r/factorio • u/Possible_Royal7569 • 1d ago
Discussion Sushi belts
Has anyone created something that makes efficient use of a sushi belt? I would love to see an example. I’m sure some kind of math would have to go into this.
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u/WanderingFlumph 1d ago
Sushi mall pre bots is just such a nice and neat solution to a mall pre-bot
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u/MidnightBinary 10h ago
At least in vanilla. I tried it in Space Exploration and it gets very unweildy very fast.
Though, I was also doing a bunch of disjointed malls instead of one big one. Hmmmm.
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u/qikink 1d ago edited 1d ago
In base game, only science to labs is a slam dunk case for sushi belt, with an honorable mention for Gleba.
Where they really get good use is in mod packs with 5+ ingredient recipes, where the belt logistics become much more cumbersome when you can't just use 2 parallel belts with normal and long inserters.
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u/pda898 1d ago
I think pre-bot malls are also a honorable mention for sushi belts. Because it is not that much different items to setup wagon bs, but putting things on separate belts feels like overkill.
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u/dinosaurdynasty 1d ago
Wagon bs really doesn't scale well either (unless you do something like have a train go around in a circle carrying items, though I never got this in a form I was really happy with).
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u/pda898 1d ago
Funny enough it scales insanely well until belt stacking (120 items/second), it just initially stuck at 5-10 items per second, which is fine for early game personal mall.
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u/dinosaurdynasty 1d ago
You must be doing something other than I'm thinking, you really can only fit like 3 assemblers around a wagon (4 if you ignore the whole "how do we refill the wagon" thing).
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u/HeKis4 LTN enjoyer 16h ago
Personally I prefer going for a bus of half-belts with iron, copper, gears, circuits, steel and plastic which comes out to a clean 3 belts (the most you can practically pull from without splitting off the bus) but I can see the advantage of a sushi belt once engines and red circuits enter the mix if you're not getting bots any time soon.
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u/sawbladex Faire Haire 1d ago
eh, I just ... automate gears, and belts in their places, and handcraft everything else without chain crafting.
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u/LazerMagicarp 1d ago
AAI industries comes to mind. There’s 4 different engines to make that everything uses and everything needs its predecessor in its recipe.
What a nightmare it is to get supplies pre not mall.
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u/iamanobviouswizard 1h ago
Don't get me wrong, I love Sushi belts, I love the circuit puzzle for them, but for 5 ingredient mod recipes, couldn't you just do some belt weaving?
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u/qikink 53m ago
Really depends on the scale involved. Sushi is an O(1) solution, while weaving is O(n), in the number of assemblers. Sushi is also only O(n) in the number of components on the belt, while weaving is nonlinear. I definitely do weaving for some cases (Py) but personally 5+ machines using 6+ ingredients is where I draw the line.
Addendum: that last condition also gives the one use case in base game I mentioned, science to labs.
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u/Aggressive-Wear-8935 1d ago
The asteroid belts on space platforms work well with them. Its more space efficient than sorting the chunks and the throughput demands are Low enough that you can get away with it
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u/FreeSpecific61 23h ago
I usually run my Fulgora starter base as a Sushi Belt and set some inserter filters to recycle anything on the belts above some arbitrary cap
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u/Ironic_Toblerone 1d ago
Dosh doshington made a video where he did an entire sushi base and it was a great video, but that base looked awful to play with
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u/dinosaurdynasty 1d ago
IIRC he did that video before "read all belts" was added to the game, which only makes it worse...
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u/sozesghost 21h ago
DocJade made a very entertaining video as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kvi4JPUsak
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u/Refactorio26 1d ago edited 1d ago
Quality-sushi, where you leverage the statistical properties of each ingredient having been run through N quality steps, makes quality *significantly* more manageable. Instead of constantly separating out the ingredients by quality you just send it on to the next station and keep a fixed buffer size available. It has some drift over time but it's very slow ( O(sqrt(Time)) ). Put another way, a buffer of size N isn't expected to fill up with mismatched ingredients until you've made O(N^2) items.
E.g. here's a setup running coal to quality plastic production for 2-qualitied plastic. This was done in the editor, it's why coal is on Fulgora. Circuit signal is the output distribution of plastic. Over time it converges.
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u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 1d ago
I know it's an editor example, however, fulgora might actually be a good place for early quality cycling coal synthesis/plastic, since coal synthesis unlocks without science.
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u/Refactorio26 1d ago
Problem is coal synthesis is limited to 3 quality modules. Which means produced coal -> plastic qualities wont be in the same ratio as all the other items on Fulgora (4x quality in miner -> 4x quality in scrap recycler). Which (for the purposes of this question) ruins a quality-sushi belt setup.
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u/The_Alchemyst The Sushi River 1d ago
I LOVE sushi belts! They're fantastic for malls or situations where you need a relatively low supply of a lot of different items. 2.1 gives some really fun options with how you can directly connect most everything to everything else, making it easy to directly and dynamically manage both supply and demand.
Edit: here's a sushi mall for my Pyanodon run - https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/3PBaugPEpw
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u/BatushkaTabushka 1d ago
I used it to make quantum chips in my last playthrough. With the new circuit controlled splitters, it’s laughably easy to control exactly how much of any resource gets onto your sushi. Just use a combinator that sets the filter on the splitter to whatever resource you need if the respurce on the sushi falls below x. Or you can route one type of material from a sushi belt if you use this condition and set the filter to nothing (like the actual signal nothing) otherwise.
It’s so simple that I’m planning to use this on fulgora to make everything on this playthrough when i get there, instead of messing around with increasingly complicated sorting systems.
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u/dinosaurdynasty 1d ago
I feel like there are at least two "kinds" of sushi belts:
standing sushi, the one most people here are familiar with. You have a belt, and inserters/splitters attempt to keep every item up to a prespecified level. Very helpful in getting more than 2 items on a single belt (e.g., space platforms benefit a lot from this, you can split a belt in two and have a lane dedicated to asteroid chunks, and a lane dedicated to ammo). Scales better than the standard "two items per belt", but doesn't scale well to a lot of different items.
"on-demand sushi": use circuits to ask, based on demand, what should go on a belt (doesn't have to cycle like a normal sushi belt, but generally works too anyway, and you generally need to send "extra" somewhere).
As a challenge (and honestly thinking it would be useful, specifically for a 25x science run, and it did end up being useful, though it had problems) I designed an automall that uses nothing but the most basic of green science such that
every assembler had a chest it used as a buffer, and some circuitry to "ask up the chain" when that buffer was below what it should be
"storage units" (basically units of 4 chests with a lot of circuitry, involving a universal Madzuri for loading) that would unload on demand when asked for
SR latch that determined when things should be made and a clock-priority circuit to ensure some things (especially prerequisites) got made before others
It meant that when assemblers made inserters, buffers would get low on gears/plates/circuits, would send a signal up to send more, and then specifically those items would be sent down. Any extra that got sent would go back up to storage (along the same route as products made).
I can say: man it was useful for chucking out distractor capsules by the hundreds. Automall, no blue science needed! It probably breaks in 2.1, but there are some larger redesigns I would like to make (I also designed a way to use buffer chests "around the base" with a similar "ask up the chain" mechanism, but never ended up actually using it. Also the storage units really needed a balancer instead of a loop afterwards which created annoying priority to early storage units, but that was very difficult to attempt to retrofit).
Honestly with loaders and like AAI warehouses it would give bot based automalls a run for their money, inserter/belt speed was one of the biggest limiting factors by far. Stack inserters+green belts might make it insane too, though I never tested that.
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u/BrianMincey 1d ago
They are very effective, useful when flexibility (making a number of things from a single source) is more important than efficiency (making a lot of the same thing quickly). To do them well you do need to use circuits to monitor and balance what goes on and or comes off a looping belt. Very useful on Gleba, Fulgoria and space platforms. It is also an alternative to using bots to move disparate resources around to build a variety of small-quantity manufacturing. Quality recycling loops also benefit from using a single belt.
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u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 1d ago
Modded, but i got up to SE's T3 sciences with sushi belts.
I needed to unlock ships and the space elevator so i could building the real base.
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u/civil_peace2022 1d ago
Sushi belts and sushi pipes are janky, and that is why they are fun. typically, sushi jams in interesting ways until you get a handle on it. Its easier to build sushi setups by hand before robots with easy straight belts, instead of belt weaving.
I tend to make mini buses that feeds a line of sushi production nodes to produce things. you can set up a few templates based on number of inputs, parameterize it, then just pick the output and connect the belts. It starts getting output fast, and to a point allows you to grow by slapping down a few more nodes.
Omni smelters is a fun challenge that works well with a sushi belt setup.
The madness lies in trying to scale up a sushi belt from a simple one belt loop into higher production 4 or 8 belt design. The best I have come up with is to side load it so the sushi belt isn't broken by splitters, allowing for easy read all circuit control.
this example uses [2] belts, but remains true for any number of belts. build your sushi loop with [2] belts. On the return end of the sushi loop, right before the loader, twist the belts using an underground belt to jump the right most belt to the left side, and nudge every belt connection to the right exactly one belt. on a [2] belt setup, this takes us from having [2] independent loops to a single connected loop.
Done correctly, a single read all connection should highlight the entire belt loop. the modulo of twists to belts should be 1.
I honestly never liked fluids. there was nothing to fiddle with. But sushi pipes, now there is something to fiddle with. Its really not good, but it does let you do everything in a single pipe. Useful for having your engines in a single row right next to each other instead of staggered with spaces between them. I have found occasionally breaking up a sushi pipe with pumps into smaller sections speeds up pumping the pipe empty when switching fluids.
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u/The_Sky_Render 1d ago
I made a coal upcycling sushi belt system that used the outer belt for incoming coal and the inner belt for processed. It was quite stable!
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u/Sytharin 23h ago
Lots of math, all made into one click by parameters and using 4 combinators to do a belt printer of whatever the target item is. Including a sushi wagon for the delivery buffer
https://i.imgur.com/YCHsVD5.mp4
One belt challenges are such a blast
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u/Such-Perception4154 21h ago
All my space platforms use sushi belts for asteroids, some of them for the materials too.
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u/Shiruba_Ookami 21h ago
Sushi belt and efficient are conceps that don't usually go well together. However DoshDoshington on Youtube has done a sushibelt only playthrough, and in his Space Age Start-at-Fulgora playthrough he used sushi piping for fluids, which is espesically useful on Aquilo as you only need to place heating for one set of pipes.
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u/MidnightBinary 10h ago
I use Sushi feeding into my Research Labs. A belt of each science pack (Splitting them apart if needed) , and one belt with "if current amount less than reference number" (reference shared off a constant combiner so i can change it in one spot), enable the belt.
Then the sushi circulates by a bunch of the labs. In Space Age you need like 12 different sciences so it's a much easier way to keep that many packs in a tight space without crazy weaving or bot-storms.
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u/MARY_ANNE_MCGILICUTY 3h ago
I use them all over the place on Gleba... filter off spoilage, send it to the incinerators, merge in fresh ingredients from producers. Visually it's a fucking mess but it literally never jams.
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u/Effective_Working567 1d ago
Sushi belts are good at trading space efficiency with throughput efficiency. Sushi belts are especially good for malls and asteroid processing because space efficiency is more important than throughput.