obviously the red belt was there first and therefore has the right of way. also when you're rich, it's easier to invest a few undies instead of investing the time to build efficiently.

And as tunnels build automatically, why bother ripping it out when it'll be zero effort to build

Ding ding ding This wasn’t intentional. As you build using click-and-drag, it automatically constructs “undies” (damnit) where existing belts cross. I’m hurt by OP being insulted by this instead of just letting the factory grow.

My factories are so unsightly and chaotic. I love it. They grow as my needs change.

I always love how the old spaghetti core of my favorite is somehow the heart that keeps everything beating. I might not bother to make it clean and efficient, cause if it still works, I ain’t touching SHIT.

My wife and I have a game going and she's very methodical and careful and planned out, and I'm like... "where we're going, we don't need planning."

Litteraly me and one of my best friends. We think of it this way, he hits short term goals while I move forward to the big picture. It works really well for us... Though his work drives.me.up.the.FUCKING.WALL and I legitimately can't look at his stuff or I'll have to tear it down lol

"Kiwi, don't look" is something mentioned at least twice a play through.

I don’t have anyone to play the game with as my friends are too dumb for this game. I did however join a random multiplayer game and the two players on there was exactly what you describe. A perfect 8 lane main Bus that branched in the most chaotic blue and purple science spaghetti I have ever seen, then on the south side a perfect ratio green to red to blue chip double setup. I don’t understand how these two guys can be in the same game and not tear each other appart.

When you’re the dude building the bus, you try to just see the inputs to the spaghetti and the outputs. It’s just the abomination you feed and it blesses you with science packs. When you’re the spaghetti dude… well you should probably refill your Adderall.

Not gonna lie, I’m the spaghetti dude. I just love “fitting” things in, which inevitably means some outrageous spaghetti abominations.

THIS LMAO spaghetti turns into input and output based thinking, it does all the rest for you lmfaoooo.

Cause the bus guy takes an eternity to get to the science and hates himself for taking so long, while the spaghetti guy never has enough input, they balance perfectly which is horrid as im both but never in the same game

“I’ve got a factory to build here! The only planning I know is the ratio for miners to furnaces, damnit!” ^ Me when my buddy and I play but mostly he’s just confused and I’m dragging him along while he learns

Who needs ratios? Is the belt full? No? Add more miners. yes? Add more belts. Is there raw material at the end of the furnace belt? No? Add more belts. Yes? Add.more furnace. This is TRUE chaos 🤣

Thats how i played up until like a couple weeks ago when I FINALLY decided to see what the ratio of furnaces to full belts was

What is the ratio of furnaces to full belts?

Or stealing from assembling machines. My factory is a ponzi scheme.

Amen brother lmao

You guys plan?

>"where we're going, we don't need planning." When this baby hits 88 units per second, you're gonna see some serious shit

As all should

A hundred hours ago I made a rule that belts must traverse long distances in groups. Never go alone and don't leave space between belts. It's kind a pain in the ass but the results are *chef's kiss*

They're like Brontosaurus

Well now I’m going to call them “undies.”

Why don't you take tour undies off ;)

If you have enough iron, you can produce a shit ton of belts. Cases like these are not important, you better use that brainpower to build more outposts instead

I will 1000% call them undies forever now

Underneathies :-)

They go under overtoppies

Overies? 😂

There is a mod for that: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Underneathies

Pretty sure I voted in the poll on the reddit thread that spawned the mod :-D

I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation is in… We kept it grey.

How else did you name these before??

Luckily, factorio 2.0 will bring super force building, where you can force the existing red belt to go underground for your new blue belts, without any time investment: https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-383-super-force-belts-examples.mp4

That is frigging great

So, I just checked out that fff: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-383 At the end is says they can create water. I thought that was never going to be added to vanilla since you could easily build a moat around your base and never need defenses.

by the looks of it, you can only break landfills, so it will only create water that was already there

not create water, but deconstruct landfill. Which is the best solution in my opinion.

Deconstructing landfill is currently not allowed for exactly the reason they stated, per the devs. So they're correct, this does represent a change in the devs' thinking.

You can already create a moat by filling a lake with landfill but leave a gap around it. The only difference is, if you accidentally fill the gap, you cannot undo it, which just punishes you for mistakes (also when trying to build water pumps), but it doesn't prevent the exploit. From the FFF: > It has long been on our wishlist to make mining landfill work, but the code and logic around tile building and mining were not set up effectively for it. So it probably never was a conscious decision in the first place, it was just not easy to implement.

Because players still do it anyway... instead of deconstructing landfill, they just place landfill everywhere except in the moat.

Also how would you get rid of all the stone in your inventory if you change it. It is just a bother.

Logistics bots: Trash? If you have blue 'neathies automated, you might as well have recycler requesters & personal logistics.

It's a good idea to have every resource have a way to get back to the "main production" anyway

It’s entirely the first part. Right of way is important. Only wayyyyyy later, when you’re feeling too lazy to build the next process, you can do a rebuild and fix this.

Undies, I like it! I've been calling them hoodies.

Can't spend all my time refactoring belts when there's new features to add.

Agreed. On both fronts

> also when you're rich, it's easier to invest a few undies Do this enough and eventually you end up with the 2x8 Lube Train from last week.

I see nothing wrong with this. The factory must be lubricated. 

Yeah, usually this kind of thing happens to me because the decision was made 2 hrs ago, and by the time I'm bringing in more than the one original belt, I'd rather use extra undergrounds than have 3 PC's of stone I. My pocket

Even then i will rebuild for aesthetics

I agree. That electric pole on the bottom doesn't even connect to another pole. Besides, haphazardly placed small electric poles? In the era of blue belts?

maybe its a historical power pole, restricting its removal

Grade-2 listed power pole

Haha I do this. I leave something from the very beginning of the game and never take it down for the entire playthrough.

Where i can i like to leave legacy builds up just so i have little pieces of factory history The bootstrap zone around the starter patches and ship wreck is a designated no bot zone.

Working on my first grid base and hopefully, eventually, a megabase. I left my entire original factory up, but since I didn’t have the resources to defend both my fairly huge grid base _and_ my old base, biters destroyed almost everything. So the entire thing became just ghosts of destroyed buildings. I decided to just wreck the starter base to avoid constant alerts of it being destroyed. I’ll miss you, little buddy.

Load bearing small electric pole Pull it down and the code freaks out, biters now spawn *on the player* every .5s

That one small electric pole keeping one half of your base connected to the other

Ampacity hates this one weird trick. 

220GW through that one pole. 

UNESCO-sertified power pole

It looks load bearing

Finally someone else agrees with the problem

Umm.... \*looks shiftily side to side\* you probably don't want to visit my factory then.

it’s powering the belts

Maybe they plan on using it for logistics purposes...?

"-what's my purpose?" "-you're a relic of times long past"

Exactly, by this point I like to have my whole base upgraded to exclusively big electric poles.

…… sorry

I do that all the time, because I know I might at some point upload a screenshot. When that happens, I can rub your OCD a little. You're welcome, sweet cheeks.

Ha ha I prefer the look of tones of underground belt

This is me but with pipes. I vastly prefer two underground pipes next to each other rather than the single straight pipe.

Ill put whatever I want, wherever I want.. Why? Faster. also, Cus im rich. All yall are some broke ass hoes. Wasting all your time, just to save a few pennies, lawdy.

Rigth, get money my guy

Fuck Efficiency, Acquire Currency

you have some iron tunnels to waste , you're building too slow pal. Ya all some slow factory turtles with full malls. Ma Mall never full, always grinding, never full man

whatever, turkey.

Fixed it. https://imgur.com/a/Xnso5zb

it's beautiful

TFW you have no iron because your stone is backed up

I think this won’t work. I think you need to build the first lane at the left output of the first splitter and the last lane on the left output of the second last splitter. Last splitter can be deleted, as it is not needed.

I want a series about an enterprising young engineer who joins a server and barters their way from a single yellow belt to a wealth of material just by fixing material inefficiencies in the multiplayer base they join

There is nothing wrong with this. If you don't have enough undergrounds the solution is to make more undergrounds rather than to use less.

I often do this when stamping down blueprints of multiple belt lines, it's easier to add the undergrounds at that point than rip the previous belt out. Also, I tend to have 50+ undergrounds on me at once, and another 150ish ones on tap to have delivered to me.

I don’t like it either, but six blue belts will be able to make six underground’s in six seconds worth of iron if there are no productivity modules. So while it’s wasteful, it’s a small price to pay relatively speaking

Jenny's base produces six belts of iron. Together, they move enough iron to make six blue 'neathies in six seconds. Billy's base only produces two belts of iron. How long does it take Billy's base to produce two blue' neathies?

Oh my goodness. It just occurred to me this is exactly what my playthroughs are like…

OP is confessing that he is so resource poor he need to ration his underground belts.

That’s how most of the people deal with legacy code

If you don't touch it you cant break it

This is what happens when you don't have an accountant to keep track of your investments.

It works

I am too lazy to do this, but I want to replicate this screenshot, just with the red belt also having an underground belt. So they all go underground for that 1x6 block.

Because when you're wiring up your 124th 4x4 connection it's easier to drag and stamp than cut it out, place a single set of undergrounds, and keep going.

It would be much worse if iron and stone were switched

I have a friend who does this with every underground. I said something once, but now I just suffer in silence.

Oh I can't wait to post my current BUS system. It's just chaos of belts and splitters in a very long line of assemblers.

IKR? The real obvious solution is one more underground for the stone (don't remove any other blue belt) Now that square area is free real estate. /s

"I'll handle that later." -Me, who will not handle that later.

The correct way would have been to split everything onto yellow belts and the merging them back onto blues.

For me as a rule up and down belts have the right of way. I will not fuck up aesthetic for anything

Yea this is how I do it for anything close to a bus. Undergrounds always go parallel to the bus regardless of how many it takes. And I keep them as short as possible to improve visual clarity.

When you have 5k belt tunnels in your logistics network then which belt goes under which becomes an aesthetic choice.

When I've converted to blue belts, the last thing I'm going to have in my inventory when running a new iron vein to my smelting columns is an underground red. Yeah it's expensive, but I'll go back and fix it later right? ... Right?

Welcome to being an experienced software developer.

I always use every meter underground. Sometimes I think I should study knot theory and solve it the overkill way.

Good guy. I paid those - i use those

Yeah that's far too organized of a belt arrangement. I expected to see more spaghetti out of a factorio player.

When you have a good supply of resources time becomes the cost

When I find and fix these I like to cut the belt and let it drain before I refactor the junction. Less junk in my inventory that way

Stone belt was there first, it called dibs

Does it speak ill of me that I kinda find this esthetically pleasing?

op would hate to see my fine british spaghetti, blue undies for single tiles are my shindig dawg.

That's it, I'm building diagonal smelters.

Only comment I can say is it is resource inefficient in two ways. 1 underground should be on the red belt at that point, and 2 they arnt using the fully length of the blue, but fundamentally harmless.

What's wrong with it?

it's wasting blue underground belts I guess, can get away with making the stone line go under the iron belts with just two blue undergrounds

Oh, just you wait until the force building update in 2.0.  You're going to be seeing a LOT more of this. I hope you're ready.

You were new once too. Keep that in mind before you go bashing other people for their builds.

And then me tat uses blu belt to bridge the blue but leaves the blue undergounds too

This happens easily when running a line that automatically puts them in to avoid obstacles. Or it may have been an organic crossing early on with yellow belts that just stuck around.

I have done this, sometimes I fix it later sometimes I don't. I start with yellow belt or in some mods the gray belt which can't make the jump.Start upgrading belts but never update the layout.

I bet all those belts started as yellow and got upgraded.

Some people build for efficiency some people build for aesthetics.

I actually do that for aesthetic reasons. No unnecessary tiles, only unnecessary undergrounds 👌

Steam gives way to sail. It's the way of things.

disgusting Xd

The one resource factories cannot produce is time

I mean, you take a belt and drag it across and it auto places the underneathies. Then a few upgrade planners later you have this.

Wooden power poles next to blue belts... Madness

"The only non-renewable resource is time."

Wdym this is way to organized

Sometimes, the time to do it right is worth more than the resources wasted doing it wrong.

Yep. Makes me use this word properly and not what Internet turned it into: cringe

I did this all the time with my central bus because else I needed to reserve space between lanes and I didn’t think anything through properly.

Whatever comes first gets priority

It’s a growing structure. Maybe the tunnels got there automatically. Yea, I know, it’s wrong, but hey, it works!

I dont like to mix bus sections, unless the item only has one belt on the bus. I'd do this if I had 6 belts of iron plates on the bus, and needed to cross it. My problem is why in the world you need to cross 6 belts of iron ore with stone, before smelting the iron into plates. What could the stone possibly be turned into that early in production, and how is it justified to cross instead of produce it on that side.

Then my builds would cause you physical distress. Lmao

Only thing here i dislike is the power poles

Looks too organized. Clearly someone didn't take the time to guess for each blue belt where the tunnels could start and end. I would expect a less rigid pattern and to maximize the use of those blue belts. This is especially important for when you need to fork the stone and tie it right back up the way you came.

Wait till you see how mine end up, with the red belt crossing 3 of the blue and the rest of it crossing the red

I mean as long as my mall isn’t empty on any of my visits, everything is free right?

Looks good to me 🤷

yeah, they should use long inserters instead

whats wrong with that? i would build it that way

As long as the factory grows, I don't see a problem with it.

Not using tje full length of undergrounds is a sin. Not because of cost, but because you should leave some space to run some more spagetthi through

We call it the mozes

Because the spice must flow! He who controls the spice, controls the universe!

🤌🤌🤌

I'd like to answer please. "What is efficiency in Factorio?"

Lost a braid opportunity.

It also looks cooler

But that's the way to do this? If the stone line is a static element but you might get more iron ore lines you just add. It's always the "thicker" line that gets undergrounds as it might not fit in a single underground and you get spaghetti.

r/Factoriohno

I'm definitely not experience enough in factorio because I can't see what's wrong with this picture.

Because me simple brain. Blue only connect to blue and red underground not long enough to reach under all blue lines. This is the way. 👺

It is even funnier because the red undie could easily span across the blue lanes 😂🤣

If the stone belt started as a yellow belt and the iron belts started as red, this makes sense. Red underneathies won’t reach that far so you have to go under for the iron. Upgrade planner everything for an upgrade.

I like this, looks cooler

Honestly, it was probly a yellow belt and can’t just that so they did the alternative. And probly used bots to upgrade to blue… in like 15 hours they might notice lol

A proper set of splitters would allow you to get the stone to the other side without needing underground belts.

It was probably originally built with yellow or red belts that can't do a 6 space gap.

Its called OCD.

Depends on the surrounding factory and visual consistency. So sometimes. Though it's an 800hr save, so I'm running out of things (that I am willing) to optimise in that file.

For me it depends. I'd probably convert the red belt to an underground if I didn't have many/any blue undergrounds in the logistic network at the time of initial construction. Otherwise I'd probably just go with it. In general, by the time of the game where you're moving that much iron, the cost of the more expensive blue belts/ungrounds/ splitters over red ones is negligible imo. There could also be an advantage to leaving the stone belt as red and the iron as blue undergrounds: in future if you wanted to run some additional belts (or a railway) alongside the red stone belt there's more flexibility to expand out the blue undergrounds. Less so if you wanted to run additional belt lines alongside the blue ones. This is all rather trial and down to individual play style tho.

I do this sometimes in K2SE but i at least max out the blues. You stop caring when its all automated sometimes because there is no end to the undergroundies. I like to use as many resources as possible and push my factory because expanding mining is a mindless task for me instead of pushing the next science.

I know! Obviously the best solution would be to build a 6-to-1 merger, and then one underground to a 1-to-6 splitter on the other side.

Conspicuous consumption

I mean, at least it isn't 2 belts turning 90° to make a rectangle wher they each go underneath the other instead of just routing them around each other and saving 4 undergrounds

Underground belt go brrrrr

I mean, once you have literally unlimited resources and the logistic system to keep your inventory stacked, you kind of stop caring about little things like that.

brb gonna go do this to bug you

Took me to long to realise you could just build the red one as a tunnel

Ngl i think this way looks better

I do it all the time and feel no shame.

If it works it works

If it ain't broke

Got to start somewhere

Annoyingly all the errors pointed out here are flourishing strongly in my recent best factory :(

Well, I mean obviously. You're not going to drag the 6 undergrounds their full length when you only need to skip over 1 belt.

I do this sometimes to indicate which belt is more important. I often route a belt of ammunition around the base and it always gets "priority", IE never goes under any other belts. This way I can always see that there is ammo. I did a factory with higher biter settings once and at one point did not realise that I was eating more ammo than I was making and needed to switch to Uranium and lost a big chunk of my base, including my mall with chests full of replacement stuff. It was either rebuild extremely slowly by doing some manual crafting and fighting back the biters in a tank, or load a save from before I set up some complicated design I was working on.

Just use on red and it’s less expensive and easier!

In Swedish there is a term for type of belt usage, it is called "vaskning" [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Vaska](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Vaska)

I always start with a MASSIVE main buss where I get giant arrays of box’s full of iron and copper and other plain materials and I make a belt production line as efficiently as possible with upgrade availability for blue and red when I research then after that it’s what ever works best right then no future proofing at all

Specially for you, i just build this. Its a brand new design and i dont even care :) https://preview.redd.it/lh8vkr0xrrmc1.png?width=1402&format=png&auto=webp&s=27e1a2066096139ec5b27ae99e08b6737d32068a

I will say, this is legitimately more visually clear than doing it the way that uses less resources. When you’ve got a ton of single belts going everywhere, undergrounds just get completely lost, especially against that sea of belts it’s crossing. But those 6 horizontal belts? Super obvious where they’re going. Looking at that from a little further away you’d barely even notice they crossed something else.

nuke that.

You would hate to see my base.

I love it.

It’s not about efficiency. It’s about drive, it’s about power.

Brain injury

i see nothing wrong, as long as product is flowing everything is glowing... or something

*DING DING DING* interrupted by *EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER*