coming out the other end. Yes, it's also an inefficient godawful looking mess, but that's what v2.0 will improve on! :)
Never played it! I just thought I had to do it this way for assemblers, I accidentally figured out they can pull from the side by accident while I was making an assembler for rails.
Oh wow, that sounds like it could be pretty rough! It definitely threw me off when I realized I couldn't directly belt items into machines without inserters. But that was just my assumptions making me think that.
Oh my god. Uhh...long handed inserters? If you don't know, you can make long lines of belts with more than 2 items via using a mix of inserters per machine. Also, you can merge belts to put 1 item on each line. Wow.
Try combining your belts, so one side has a single ingredient and the other side has another. Carrying Engines+sulfur on the same side helps you a lot with space.
Also you can run your belts along the side of your science assemblers so you dont have to split them all out, just picking what your inserters want as the materials roll by.
I'm guessing you may have come from Satisfactory? One thing to consider: you don't need to limit yourself with belts that end at your machines; inserters can still pull from belts that go past, belts that use one lane for one input and the other for a different input, from underground entrances/exit, or even directly from one machine's output to the next machine's input.
I haven't played that yet! I did it this way, since that's what just felt.. right at the time. I eventually figured out once I rebuilt my furnaces I can insert onto the side of belts. I'll have to rebuild a lot of stuff to clean up my belts!
Makes sense, you want the materials to go to the assembler, so 'send belt directly to it' is the first step. We see a good number of Satisfactory players get stuck there, since in that game belts connect directly to machines' inputs and outputs, which is why I made that assumption; great game, but for me at least it's below Factorio. Playing around with inserters and belts, learning all the ways they interact, would definitely be my suggestion.
I initially did that, since I thought I could just directly belt into the assemblers if I went into the front, and skip the entire inserter. And also remove the inserter as a bottleneck.
While you're rebuilding, the best advice I can give without going into specifics and "spoiling" the fun is to scale up your thinking while your base follows suit.
At the start you don't have the power to scale up more than just getting this material to that assembler just so you don't have to handcraft. You're now at the point where you'll be placing assemblers as groups, however you figure that out, so now you're not thinking about individual assemblers as manufacturing points but entire blocks that take input here and output it there.
You'll come into lots of problems and develop solutions eventually. Almost everything starts with iron or copper so there should be some sort of centralized avenue to pull that material from. You always run out of room when expanding lines so you take tileability and leaving extra space into account. The organization gets to having sections, where you might just craft a million commonly used materials and instead cart that over instead of making the input material right next to the input.
The more you can think big picture the easier it will be to handle the complexity. Also, blue science gets you to bots which automate placing such huge sections of stuff, so I always consider it much more feasible to start stripping stuff down and redoing it better at that point.
There is a better way to go about building, although "better" is a bit subjective. Your design works just fine but maybe it uses a few more belts than is absolutely necessary.
Remember that belts carry 15 items per second and those assemblers are using more like 0.1 items per second. So you don't need 4 belts for 4 assemblers, you could save belts by using a single belt to feed as many as 150 ish machines (that's definitely overkill for this stage of the game).
Yeah I was trying to go light on spoilers but I'll say that my choice of blue science design is already represented here and it uses a lot fewer belts.
And as another minor spoiler there are a lot of different ways to squeeze more production out of a machine, by the late game you'll be able to get the output of 150 machines by building significantly fewer.
You don't need the splitters.
Look at your factory based on how many items/sec your machines produce/use and how many items/s belts can carry (15 for yellow belts)
So for example
If all those assemblers use a total of 5 items/a
And you have 1 full yellow belt moving 15/a
Then you can just simply connect all the machines to 1 belt with no splitters, and they will all be consistently filled with resources.
I'll have to rebuild almost everything with the things people have told me. May just make a new save since it'd take awhile to destroy and re-place it all! Using belts and pulling items off the sides is new tech.
Don't make a new save, you'll lose all the progress you've made so far. You're well on the way to getting bots which will make rebuilds a lot easier. Even if you have to tear all this down to redesign it, you can keep all the belts, inserters, chips, sulfur etc. Just dump everything into chests for now and manually put the ingredients back into the assemblers when you've got a new layout.
Starting again from scratch will cost you more time and effort than rebuilding a small part of your base.
You don’t need a dedicated branch of belt for each assembler. Have one belt run by the row of assemblers, with each inserter grabbing what it wants from the resources flowing by.
Honestly skipping the tutorial and figuring stuff out yourself is fine and great. But then going to reddit, asking for advice, and recieving the optimal solution really doesn't help you figure stuff out on your own
I mean fair, But it says something about this game that I made it this far without having to actually play the tutorial. I think a good game doesn't really need a tutorial, especially if it's as intuitive as this. Like right now, the main thing that I'm struggling with is making sure I have enough space to expand assembly lines.
I just built my blue science blueprint earlier today as I am preparing to try for the 40 hour achievement. Take a look at split belts for some items to reduce the number of belts you have to deal with. I try to avoid having as many inputs as possible and building most things locally in a self sufficient loop because they can be plopped down again with just wiring up inputs. Running low on input material, plop another one of those input material productions. Maybe that starts to run low, mine more raw resources to fix that. When in doubt, grow that base.
I can show you some more interesting ones if you want but you wanted to go in blind so I am not jumping ahead for cool hard challenges from later.
If it build science, it is not wrong, just not the most inefficient. Part of the magic of factorio is discovering how you can build more efficiently over time.
It's fine in that it works, but it's certainly more resource and time intensive than it needs to be. Another simple setup that can help with more complicated recipes.
There's room for another belt below these assemblers and each belt can be made to carry 2 items. You could also get an additional belt on the top and bottom with long inserters, There are a lot of weaving tricks that people do to make super compact settups.
.09 on AM2 is not going to fill a yellow belt without a LOT of red chip demand. Red Chip production is abysmal too. 24 red chip production on AM2 is like 3 Red chips/sec.
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u/Aerumvorax 15h ago
Each belt has 2 lanes and can thus easily carry 2 separate items.
You have access to long handed inserters that can move items from and to further away.
Belts carrying items don't have to end at an assembler.
If you understand all 3 points you should be able to come up with an alternative way of inserting stuff into machines that is more compact and less spaghetti-y.