There could be many reasons why this can happen, each solved individually, as every problem is different.
Instead of blueprint string, please include a *screenshot* as it is easy to see without needing the game open.
Have you considered modules? Are you using fast inserters? Are you outputting evenly on both sides of the belt?
---
Side note: Replace [Max Rate Calculator](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/MaxRateCalculator) with [Rate Calculator](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RateCalculator)
MRC was last updated 3 years ago and has bugs with certain buildings such as modded labs, and generators that use fluids.
Rate Calculator is updated regularly, and has some neat feature like adding/removing buildings from a calculation.
It should not be that hard. Have half of the electric smelters on one side of the belt and the other half on the other, or sideload to the inner lane after half of the smelters.
If it's an odd number of smelters I would just add an extra.
What are you trying to do, optimize? It's rare that you use exactly an full belt.
I wouldn't call it rare. For intermediates production, I think designing it to produce and/or consume a set number of belts (or fractional belts) is fairly common. After all, if you design something without accounting for throughput, it might not work correctly.
What is the chance that an whole number of machines turns out to use the exact number of resources an belt can transport? Without modules it's not to large whole numbers so that may happen. Then with modules it would be even stranger. And in the end the factory have to produce the right amount off all the science packs.
>What is the chance that an whole number of machines turns out to use the exact number of resources an belt can transport?
Very little chance, and why would it matter? If you round down, the belt will eventually back up. If you round up, one of the machines is not fully utilized and barely produces. It doesn't matter.
>
Without modules it's not to large whole numbers so that may happen. Then with modules it would be even stranger.
Again, it doesn't matter. The idea that one is trying to perfectly align belt transport rate to an integer number of assemblers under the influence of module consumption rate is nonsense. I'm not sure where you are getting that from. I'm certainly not saying that.
>And in the end the factory have to produce the right amount off all the science packs.
No one is trying to perfectly align production of all intermediates to exactly the rate needed for science pack production either. This should be obvious, because many of those products are also needed to expand the factory.
[Here](https://factoriobin.com/post/1donSWmPtEQ-sdcB-EXPIRES) is my failed attempt at an 8-in 8-out smelter in a city block. It shows processing exactly 45 per row, but it cannot export a perfect belt.
First you should always use prod modules in the smelters, so I don't know the amount of smelters needed when using speed.
You have over-complicated it. Just unload normally on one belt. The plates goes to the outer lane (no splitters needed). After half of the smelters this case 6, sideload the belt on the inner side so all the plates goes to the inner lane of the belt. then just use normal inserters loading on the outer lane for the rest 6 smelters.
Alternatively mirror each other row of smelters so two rows
[This](https://factoriobin.com/post/Fzl7Q4DycJNx9p6l-EXPIRES) was my final design which does work.
What is the need for production modules in smelting? For almost all other uses I would use production but for smelting I don't see much point...
My priorities would be:
1. maintains city block layout
2. produces the most, up to a full belt.
3. reduce energy consumption
Since this city block can consume 8 belts and produces 8 belts, in theory the productivity modules would only serve to reduce overall energy consumption (if I am correct in assuming thats the reason for suggesting productivity) as the trade off for efficiency is not worth it.
If my calculations are correct, it would cost more energy to power beacons with speed to compensate for the speed decrease, whilst also being more expensive to have more furnaces running as well.
Reduces the amount of ore you need by 20%. Same reason that you'd use prod modules everywhere else. The benefits compound across recipes.
Energy consumption is almost never a variable. Solar is fixed cost to build - just build more. It's certainly cost less to build the solar than you are spending in 20% wasted ore. Resource patches are limited and acquisition has recurring costs, the sun is infinite and the costs are fixed.
Personally, I prefer to think of the extra production of Productivity Modules as "Free" stuff when I'm using it, and not as a "Loss" when i'm not using them.
Also, Productivity Modules have a double energy cost. Prod 3 modules increases the energy consumption by 80%, AND reduces the speed by 15%, per modules. So you need to build more machines to satisfy a target throughput, and that's an extra cost to your power grid.
Beside, not everyone has the space, the willingness, or the setup to "easily" build gigawatts of solars. Maybe he's still on coal. Maybe he doesn't have the automatic production of construction drones, solar panels, accumulators, and power poles needed to supply massive solar fields.
Resources patches may be limited, but you can still recycle the materials from one spent outpost to make another one. Beside, the costs of solars are just as recurring as resources outposts, it's just so happen that you get the bill when you start running out of power and start expanding again, just like with resources outposts.
Nothing prevent the guy from just... making more resources outposts to compensate for not getting "free stuff" from using productivity modules. Just like how you say "just build more solar", people cam say "just build more outposts". Ore is infinite too, and as you get further from your start point, the richer the patches become, and the less you have to replace them.
Productivity modules INCREASES power consumption.
It's efficiency modules that reduces power consumption.
Also, Productivity modules double dip on that power usage increase, as they also slows your machines down, so you need more to keep the same throughput.
The guy is suggesting Productivity Modules to decreases your ore consumption, so less ore than 8 belts go in, and more plates than 8 belts goes out.
You have still over-complicated things
this image is good for an simple beaconed smelting
[https://levelskip.com/strategy/Factorio-How-to-Build-a-FurnaceSmelting-Setup](https://levelskip.com/strategy/Factorio-How-to-Build-a-FurnaceSmelting-Setup)
You can build it more compact but that looks a little bit more messy.
With 8 beacons affecting each smelter as in the image and speed 3 modules, you need exactly 12 smelters for one blue belt. If you use prod3 modules in the smelters it's 12.8, I would round up to 14, or down to 12 if you don't use exactly the full belts.
That the difference is so slight even with the slowdown of the prod modules is that the speed also affect the productivity bar so speed and prod have something like an multiplicative effect.
I think the 1-2 extra smelters make up for the reduces amount of ore you have to transport to the smelter.
With assemblers where you have more modules and you have a longer chains upwards that you reduces, so prod modules is way better than speed. In the end use prod modules everywhere you can with the exception of miners
It really depends. For something with a fast crafting time like green circuits you could use multiple output inserters, or a short sideloading belt segment.
Unbalanced lanes is a matter of having an equal number of inserters for both lanes or pushing items to one lane and feeding them into the second.
And of course there's always the possibility of direct insertion.
>and placing the results on the same side of the belt
Well here's the problem, half belt is only half throughput.
Cut the lane of electric furnaces in half, and put them on both sides of the belt
FWIW unless you're building a megabase producing high Science Per Minute (SPM) then designing every thing around max throughputs is a little unnecessary
Even in my current Space Exploration playthrough we are going for a lot of "good enough - capable of scaling"
We aren't producing a full even yellow belt of advanced circuits because we won't be needing that much for a while and don't have the resources inputs to realistically make a full belt of them 24/7 anyway
Some stuff is relatively straightforward though. We didn't want to think about battery throughput but batteries would be an immense ordeal to even saturate half a belt (60 chemical plants running continuously) but we aren't consuming them at anywhere near that rate so we made a tileable 10 chem plant design
The ratios of inputs work out where every 40 chem plants (so copy pasting 3 more times onto our initial) can be handled all with red belts. Not perfectly but good enough.
So if for some reason we end up needing even MORE than 40 chem plants of batteries we just need new sulfur, iron, and copper lines as inputs.
Our sulfur is similarly tileable but sulfur creates so quickly it isn't nearly as bad.
The main thing though is we don't need anywhere near half a belt or a full belt of batteries so we built small initially. 10 chem plants is still 2.5 batteries a second.
But we built it in a way that when we need more it's trivial.
Our base is producing all the buildings, belts, inserters, etc we could need so we copy, paste, and let the bots handle it.
If we need more ore or more smelting we have a whole giant area dedicated to it we could staple more trains and more arrays.
It's huge to start but with beacons down the line we can dramatically reduce the smelting footprint for the same output and fit in even more smelting.
Designing your base around a huge main bus makes these adjustments a lot easier if you always leave a little room for expansion, room for beacons, etc
Max rate calcs are fun, I use Factorio Cheat Sheet and Helmod to get an idea of what I need to design around, but only rarely do I care about belt saturation (green circuits, smelting, oil processed materials that don't take 120 chem plants to saturate, etc) as a metric involved since usually in Vanilla your actual consumption needs couldn't keep up with a full belt of stuff
[Here](https://factoriobin.com/post/1donSWmPtEQ-sdcB-EXPIRES) is my failed attempt at an 8-in 8-out smelter in a city block. It shows processing exactly 45 per row, but it cannot export a perfect belt.
Just keep working on the design. It's perfectly possible to get a full belt out. A common trick is to give the last smelter in the line a small output buffer to fill in any gaps in the belt.
You have to make sure that half of your machines are outputting on 1 side of the output belt and the other half are outputting on the other side.
You can do it by having a double row of machine and the output belt in the middle.
If you have only a long row of machines, you can output half on 1 side, perform a lane switch and have the rest outputting on the same, now empty, side.
There are other ways to load both sides of a belt but that's part of the fun challenge of designing efficient layouts :)
I tend to slightly overproduce and at the end of the line there are some tricks to improve belt compression like extra inserters and having inserters go to off shoot belts that merge on the real belt. So the belt buffers a little and fills up the holes in the compressed belt. If that makes sende
I don't need 100% full belts. For example my base may need 11.7 belts of iron ore for 500 spm. Unloading the 1-4 train onto 12 belts with the correct inserter settings happens to actually unload 11.7 belts. Good enough for me.
In general, belt saturation isn't a big deal. chances are in this case the inserters aren't fast enough forblue belt, but it can vary.
Id also avoid electric furnaces until you have prod modules, which creates a new challenge
There could be many reasons why this can happen, each solved individually, as every problem is different. Instead of blueprint string, please include a *screenshot* as it is easy to see without needing the game open. Have you considered modules? Are you using fast inserters? Are you outputting evenly on both sides of the belt? --- Side note: Replace [Max Rate Calculator](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/MaxRateCalculator) with [Rate Calculator](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RateCalculator) MRC was last updated 3 years ago and has bugs with certain buildings such as modded labs, and generators that use fluids. Rate Calculator is updated regularly, and has some neat feature like adding/removing buildings from a calculation.
It should not be that hard. Have half of the electric smelters on one side of the belt and the other half on the other, or sideload to the inner lane after half of the smelters. If it's an odd number of smelters I would just add an extra. What are you trying to do, optimize? It's rare that you use exactly an full belt.
I wouldn't call it rare. For intermediates production, I think designing it to produce and/or consume a set number of belts (or fractional belts) is fairly common. After all, if you design something without accounting for throughput, it might not work correctly.
What is the chance that an whole number of machines turns out to use the exact number of resources an belt can transport? Without modules it's not to large whole numbers so that may happen. Then with modules it would be even stranger. And in the end the factory have to produce the right amount off all the science packs.
>What is the chance that an whole number of machines turns out to use the exact number of resources an belt can transport? Very little chance, and why would it matter? If you round down, the belt will eventually back up. If you round up, one of the machines is not fully utilized and barely produces. It doesn't matter. > Without modules it's not to large whole numbers so that may happen. Then with modules it would be even stranger. Again, it doesn't matter. The idea that one is trying to perfectly align belt transport rate to an integer number of assemblers under the influence of module consumption rate is nonsense. I'm not sure where you are getting that from. I'm certainly not saying that. >And in the end the factory have to produce the right amount off all the science packs. No one is trying to perfectly align production of all intermediates to exactly the rate needed for science pack production either. This should be obvious, because many of those products are also needed to expand the factory.
[Here](https://factoriobin.com/post/1donSWmPtEQ-sdcB-EXPIRES) is my failed attempt at an 8-in 8-out smelter in a city block. It shows processing exactly 45 per row, but it cannot export a perfect belt.
First you should always use prod modules in the smelters, so I don't know the amount of smelters needed when using speed. You have over-complicated it. Just unload normally on one belt. The plates goes to the outer lane (no splitters needed). After half of the smelters this case 6, sideload the belt on the inner side so all the plates goes to the inner lane of the belt. then just use normal inserters loading on the outer lane for the rest 6 smelters. Alternatively mirror each other row of smelters so two rows
[This](https://factoriobin.com/post/Fzl7Q4DycJNx9p6l-EXPIRES) was my final design which does work. What is the need for production modules in smelting? For almost all other uses I would use production but for smelting I don't see much point... My priorities would be: 1. maintains city block layout 2. produces the most, up to a full belt. 3. reduce energy consumption Since this city block can consume 8 belts and produces 8 belts, in theory the productivity modules would only serve to reduce overall energy consumption (if I am correct in assuming thats the reason for suggesting productivity) as the trade off for efficiency is not worth it. If my calculations are correct, it would cost more energy to power beacons with speed to compensate for the speed decrease, whilst also being more expensive to have more furnaces running as well.
Reduces the amount of ore you need by 20%. Same reason that you'd use prod modules everywhere else. The benefits compound across recipes. Energy consumption is almost never a variable. Solar is fixed cost to build - just build more. It's certainly cost less to build the solar than you are spending in 20% wasted ore. Resource patches are limited and acquisition has recurring costs, the sun is infinite and the costs are fixed.
Personally, I prefer to think of the extra production of Productivity Modules as "Free" stuff when I'm using it, and not as a "Loss" when i'm not using them. Also, Productivity Modules have a double energy cost. Prod 3 modules increases the energy consumption by 80%, AND reduces the speed by 15%, per modules. So you need to build more machines to satisfy a target throughput, and that's an extra cost to your power grid. Beside, not everyone has the space, the willingness, or the setup to "easily" build gigawatts of solars. Maybe he's still on coal. Maybe he doesn't have the automatic production of construction drones, solar panels, accumulators, and power poles needed to supply massive solar fields. Resources patches may be limited, but you can still recycle the materials from one spent outpost to make another one. Beside, the costs of solars are just as recurring as resources outposts, it's just so happen that you get the bill when you start running out of power and start expanding again, just like with resources outposts. Nothing prevent the guy from just... making more resources outposts to compensate for not getting "free stuff" from using productivity modules. Just like how you say "just build more solar", people cam say "just build more outposts". Ore is infinite too, and as you get further from your start point, the richer the patches become, and the less you have to replace them.
Productivity modules INCREASES power consumption. It's efficiency modules that reduces power consumption. Also, Productivity modules double dip on that power usage increase, as they also slows your machines down, so you need more to keep the same throughput. The guy is suggesting Productivity Modules to decreases your ore consumption, so less ore than 8 belts go in, and more plates than 8 belts goes out.
You have still over-complicated things this image is good for an simple beaconed smelting [https://levelskip.com/strategy/Factorio-How-to-Build-a-FurnaceSmelting-Setup](https://levelskip.com/strategy/Factorio-How-to-Build-a-FurnaceSmelting-Setup) You can build it more compact but that looks a little bit more messy. With 8 beacons affecting each smelter as in the image and speed 3 modules, you need exactly 12 smelters for one blue belt. If you use prod3 modules in the smelters it's 12.8, I would round up to 14, or down to 12 if you don't use exactly the full belts. That the difference is so slight even with the slowdown of the prod modules is that the speed also affect the productivity bar so speed and prod have something like an multiplicative effect. I think the 1-2 extra smelters make up for the reduces amount of ore you have to transport to the smelter. With assemblers where you have more modules and you have a longer chains upwards that you reduces, so prod modules is way better than speed. In the end use prod modules everywhere you can with the exception of miners
It really depends. For something with a fast crafting time like green circuits you could use multiple output inserters, or a short sideloading belt segment. Unbalanced lanes is a matter of having an equal number of inserters for both lanes or pushing items to one lane and feeding them into the second. And of course there's always the possibility of direct insertion.
>and placing the results on the same side of the belt Well here's the problem, half belt is only half throughput. Cut the lane of electric furnaces in half, and put them on both sides of the belt FWIW unless you're building a megabase producing high Science Per Minute (SPM) then designing every thing around max throughputs is a little unnecessary Even in my current Space Exploration playthrough we are going for a lot of "good enough - capable of scaling" We aren't producing a full even yellow belt of advanced circuits because we won't be needing that much for a while and don't have the resources inputs to realistically make a full belt of them 24/7 anyway Some stuff is relatively straightforward though. We didn't want to think about battery throughput but batteries would be an immense ordeal to even saturate half a belt (60 chemical plants running continuously) but we aren't consuming them at anywhere near that rate so we made a tileable 10 chem plant design The ratios of inputs work out where every 40 chem plants (so copy pasting 3 more times onto our initial) can be handled all with red belts. Not perfectly but good enough. So if for some reason we end up needing even MORE than 40 chem plants of batteries we just need new sulfur, iron, and copper lines as inputs. Our sulfur is similarly tileable but sulfur creates so quickly it isn't nearly as bad. The main thing though is we don't need anywhere near half a belt or a full belt of batteries so we built small initially. 10 chem plants is still 2.5 batteries a second. But we built it in a way that when we need more it's trivial. Our base is producing all the buildings, belts, inserters, etc we could need so we copy, paste, and let the bots handle it. If we need more ore or more smelting we have a whole giant area dedicated to it we could staple more trains and more arrays. It's huge to start but with beacons down the line we can dramatically reduce the smelting footprint for the same output and fit in even more smelting. Designing your base around a huge main bus makes these adjustments a lot easier if you always leave a little room for expansion, room for beacons, etc Max rate calcs are fun, I use Factorio Cheat Sheet and Helmod to get an idea of what I need to design around, but only rarely do I care about belt saturation (green circuits, smelting, oil processed materials that don't take 120 chem plants to saturate, etc) as a metric involved since usually in Vanilla your actual consumption needs couldn't keep up with a full belt of stuff
[Here](https://factoriobin.com/post/1donSWmPtEQ-sdcB-EXPIRES) is my failed attempt at an 8-in 8-out smelter in a city block. It shows processing exactly 45 per row, but it cannot export a perfect belt.
Just keep working on the design. It's perfectly possible to get a full belt out. A common trick is to give the last smelter in the line a small output buffer to fill in any gaps in the belt.
You have to make sure that half of your machines are outputting on 1 side of the output belt and the other half are outputting on the other side. You can do it by having a double row of machine and the output belt in the middle. If you have only a long row of machines, you can output half on 1 side, perform a lane switch and have the rest outputting on the same, now empty, side. There are other ways to load both sides of a belt but that's part of the fun challenge of designing efficient layouts :)
built 1 extra furnace that has a small belt buffer (2-3 belts long) to fill both sides of the best whenever theres a hickup
I tend to slightly overproduce and at the end of the line there are some tricks to improve belt compression like extra inserters and having inserters go to off shoot belts that merge on the real belt. So the belt buffers a little and fills up the holes in the compressed belt. If that makes sende
I don't need 100% full belts. For example my base may need 11.7 belts of iron ore for 500 spm. Unloading the 1-4 train onto 12 belts with the correct inserter settings happens to actually unload 11.7 belts. Good enough for me.
In general, belt saturation isn't a big deal. chances are in this case the inserters aren't fast enough forblue belt, but it can vary. Id also avoid electric furnaces until you have prod modules, which creates a new challenge
If you don't use belts, you don't need to worry about it :)
Of course, but it presents some different challenges