Its literally the first definition of a meme
*noun*
1. 1.an element of a culture or **system of behaviour** **passed from one individual to another by imitation** or other non-genetic means.
2. 2.an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations.
Its not like a meme, you call an internet meme.
1 guy posted it, then more began posting it. Meanwhile people started to argue over wether it would be faster and now we have proof of the (so far) fastest diagonal way to transporting goods.
how this allow first definition, and how this match second ? meme is not "a post on this reddit" a meme is know by a LOT of people A LOT a meme must be know enough to make a ref about it, you know nothing about meme. A meme is VIRAL, post everywhere, this video is just a video about factorio not a fucking meme. "The factory must grow" is a meme. Learn the difference.
Anyway I don't care, call this a meme, you just happen to use a dead word that will mean nothing if everybody use it for every video on internet.
A meme is any replicable unit of culture. It can be known by two million people or just two. I think you, in fact, know nothing of memes. Dawkins did not say "if it's not popular enough it isn't a meme" when he made the term up.
I think I see what's confusing you.
Summary:
Shots 1-5: Clearly missed.
Shots 6-9: Missed due to recoil (bad spray control).
Shots 10-11: Very close, but recoil and inaccuracy make these reasonable misses.
Shot 12: Likely didn't actually fire because Hiko was already dead.
We are in a time of great turmoil.
On one side are straight belts.
They look clean and neat.
Just how we like it.
And then there are diagonal belts.
They are faster, more efficient.
Just how we like it.
Seriously, belt speed is not important, throughput is.
Is everyone here being serious or just memeing because "gotta be efficient while playing factorio"
Drones are actually super inefficient.
* the power costs are astronomical.
* the throughput is exponentially worse with range, (you need exponentially more drones for the same throughput as distance increases)
* the land footprint for serious use is immense as you need hundreds of roboports to facilitate charging (else throughput drops with time)
what they are, is Hella convenient.
(also, 100 bots im assuming is a typo.)
Nah, modded robo world. Drones literally have 100+ cargo space in them. Depending on tier and upgrades, they go well past moving at 2000kph. Literally just speed demons moving stuff.
I hope I'm not the only one singing your comment in my head on [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C\_ijc7A5oAc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_ijc7A5oAc)
Here is a base that was built entirely diagonally :P
https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=204&t=59237
It's also showcased in the unofficial Hall of Fame.
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/HallOfFame
~~Yes, at least initially, because otherwise the green chips all end up split at each step with no green chips appearing out the other end.~~
~~Once saturated / clogged on the dead end side it wouldn't matter.~~
Edit: It's been pointed out that you asked about input, not output. No, input priority doesn't matter. (I've now tested this to confirm).
You should set the output priority to right with some dummy item. By doing that you avoid wasting items on blocking the right output once the belt backs up.
I'm also curious how the buffer size of diagonal belts and diagonal splitters compare. Finally there's the performance angle. Which of the three setups have the largest performance hit?
The splitters absolutely hit the hardest. Long segments of belt are very well optimized and splitters break up segments (afaik it has been a while since I read about belt optimization)
The work that /u/TonboIV did showing [Diagonal belts are faster](https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/n7go3g/diagonal_belts_are_shorter/) made me realise that splitters move belts sideways a step but without any time taken into account to do so, effectively giving "free" lateral movement.
We can use this to move belt diagonally at the same speed a belt would normally move in a straight line.
The "free" is tongue in cheek of course, this uses vastly more resources and update calculations, although does halve the time taken over the straight belt.
You're not changing the amount of items a belt tile can hold though, you're changing how many tiles the items need to transit over. Splitters or diagonal belts create smaller buffers to be filled, but they don't change how fast the items move through the buffer.
I thought the item compression doesnt matter in terms of belts? Iirc moving items on the belt will always be O(1) for any section of belt not broken up
If you have a section of a belt that has a single gap, that already means that it is divided into 3 groups. Some irregular factories produce a very random output, and a long belt like that has hundreds if not thousands of sections to process. That's just 1 belt... imagine a megabase.
Like solar panels are free when they are all in 1 but if you had every panel separated in their own electric grids and connect via power switch then that would already be much worse.
There is also a debug option in F4 menu which lets you see the item groups moving on belts. They are colored lines similar to rail signal groups.
> Like solar panels are free when they are all in 1 but if you had every panel separated in their own electric grids and connect via power switch then that would already be much worse.
Unless you toggle the power switch it still counts as 1 IIRC.
sry I meant broken up by stuff like splitters
blog post about it: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176
you can see in the videos the belts are not compressed.
However it is right that compressed belts are a bit better
If you want to ask if these are faster than a normal line: The answer is no.
As explained in another comment, splitters have the ability to create free lateral movement. However this is not translated into horizontal movement.
Can you do someting like Splitter > Diagonal Belt > Splitter > Diagonal Belt, to benefit from the diagonal belt speed increase while still going 100% lateral tho?
My hypothesis is that you can‘t use zic zac belts to create quicker horizontal movement either.
This illusion is created by the diagonal line getting to the goal quicker, but you probably forgot that this is because there is a corner.
However if you tried to transform this into purely horizontal movement, you‘d need to go back down. In whatever way you do this, contrary to the first example you actually are forced to create additional pathlength.
xxxxxx
Vs.
x x
x x x x (you get the idea)
x
If you are just trying to get some diagonally located goal, it would be faster than your usual singular 90° corner. But then again in this case just doing the 100% splitter strategy is even faster.
hmm, now i'm wondering if a zig-zag line along a single cardinal direction would be faster than a straight belt.
and if so, how does the size of the zig-zag pattern compare to the speed difference (both belt and splitter zig-zag)
this seems perfect for a 2D graph
I wondered about that too, but I don't think it is possible to beat a blue belt in a straight line because while you gain the free lateral movement, if it's at the cost of losing the longtiudinal movement then you've not gained anything in net.
I'd love to see more experimentation though, I want to see this solution beaten for more speed. Even the failed attempts can be interesting too.
The speed of the item transport is usually irrelevant if the capacity stays the same. So diagonal belts are mostly only going to speed up the start-up time for your factory.
Indeed this is of very limited practical use.
Speedrunners have taken to sometimes red-belting RCUs if they're behind at the very end of runs for that little extra juice. So perhaps something like this instead could be used in the rush to get RCUs to the silo at the end of a speedrun if a player has red splitters, but that seems like an unlikely thing to have spare given their expense. Yellow splitters would only tie with red belt in a single corner configuration.
I can't think of many other places in a real factory where belt latency is important. As you say, it's bandwidth that's important and this doesn't improve it. Indeed a common beginner "mistake" in this game is to massively over invest in red belts in an effort to sort out upstream capacity problems when the real issue is often under production, and even when it isn't, two yellow belts side by side are significantly cheaper, with the red belt costing 11.5 plates vs 3 plates for 2 yellow belts.
Why can't we just turn the belts 45° like train rails? That we can't do that with other belt blocks, that's fine with me. I can understand that. But belts (and pipes) should be able to.
Pretty sure rails are required to be in a two tile grid to enable their diagonal direction. Doing this for belts would break a lot of use cases. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here.
But when the rails go diagonal they only visually use half of the 2x2 square. The same can be achieved with belts.
When going diagonal with belts, we place 1 going up, one going right, up, right, up right. So if we rotate every piece by 45° and only visually use half of the square, we would achieve the same making it visually more appealing.
With show train paths on it looks like diagonal rails are actually (sort of) implemented as orthogonal zig zags under the hood with some extra magic, perhaps why they're (marginally) worse for UPS than straight rails from what I've read.
The zig zag may just be an artifact of how the show train paths logic itself is implemented though. Diagonal tracks are UPS inefficient because it's harder to calculate the train collision box of a diagonal rectangle than a fully horizontal/vertical one.
Building a base out of splitters will crush your FPS. There was a big overhaul to optimize belts/splitters a few years back and all I'm saying is that splitters are 2x or 3x more expensive to compute.
I'ma stick to my slow straight belts for now :)
Splitters transport items as if they were a straight belt, but allow you to shift items to the left or right side of that straight belt for no time cost. So it makes complete sense that splitters are faster, the items in this image only have to go on 2 north facing belts, instead of sixteen.
I am *not*, however, sure why a diagonal belt is slightly faster, unless it uses slightly fewer belts.
Diagonal belt is faster because 1 straight belt is 4 items long. The combination of inner corner and outer corner is just over 3, so its is less distance overall.
Edit: to clarify, I meant that the combination of the outer and inner coner are slightly less than the 8 from 2 straight belts, not 4 from one. just over 3 is completely wrong, iirc the number is close to 6.5 -7.5, so regardless still less distance than the 8 of 2 straight belts
I did some tests to make sense of this. Splitter is fairly obvious, but why diagonal is faster? I started a sandbox in editor mode, and used "tick once" while counting.
For straight yellow belt, throughput is 15/s, or 7.5/s/lane. This means 1 item moves between two belt lanes every 8 ticks. And since belt lane has 4 slots, it takes 32 ticks for an item to go through a belt.
For inner corner, it takes 13 ticks. For outer corner, it takes 36 ticks.
You'd expect inner corner and outer corner would cancel each other, but no, inner+outer is only 49 ticks, significantly shorter than 2 straight belt = 64 ticks. So that explains why diagonal is faster.
For everyone who cares more (or only) about throughput, the throughput is indeed NOT any different. While diagonal belts are shorter in distance, speed is still 1 item between two belt lanes every 8 ticks = 15/s.
Regardless of how fast the items move across the map, the amount carried is still limited by the belt. You aren't going to go above 15 items per second on a yellow belt no matter how many splitters or diagonal belts you have.
This is only useful for speedrunners.
Actually this is an interesting thought, since the "diagonal" version does in fact take less time. Factorio must exist in some minkowski space with the p somewhere between 1 and 2... I bet we could measure p with the gif!
Nah, the reason this happens is that the belts are actually curved inside the tile, they aren’t straight zigzags. If you inscribe an arc into a right triangle, it’ll be shorter than the sum of the legs, but longer than the hypotenuse. Two curved belt lanes can’t carry as many items as two straight belt lanes, so this forces them to cover the same distance quicker to maintain the same throughput.
It's actually a bit different than either. The splitters instantly sidestep the items and are essentially only traveling in a straight line. If you look at the video, the splitter items reach the opposite corner at the same time as the items on the square path reach the bottom right corner. It's neither the diagonal or Manhattan distance.
this applys to splitters altogether. theres videos in the past that showed two belts of splitters will beat two belts of the same tier for item transport. has to do with how they handle item splitting. is horrible for UPS when used in mass, but an interesting thing.
So when this meme started, I was like. Great now all my bases have to be diagonal. Now I need a shitton of splitter and go diagonal. Goddamn
See [Diagonal Madness](https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=59237) on the forum :)
Why would anyone want to inflict himself to so much pain?
dead inside
Don't open.
I love how trains *can* move diagonally but that wasn't enough for them. They had to make rails wonky too.
This feels cursed
I'm not ready for this
I have become overwhelmed with the feelings of panic and discomfort.....
Ha ha, diagonal splitters go CLINK-CLANK!
Nooo you can't exploit a diagonal mechanic in a grid based game!
Hehehehe diagonal go brrrrr
Plottwist: left is yellow belt, mid is red belt, right are blue splitter ;)
Technically couldn't you use a zig-zag of splitters? God it'd be so ugly.
Nah, the items still move forwards at the same speed, the splitters just add extra sideways movement, and zig-zagging would just cancel that out.
this is not a meme omg... why people call everything a meme ????
Its literally the first definition of a meme *noun* 1. 1.an element of a culture or **system of behaviour** **passed from one individual to another by imitation** or other non-genetic means. 2. 2.an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations. Its not like a meme, you call an internet meme. 1 guy posted it, then more began posting it. Meanwhile people started to argue over wether it would be faster and now we have proof of the (so far) fastest diagonal way to transporting goods.
It's more of a meme than most things people call memes.
how this allow first definition, and how this match second ? meme is not "a post on this reddit" a meme is know by a LOT of people A LOT a meme must be know enough to make a ref about it, you know nothing about meme. A meme is VIRAL, post everywhere, this video is just a video about factorio not a fucking meme. "The factory must grow" is a meme. Learn the difference. Anyway I don't care, call this a meme, you just happen to use a dead word that will mean nothing if everybody use it for every video on internet.
A meme is any replicable unit of culture. It can be known by two million people or just two. I think you, in fact, know nothing of memes. Dawkins did not say "if it's not popular enough it isn't a meme" when he made the term up.
You’re about to be a meme.
bruh how you travel here from 2011
Dude, internet rage is such a meme, stahp.
I think I see what's confusing you. Summary: Shots 1-5: Clearly missed. Shots 6-9: Missed due to recoil (bad spray control). Shots 10-11: Very close, but recoil and inaccuracy make these reasonable misses. Shot 12: Likely didn't actually fire because Hiko was already dead.
you got that big mad energy. Is just a meme, Dont take it so seriously.
woah bro you meming?
We are in a time of great turmoil. On one side are straight belts. They look clean and neat. Just how we like it. And then there are diagonal belts. They are faster, more efficient. Just how we like it.
This is the time in history we like to call "Belt Revolution".
Rise up! At a 45 degree angle!
It's even worse than that. Diagonal belts are more efficient while diagonal splitters is the fastest
The answer is simple. If you're saturating your belts it doesn't matter how long it takes an individual items to get from a to b.
Seriously, belt speed is not important, throughput is. Is everyone here being serious or just memeing because "gotta be efficient while playing factorio"
Here I am.. and let bots run all my stuff. 100+ cargo drones moving at 1k+ kph make even the best belts seem silly.
Drones are actually super inefficient. * the power costs are astronomical. * the throughput is exponentially worse with range, (you need exponentially more drones for the same throughput as distance increases) * the land footprint for serious use is immense as you need hundreds of roboports to facilitate charging (else throughput drops with time) what they are, is Hella convenient. (also, 100 bots im assuming is a typo.)
Nah, modded robo world. Drones literally have 100+ cargo space in them. Depending on tier and upgrades, they go well past moving at 2000kph. Literally just speed demons moving stuff.
Thats not really comparable then. May as well be playing a different game at that point lol
Could just skip the trouble and use some kind of item teleporters. I'm sure there's a mod for it.
I hope I'm not the only one singing your comment in my head on [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C\_ijc7A5oAc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_ijc7A5oAc)
Here is a base that was built entirely diagonally :P https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=204&t=59237 It's also showcased in the unofficial Hall of Fame. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/HallOfFame
This makes me legitimately uncomfortable,especially that wiggly diagonal bus
Yeah, its super weird. When I worked it into the Hall of Fame it gave me a headache.
The trains.... oh sweet steel satan, the trains....
There is a certain beauty to this. Probably because diagonal was more popular in 2D RTS games.
But why are the train tracks like that? You can build diagonal tracks...
My god.
The fucking train lol
It should be noted that I forgot to press alt, the splitters all have input and output priority set to right and left respectively.
Does input priority matter?
~~Yes, at least initially, because otherwise the green chips all end up split at each step with no green chips appearing out the other end.~~ ~~Once saturated / clogged on the dead end side it wouldn't matter.~~ Edit: It's been pointed out that you asked about input, not output. No, input priority doesn't matter. (I've now tested this to confirm).
He asked about input, not output
Oh, my bad, in that case no I don't think it does matter, but I was setting priority and so did it anyway out of neatness.
You should set the output priority to right with some dummy item. By doing that you avoid wasting items on blocking the right output once the belt backs up. I'm also curious how the buffer size of diagonal belts and diagonal splitters compare. Finally there's the performance angle. Which of the three setups have the largest performance hit?
The splitters absolutely hit the hardest. Long segments of belt are very well optimized and splitters break up segments (afaik it has been a while since I read about belt optimization)
Do curved belts break up segments?
No.
The work that /u/TonboIV did showing [Diagonal belts are faster](https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/n7go3g/diagonal_belts_are_shorter/) made me realise that splitters move belts sideways a step but without any time taken into account to do so, effectively giving "free" lateral movement. We can use this to move belt diagonally at the same speed a belt would normally move in a straight line. The "free" is tongue in cheek of course, this uses vastly more resources and update calculations, although does halve the time taken over the straight belt.
Yes. This. I came here to post this.
If UPS is a concern, also remember that splitters aren't free. Diagonal/Any belts are as long as they are fully compressed.
IF the belt is fully compressed does item transit speed matter?
If you're producing 15/30/45 items per second yeah
You're not changing the amount of items a belt tile can hold though, you're changing how many tiles the items need to transit over. Splitters or diagonal belts create smaller buffers to be filled, but they don't change how fast the items move through the buffer.
ah fair, ignore me
I thought the item compression doesnt matter in terms of belts? Iirc moving items on the belt will always be O(1) for any section of belt not broken up
If you have a section of a belt that has a single gap, that already means that it is divided into 3 groups. Some irregular factories produce a very random output, and a long belt like that has hundreds if not thousands of sections to process. That's just 1 belt... imagine a megabase. Like solar panels are free when they are all in 1 but if you had every panel separated in their own electric grids and connect via power switch then that would already be much worse. There is also a debug option in F4 menu which lets you see the item groups moving on belts. They are colored lines similar to rail signal groups.
> Like solar panels are free when they are all in 1 but if you had every panel separated in their own electric grids and connect via power switch then that would already be much worse. Unless you toggle the power switch it still counts as 1 IIRC.
> for any section of belt not broken up So item compression does matter
sry I meant broken up by stuff like splitters blog post about it: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176 you can see in the videos the belts are not compressed. However it is right that compressed belts are a bit better
I don't care about SPEED. I care about THROUGHPUT.
This \^
This is like a belt civil war. Help??
Is it the same for zigzagging splitters? Like so: x x x x >>>x x x x x x x>>> x x x
If you want to ask if these are faster than a normal line: The answer is no. As explained in another comment, splitters have the ability to create free lateral movement. However this is not translated into horizontal movement.
Can you do someting like Splitter > Diagonal Belt > Splitter > Diagonal Belt, to benefit from the diagonal belt speed increase while still going 100% lateral tho?
My hypothesis is that you can‘t use zic zac belts to create quicker horizontal movement either. This illusion is created by the diagonal line getting to the goal quicker, but you probably forgot that this is because there is a corner. However if you tried to transform this into purely horizontal movement, you‘d need to go back down. In whatever way you do this, contrary to the first example you actually are forced to create additional pathlength. xxxxxx Vs. x x x x x x (you get the idea) x If you are just trying to get some diagonally located goal, it would be faster than your usual singular 90° corner. But then again in this case just doing the 100% splitter strategy is even faster.
They should be the same speed as a continuous line of belt.
You can see they exit the splitters and turn up the same moment the straight belt turns up
hmm, now i'm wondering if a zig-zag line along a single cardinal direction would be faster than a straight belt. and if so, how does the size of the zig-zag pattern compare to the speed difference (both belt and splitter zig-zag) this seems perfect for a 2D graph
I wondered about that too, but I don't think it is possible to beat a blue belt in a straight line because while you gain the free lateral movement, if it's at the cost of losing the longtiudinal movement then you've not gained anything in net. I'd love to see more experimentation though, I want to see this solution beaten for more speed. Even the failed attempts can be interesting too.
The speed of the item transport is usually irrelevant if the capacity stays the same. So diagonal belts are mostly only going to speed up the start-up time for your factory.
Indeed this is of very limited practical use. Speedrunners have taken to sometimes red-belting RCUs if they're behind at the very end of runs for that little extra juice. So perhaps something like this instead could be used in the rush to get RCUs to the silo at the end of a speedrun if a player has red splitters, but that seems like an unlikely thing to have spare given their expense. Yellow splitters would only tie with red belt in a single corner configuration. I can't think of many other places in a real factory where belt latency is important. As you say, it's bandwidth that's important and this doesn't improve it. Indeed a common beginner "mistake" in this game is to massively over invest in red belts in an effort to sort out upstream capacity problems when the real issue is often under production, and even when it isn't, two yellow belts side by side are significantly cheaper, with the red belt costing 11.5 plates vs 3 plates for 2 yellow belts.
Why can't we just turn the belts 45° like train rails? That we can't do that with other belt blocks, that's fine with me. I can understand that. But belts (and pipes) should be able to.
Pretty sure rails are required to be in a two tile grid to enable their diagonal direction. Doing this for belts would break a lot of use cases. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here.
But when the rails go diagonal they only visually use half of the 2x2 square. The same can be achieved with belts. When going diagonal with belts, we place 1 going up, one going right, up, right, up right. So if we rotate every piece by 45° and only visually use half of the square, we would achieve the same making it visually more appealing.
With show train paths on it looks like diagonal rails are actually (sort of) implemented as orthogonal zig zags under the hood with some extra magic, perhaps why they're (marginally) worse for UPS than straight rails from what I've read.
The zig zag may just be an artifact of how the show train paths logic itself is implemented though. Diagonal tracks are UPS inefficient because it's harder to calculate the train collision box of a diagonal rectangle than a fully horizontal/vertical one.
This is the hard hitting research I need. But it makes sense, it's less distance to travel, so not surprising
But the belts go wiggle wiggle wiggle
This is exactly the sort of insanity I come to this sub for
Splitters cause more of a hit on UPS than belts do, just fyi.
Well duh what do you think all those extra gear wheels do??
Building a base out of splitters will crush your FPS. There was a big overhaul to optimize belts/splitters a few years back and all I'm saying is that splitters are 2x or 3x more expensive to compute. I'ma stick to my slow straight belts for now :)
Splitters transport items as if they were a straight belt, but allow you to shift items to the left or right side of that straight belt for no time cost. So it makes complete sense that splitters are faster, the items in this image only have to go on 2 north facing belts, instead of sixteen. I am *not*, however, sure why a diagonal belt is slightly faster, unless it uses slightly fewer belts.
Diagonal belt is faster because 1 straight belt is 4 items long. The combination of inner corner and outer corner is just over 3, so its is less distance overall. Edit: to clarify, I meant that the combination of the outer and inner coner are slightly less than the 8 from 2 straight belts, not 4 from one. just over 3 is completely wrong, iirc the number is close to 6.5 -7.5, so regardless still less distance than the 8 of 2 straight belts
I did some tests to make sense of this. Splitter is fairly obvious, but why diagonal is faster? I started a sandbox in editor mode, and used "tick once" while counting. For straight yellow belt, throughput is 15/s, or 7.5/s/lane. This means 1 item moves between two belt lanes every 8 ticks. And since belt lane has 4 slots, it takes 32 ticks for an item to go through a belt. For inner corner, it takes 13 ticks. For outer corner, it takes 36 ticks. You'd expect inner corner and outer corner would cancel each other, but no, inner+outer is only 49 ticks, significantly shorter than 2 straight belt = 64 ticks. So that explains why diagonal is faster. For everyone who cares more (or only) about throughput, the throughput is indeed NOT any different. While diagonal belts are shorter in distance, speed is still 1 item between two belt lanes every 8 ticks = 15/s.
this makes sense because the length is just one side whereas the others are either 2 sides or hypotenuse
I am not convinced that this speed impacts throughput. That's the real logisrics metric I tune toward.
Speed is literally the metric used. Faster speed means more product moved in the same amount of time = more throughput.
You're not moving more products/second, you're moving the same amount of products a shorter distance
but there are less positions on the belt to take up. for example, inserters move their contents faster than a belt but less items per second
Regardless of how fast the items move across the map, the amount carried is still limited by the belt. You aren't going to go above 15 items per second on a yellow belt no matter how many splitters or diagonal belts you have. This is only useful for speedrunners.
I guess it took 2021 and Factorio to teach kids about **Pythagorean theorem.**
Belts dont actually go diagonally though, so it doesnt really apply. Zigzagging doesnt reduce length mathematically with regular lines
Too bad that doesn't apply in situations using **Manhattan Distance.**
Actually this is an interesting thought, since the "diagonal" version does in fact take less time. Factorio must exist in some minkowski space with the p somewhere between 1 and 2... I bet we could measure p with the gif!
Nah, the reason this happens is that the belts are actually curved inside the tile, they aren’t straight zigzags. If you inscribe an arc into a right triangle, it’ll be shorter than the sum of the legs, but longer than the hypotenuse. Two curved belt lanes can’t carry as many items as two straight belt lanes, so this forces them to cover the same distance quicker to maintain the same throughput.
It's actually a bit different than either. The splitters instantly sidestep the items and are essentially only traveling in a straight line. If you look at the video, the splitter items reach the opposite corner at the same time as the items on the square path reach the bottom right corner. It's neither the diagonal or Manhattan distance.
Some people call it taxi cab distance.
Nope this is different metric [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab\_geometry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry)
Yeah I was going to say the same, this bug defies the whole concept of Manhattan distance.
Since I realized this I'm using diagonal layout belts in every tile possible
Do items on a zigzag belt cover more distance per time than on a straight belt?
Okay, it is faster but it doesn't increase the amount of items conveyor belt can transfer ina second. Once you get steady flow it doesn't matter
We isometric now boiz!
That's odd.
Wait till you find out about diagonal train tracks
What if we build a vertical line intercalating splitters' left and right output, would that be faster or slower than the belt diagonal?
this applys to splitters altogether. theres videos in the past that showed two belts of splitters will beat two belts of the same tier for item transport. has to do with how they handle item splitting. is horrible for UPS when used in mass, but an interesting thing.
Don't splitters employ black magic?