Belt transport system
The belt transport system is the first and most interesting transport system in Factorio (besides the Railway and Robot logistics of course ^^). Transport belts (or conveyor belts) are used to transport Items.
There are 3 different types of belts in 3 different speed categories:
File:Basic-transport-belt.png File:Fast-transport-belt.png File:Express-transport-belt.png - Transport belts
File:Basic-transport-belt-to-ground.png File:Fast-transport-belt-to-ground.png File:Express-transport-belt-to-ground.png - Underground belts
File:Basic-splitter.png File:Fast-splitter.png File:Express-splitter.png - Splitters
Differences between the belt-types
Technically the only difference between the levels of the three belt types is speed (and colour, of course). In practice, there are some differences in density, throughput and handling in conjunction with inserters. See Physics to dig deeper into that.
General behaviour
No energy usage
Belts don't need energy to for transportation, and this is one of the Mysteries of the Factorio World, but like any other mystery in Factorio this is just for gameplay reasons: If the transport belts would use energy, you would easily cut yourself into the knee, if you run out of coal, which needs to be transported to the boilers to be burned to produce energy which you would need to transport it.
Using debug-mode to see, what really happens?
The belt transport system can be imagined as "moving ground". Basically every item on a belt is moved in the belts direction.
Technically an item is a small box (turn on the collision box in the Debug mode) and moving means that the position of an item is constantly changed but the items are not allowed to overlap. A picture can show you this better:
You can imagine the items moving upward tick by tick. And when coming to the turn, the items aren't rotated, but moved to the side.
When you use the Debug mode and turn on the collision boxes, and also reduce the game speed to about 0.3, you can really clearly see, how the items are moving on the belts.
Puzzling game element
Another game-element of the belts is, that they introduce some kind of puzzling into the game. The handling of the near and far side of the belt, optimizing and many other aspects are quite concentrated in the management of the belts. If you want to handle those kinds of puzzles, please continue to read the pages below.
