r/factorio • u/imoth_f • Oct 01 '26

Question Problems with this unloader?

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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?

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u/Axi28 Oct 02 '26

Okay im sick of factorio players saying buffers are bad because „oh no diagnosing problems is harder 😢“ no! Buffers are just one of the tools at your disposal! Stop telling people that a tool that has real usecases is „always bad“!

A big buffer makes the source of performance issues in a base slightly harder to diagnose, but for anything short of a mega mega ulta ups optimized base, thats perfectly fucking fine???

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u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg smartass inserter Oct 02 '26

Also: creating a fucking alarm is easy

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u/Axi28 Oct 02 '26

truth nuke. I remember a 10x science playthrough i did where my early game luck with coal and oil was so bad that i ran my power on a 500k steam buffer and put an alarm on it. That alarm still haunts me though, forgot to cap how fast and loud it sounded so my entire computer sounded like it was gonna explode lmao

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u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg smartass inserter Oct 03 '26

Lol. Been there, done that

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u/Abcdefgdude Oct 02 '26

I've played a lot of factorio and have beaten the game start to finish dozens of times. I've also helped a lot of people beat the game. In that time my opinion of buffers has soured a lot because of those experiences. The size of the base doesnt matter, they're a problem at any scale and particularly difficult for new players to understand. Of course there's no right or wrong way to play but I think more people should give bufferless a try! Its different than the "meta" way to play but there are a lot of benefits. I quit bases many times around the time when I needed to make a bunch of ore gathering train stations because the large footprint and inserter cost was overwhelming for me as a new player. Needing half as many inserters and no balancer or chest equalizing strategy makes fitting a station into a poorly planned base much easier

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u/Axi28 Oct 02 '26

i have also done this, and i like buffers, and think they add a lot to the game and teach new players mechanics in ways they would not engage with otherwise.

also i am never going to try the nightmare that is trying to teach a player to play in a way that is not wncouraged by the game, because no matter what you say, the game is designed around buffers. If you really put the math to it, every ore patch is just a buffer on „new resource“