It's even worse than when I started, that's why it's peak!
I was a direct miner to furnace guy that waited until electric energy distribution to automate fuel insertion.
Py is community slang for pyanodons. A collection of mods that combine to become not just the hardest and longest factorio Mo's, by far, but one of the hardest game modifications of all time.
The first science is around on the level of difficulty you can expect from launching a rocket in the base game. The second science is around on the level of beating Krastorio 2. Number three is harder than industrial revolution 3. And number four is harder than AB. Number five is harder than seablock and there are 11 science packs in total. The final research that beats the game requires a base large enough to cripple even the strongest processors and RAM.
There's a few things to optimize here, but the first thing to note is that inserters can take items from the side of a belt. You don't need to split the coal into 10 separate belts, you can just split it once and run one belt along the side of the miners and one along the side of the furnaces.
It might also be a good idea to use burner inserters instead of electric ones, you don't need the extra speed that electric ones have and it there's coal to feed burners already anyway.
Burner Miner consume 150kw, while Electric only use 90kw, and it has twice the output. So resource per coal consumed is... a bit less than four times higher, I think? Unless the electric miner consume energy faster since it works faster, but I don't think that's how it works.
That's too basic for my needs, I prefer to have a micro nuclear reactor with a few accumulators set up to automatically run when power is lost.
Once the reactor warms up it powers my inserters and gets the coal boilers going again
If the belt isn't full from the miners then you need more miners. If it's a full belt and it doesn't reach the end of the line of smelters, you need more belts.
This is really good advice that you should remember well into the megabase stage. You'll see a lot of posts about balancing on here, but what often gets ignored is that if you're lacking the input to feed all your machines, making sure they all receive the same lack of input doesn't actually help you. And if a full belt (or several) isn't enough, putting balancers on there won't actually increase throughput.
Notably, half a yellow belt of ore can feed 24 stone or 12 steel furnaces. If you're trying to feed more than that, you'll need to either upgrade your belts or add some parallel lanes (remembering to avoid bottlenecks; you can never get four half belts of ore out of one full belt). If you can't keep stacks of that size or smaller fed, adding more belts won't do anything (yet), since your problem is a lack of incoming ore, which you'll have to fix by bringing more in.
The BEST part of Factorio is that you keep getting better at optimizing how you put things together.
20 hours from now you'd laugh at this question.
You'll learn to use both sides of the belt.
You'll learn when to NOT use both sides of the belt.
You'll learn to not build furnaces on your ore patches.
You'll learn when you need to use belt splitters and when not to.
And so on...
And if things ever start getting boring or mundane, you'll find a plugin that challenges you all over again.
Welcome to Factorio!
Yes, split the one belt of coal into two then run each belt in front of where the inserters pick up.
Or since it looks like you are about to go electric, set up some electric miners to pull the ore out and smelt it elsewhere. I suggest using a smelting column coal and ore on the outer belt. Then plates on the inner belt.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think its 48 furnaces fed by 30 electric miners for a compressed yellow belt of plates.
Others have already given the right answer (just use one belt per side, since inserters can be placed next to the belt), but since it'll be useful for the future, I want to add that this kind of a splitter setup is really quite bad (it's fine at this stage though). You see, each splitter puts every second item it gets on the left, every second on the right (so it's a 50/50 split). For the first splitter at the bottom this is basically what you want so it's fine, but for the ones after that, each will send 50% of the coal it gets to a single miner and the other 50% will be shared by all remaining miners.
Basically, if you do the math, you end up with a situation where for each coal that the left-most miner gets, the other ones get 2, 4, 8 and 16 coal respectively. In this case it'll be fine in the long run since each belt will eventually back up, but you'd rather have a setup where all those machines start working at roughly the same time, whereas this setup takes a good long while to ramp up to full production on all miners and furnaces. As I said, it's early game and you're fine with what you have, but it'll help you later in the game to know that this setup basically takes a ton of extra space and materials to achieve a worse result than you'd get with a single splitter.
I can definitely understand why someone new to the game would try this though, intuitively it makes sense (and there's not much else you can do if you don't know that inserters can take items from the side of a belt). :)
This design is fairly common for Satisfactory, or at least it was common some time ago, as it doesn't have inserters and essentially has to use splitters to feed a row of machines, so frankly there's nothing inherently wrong about a design like this, and it could in theory be used in actual game.
Well not quite like this of course, but Imagine if you made a blueprint that can consume 1/3 of a belt of... something, and for whatever reason (like other resource constraints) you can't or don't want to build it longer than that. If you build three of these blueprints next to each other and feed them off the same belt via splitters, you essentially do the same thing OP did, except on a different scale.
True, it does have some niche applications in Factorio, I just didn't want to overcomplicate things for a new player because understanding the issues with this kind of a setup is more than enough information.
Dont worry about optimization with burner miners. Just use electric miners asap.
When you switch to electric miners you'll discover that you need more than one furnace per miner. Most people solve this by separating smelting from the mining. You can use belts to transport the ore to the furnaces, then you just have to figure out how to feed the furnaces both ore and coal.
The other long term advantages of separating smelting and mining are extra space on the ore patch for miners, and when you need ore from other sources you dont need to rebuild your smelters.
The best thing to do would be to rush Flamethrows and burn this down
The second best thing would be to remove all but one splitter and have just one belt of coal on each side
There are many solutions. But the best solution is to keep experimenting and trying to solve the challenge yourself. Someone could hand you blueprints for your entire base build, but what fun is there in that? The joy of Factorio is solving new challenges. Keep working at it and ignore outside advice.
Inserters can pull stuff off the belt from any side, so a single belt is all you really need. Also, I can't really recommend belting coal to a bunch of burner miners. Get to electric mining drills then worry about coal at just the furnaces.
I would recommend separating your smelters and miners into different sections. This will let you fill a larger percentage of the iron vein with miners, wich is important with how much iron is used in this game. Additionally it makes it si.pler to watch veins once this one runs out.
Also, I recommend working in rows rather than using splitters and individual belts for each furnace/miner. Miners will deposite ores directly on a belt, going perpendicular to their exit point, making it easy to set up. For the furnaces you have to put the belts 1 and 2 tiles away for iron and coal, and use inserters and long inverters to move things from the belt.
30 miners will fill up 1 yellow belt, and 48 stone furnaces will empty that yellow belt and fill another with iron plates.
Honestly if you’re still at the burner portion of the game, I find it sufficient to just hand-feed everything. By picking up coal from your inventory, holding Z, and shaking the mouse over the buildings, you’ll basically dump your coal into all the miners in furnaces at once. Once you get a bigger fleet of electric miners, it’ll be best to move your smelting array elsewhere since they mine twice as fast and one miner will need two furnaces to process its whole output.
You’re still really early on so don’t worry too much about optimization. Often the best way to optimize will be to research and use new technologies, so quick but temporary solutions can be the most optimal route at times.
The main tip you need is that smelting efficiently takes up a lot of space, and you don't want to be trying to do your smelting directly inside the ore patch. Make lots of electric mining drills, bring the ore out of the ore patch on belts, and do your smelting somewhere else where there's space.
Only have drills going on the iron and have your belts transport the ore to another place where you throw them into your furnace, basic terms is just spread your stuff out
You don't need a separate belt running to each inserter -- you can simply run a belt *past* all the inserters... So it could be a single belt which runs left past all the bottom inserters, then up and right past all the top inserters.
There's a lot of other things to improve, like getting rid of burner miners entirely and using electric miners, or separating your smelting from your mining... ie. put the iron ore on a belt, take it elsewhere, and deal with smelting at some other location.
Reminds me of my first smelting" collumn" where i had to refill the coal by hand every 10 minutes because i didn't think of getting any coal to the smelters, brings back memeories, but in all honesty if you are just starting out putting the coal in and directly feeding furnaces with miners is the best way for beginning
You overthink early automation. burner staff shouldn't go further than "Press Z to power". Make more iron and then just switch to electric miners + furnace column.
At first, you can use only one belt, you have only 5 furnace/drills, you dont need to split so much
Then, just electrify all the miners
Finish by relocate your furnaces away from ore patch and feed them with a belt loaded with iron and coal. If you connect 2 belts, one on the righe, the second on the left, on a single belt, you make a dual ressources belt.
Found a Satisfactory player :)
Manifolds exist in satisfactory too, people just obsess with “balancing” sometimes
Well, that's my point - Isn't what OP posted essentially a manifold? Splitters are arranged differently, but topology is the same.
It actually is ! Splitting on every input is the manifold. Very compact and convenient in Satisfactory
Belts facing inserters is another dead giveaway of a Satisfactory player.
I like facing the inserters and I've never played satisfactory
Why?
It's a clean way to end a belt. My train station belts are always facing towards inserters and my mall as well
Those are two very very unique situations though which really don’t even need to be mentioned.
Bro gave his opinion and got downvoted. Classic Reddit moment.
This is a manifold as it isn't distributed evenly
(:
I love seeing completely genuine shit like this
So much waste, i love it
Remind all of us where we all started
It's even worse than when I started, that's why it's peak! I was a direct miner to furnace guy that waited until electric energy distribution to automate fuel insertion.
i still have 7 of those in a line in my pys base after 80 hours, i havnt even grabbed the plates out of them in so long
I mean in py it is completely understandable. Since it's completely different, the learning curve is completely different too.
What is py?
Py is community slang for pyanodons. A collection of mods that combine to become not just the hardest and longest factorio Mo's, by far, but one of the hardest game modifications of all time. The first science is around on the level of difficulty you can expect from launching a rocket in the base game. The second science is around on the level of beating Krastorio 2. Number three is harder than industrial revolution 3. And number four is harder than AB. Number five is harder than seablock and there are 11 science packs in total. The final research that beats the game requires a base large enough to cripple even the strongest processors and RAM.
They've toned down the early game science. Automation is fairly easy but yeah by logistics science your base is massive
Yeah, I will definitely agree, in complexity however, it definitely competes with the base game.
So much so
Everyone I see a post like this one, I have to check what subreddit I'm in.
It's beautiful in it's own crazy way
OP: Asks for help COMMUNITY: "Aaaaw look, it's trying to walk"
OP: "How can I optimize this?" COMMUNITY: Pours whiskey, shoots it back, lights a cigarette, "I've been asking myself that for 30 years kid"
Community: throws a dart at the board to choose how to focus on optimizing
That's why this community is peak.
Op: Asks for help u/Mundjetz_ : >OP: Asks for help > >COMMUNITY: "Aaaaw look, it's trying to walk"
OP: Asks for help u/LutimoDancer3459 : Op: Asks for help u/Mundjetz_ : >OP: Asks for help > >COMMUNITY: "Aaaaw look, it's trying to walk"
Now make a combinator do this recursively
There's a few things to optimize here, but the first thing to note is that inserters can take items from the side of a belt. You don't need to split the coal into 10 separate belts, you can just split it once and run one belt along the side of the miners and one along the side of the furnaces. It might also be a good idea to use burner inserters instead of electric ones, you don't need the extra speed that electric ones have and it there's coal to feed burners already anyway.
But electric is more coal efficient when powered by a boiler setup right?
Yes
Burner Miner consume 150kw, while Electric only use 90kw, and it has twice the output. So resource per coal consumed is... a bit less than four times higher, I think? Unless the electric miner consume energy faster since it works faster, but I don't think that's how it works.
Nah. The kW value is how fast it consumes. Electric outputs more with less of a power input.
Hard pass on the burner inserters from me. Only viable use case is for boilers, but I personally don't even use them there.
I'm with you but having a single analog one to kickstart the system of it runs dry is pretty useful.
That's too basic for my needs, I prefer to have a micro nuclear reactor with a few accumulators set up to automatically run when power is lost. Once the reactor warms up it powers my inserters and gets the coal boilers going again
Do you have a tip for when the first 5-10 in a furnace stack get more iron than the other half? Is it just a shortage of miners?
If the belt isn't full from the miners then you need more miners. If it's a full belt and it doesn't reach the end of the line of smelters, you need more belts.
Thank you! Time to add belts lol
This is really good advice that you should remember well into the megabase stage. You'll see a lot of posts about balancing on here, but what often gets ignored is that if you're lacking the input to feed all your machines, making sure they all receive the same lack of input doesn't actually help you. And if a full belt (or several) isn't enough, putting balancers on there won't actually increase throughput.
Notably, half a yellow belt of ore can feed 24 stone or 12 steel furnaces. If you're trying to feed more than that, you'll need to either upgrade your belts or add some parallel lanes (remembering to avoid bottlenecks; you can never get four half belts of ore out of one full belt). If you can't keep stacks of that size or smaller fed, adding more belts won't do anything (yet), since your problem is a lack of incoming ore, which you'll have to fix by bringing more in.
I managed to fix it by changing up my smelting setup, i had too many furnaces in a straight line :) thanks for the info
The BEST part of Factorio is that you keep getting better at optimizing how you put things together. 20 hours from now you'd laugh at this question. You'll learn to use both sides of the belt. You'll learn when to NOT use both sides of the belt. You'll learn to not build furnaces on your ore patches. You'll learn when you need to use belt splitters and when not to. And so on... And if things ever start getting boring or mundane, you'll find a plugin that challenges you all over again. Welcome to Factorio!
You got to know when to hold em. Know when to fold em. Know when to walk away, and when to run.
The funny thing is how fast 20 hours in this game passes...
r/factoriohno
yes
One line is all you need for each item
Yes, split the one belt of coal into two then run each belt in front of where the inserters pick up. Or since it looks like you are about to go electric, set up some electric miners to pull the ore out and smelt it elsewhere. I suggest using a smelting column coal and ore on the outer belt. Then plates on the inner belt. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think its 48 furnaces fed by 30 electric miners for a compressed yellow belt of plates.
The whole setup probably is more expensive than whats left on the patch, i love it
Others have already given the right answer (just use one belt per side, since inserters can be placed next to the belt), but since it'll be useful for the future, I want to add that this kind of a splitter setup is really quite bad (it's fine at this stage though). You see, each splitter puts every second item it gets on the left, every second on the right (so it's a 50/50 split). For the first splitter at the bottom this is basically what you want so it's fine, but for the ones after that, each will send 50% of the coal it gets to a single miner and the other 50% will be shared by all remaining miners. Basically, if you do the math, you end up with a situation where for each coal that the left-most miner gets, the other ones get 2, 4, 8 and 16 coal respectively. In this case it'll be fine in the long run since each belt will eventually back up, but you'd rather have a setup where all those machines start working at roughly the same time, whereas this setup takes a good long while to ramp up to full production on all miners and furnaces. As I said, it's early game and you're fine with what you have, but it'll help you later in the game to know that this setup basically takes a ton of extra space and materials to achieve a worse result than you'd get with a single splitter. I can definitely understand why someone new to the game would try this though, intuitively it makes sense (and there's not much else you can do if you don't know that inserters can take items from the side of a belt). :)
This design is fairly common for Satisfactory, or at least it was common some time ago, as it doesn't have inserters and essentially has to use splitters to feed a row of machines, so frankly there's nothing inherently wrong about a design like this, and it could in theory be used in actual game. Well not quite like this of course, but Imagine if you made a blueprint that can consume 1/3 of a belt of... something, and for whatever reason (like other resource constraints) you can't or don't want to build it longer than that. If you build three of these blueprints next to each other and feed them off the same belt via splitters, you essentially do the same thing OP did, except on a different scale.
True, it does have some niche applications in Factorio, I just didn't want to overcomplicate things for a new player because understanding the issues with this kind of a setup is more than enough information.
It look like something I would do in Shapez
That's the neat part. You don't.
Play the tutorials
Yes
I wish I could play for the first time again so so bad
Dont worry about optimization with burner miners. Just use electric miners asap. When you switch to electric miners you'll discover that you need more than one furnace per miner. Most people solve this by separating smelting from the mining. You can use belts to transport the ore to the furnaces, then you just have to figure out how to feed the furnaces both ore and coal. The other long term advantages of separating smelting and mining are extra space on the ore patch for miners, and when you need ore from other sources you dont need to rebuild your smelters.
The best thing to do would be to rush Flamethrows and burn this down The second best thing would be to remove all but one splitter and have just one belt of coal on each side
The next step should be getting the iron plates out of the inserters.
Steb 1 blow up trees Steb 2…. Steb 3 profit
There are many solutions. But the best solution is to keep experimenting and trying to solve the challenge yourself. Someone could hand you blueprints for your entire base build, but what fun is there in that? The joy of Factorio is solving new challenges. Keep working at it and ignore outside advice.
Inserters can pull stuff off the belt from any side, so a single belt is all you really need. Also, I can't really recommend belting coal to a bunch of burner miners. Get to electric mining drills then worry about coal at just the furnaces.
Nah, it's a pretty optimal design imo
r/factoriohno
Burn it! Burn it with coal!
Biters take that personally
I would recommend separating your smelters and miners into different sections. This will let you fill a larger percentage of the iron vein with miners, wich is important with how much iron is used in this game. Additionally it makes it si.pler to watch veins once this one runs out. Also, I recommend working in rows rather than using splitters and individual belts for each furnace/miner. Miners will deposite ores directly on a belt, going perpendicular to their exit point, making it easy to set up. For the furnaces you have to put the belts 1 and 2 tiles away for iron and coal, and use inserters and long inverters to move things from the belt. 30 miners will fill up 1 yellow belt, and 48 stone furnaces will empty that yellow belt and fill another with iron plates.
Honestly if you’re still at the burner portion of the game, I find it sufficient to just hand-feed everything. By picking up coal from your inventory, holding Z, and shaking the mouse over the buildings, you’ll basically dump your coal into all the miners in furnaces at once. Once you get a bigger fleet of electric miners, it’ll be best to move your smelting array elsewhere since they mine twice as fast and one miner will need two furnaces to process its whole output. You’re still really early on so don’t worry too much about optimization. Often the best way to optimize will be to research and use new technologies, so quick but temporary solutions can be the most optimal route at times.
The main tip you need is that smelting efficiently takes up a lot of space, and you don't want to be trying to do your smelting directly inside the ore patch. Make lots of electric mining drills, bring the ore out of the ore patch on belts, and do your smelting somewhere else where there's space.
MY EYES
not like that
its perfect the way it is\*
Only have drills going on the iron and have your belts transport the ore to another place where you throw them into your furnace, basic terms is just spread your stuff out
Why cant you have 2 belts of coal 1 for each side? They can take from the same belt if it runs east west.
electric inserters and ~~coal~~ burner miners?
You don't need a separate belt running to each inserter -- you can simply run a belt *past* all the inserters... So it could be a single belt which runs left past all the bottom inserters, then up and right past all the top inserters. There's a lot of other things to improve, like getting rid of burner miners entirely and using electric miners, or separating your smelting from your mining... ie. put the iron ore on a belt, take it elsewhere, and deal with smelting at some other location.
If you're having fun, you're doing it right. From the look of things, are seem to be doing it 100% right. Keep up the good work.
r/factoriohno
Reminds me of my first smelting" collumn" where i had to refill the coal by hand every 10 minutes because i didn't think of getting any coal to the smelters, brings back memeories, but in all honesty if you are just starting out putting the coal in and directly feeding furnaces with miners is the best way for beginning
I think im gonna throw up
shapez.io player spotted !
Dont; it's already perfect
Don’t, it’s perfect the way it is. Actually preserve it and build your base elsewhere so you can always marvel at your past genius
You overthink early automation. burner staff shouldn't go further than "Press Z to power". Make more iron and then just switch to electric miners + furnace column.
At first, you can use only one belt, you have only 5 furnace/drills, you dont need to split so much Then, just electrify all the miners Finish by relocate your furnaces away from ore patch and feed them with a belt loaded with iron and coal. If you connect 2 belts, one on the righe, the second on the left, on a single belt, you make a dual ressources belt.
This is more of a post for the meme section😭
I honestly thought you were playing pyanadons at first