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Transport belts: Difference between revisions

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| [[File:Transport_belts_demo.gif|300px|top|thumb|Inserters insert onto the far side of a belt running past them.]]
| [[File:Transport_belts_demo.gif|300px|top|thumb|Inserters insert onto the far side of a belt running past them.]]

Revision as of 01:26, 20 August 2016

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Page "Transport belts" has been recommended for clean-up. Reason: Page contains you-based verbiage, old images and dead links/links to pages that are deletion candidates.
This may mean fixing grammar or broken links, providing better explanations, or removing incorrect/outdated info.
Further recommendations for this page's clean-up can be made at Talk:Transport belts.
Inserters insert onto the far side of a belt running past them.
Inserters insert onto the right hand side of a belt running away from them.

Transport belts are used to transport items from one place to another. The advantages of transport belts lie in the fact that they don't use any power and are very easy to set up. There are three types of transport belts, each with their own properties.

Types

Animation showing the three types of belt and their speed (from top to bottom: regular belts, fast belts and express belts).
Type Max. throughput (Items per game-second) Speed (Tiles per game-second) Max. density (Items per tile) Required technologies
Transport Belt 13.333 1.875 7.1111 none
Fast Transport Belt 26.667 3.750 7.1111 Logistics 2 (research)
Express Transport Belt 40.000 5.625 7.1111 Logistics 3 (research)

 *experimental value: See Transport belt experiments for more detailed information.

Placement

Transport belts notplace.gif Transport belts doplace.gif Transport belts replace.gif
  • Do not place transport belts by moving the mouse
  • Instead just move your character
  • You can change the direction of a transport belt by overbuilding it
  • You can change the direction of a transport belt by pressing "r" while mousing over it
  • You can upgrade a transport belt by overbuilding it with another type

Belt Management

Merging and un-merging

Belts have two lanes that can be used for transporting. This allows for either a double flow of one material, or with some careful setup, transporting two different materials on the same belt. Mixed belts can be beneficial for smelting ore, or producing items with a lot of ingredients such as the science pack 3. Un-merging a mixed belt is fairly easy too, since an underground belt will block half of your a belt. So there is no reason to be afraid of mixed belts at all.

Transport belts merge.gif   Transport belts unmerge.gif

Balancing the belts

Sometimes you will find one side of a belt more empty than the other. In this care rebalancing the belt can be helpful.

The left design only rebalances equally if one side of the belt is empty while the right version always balances equally.

Transport belts balance1.gif   Transport belts balance2.gif

Speed, Density and Throughput: About finding the bottlenecks

Maximizing the throughput is important, since it will keep your belts efficient. Therefore we need to introduce some definitions:

Speed
How fast does a belt move.
Density
How tight are the items put on the belts.
Throughput
This is speed * density. It describes how many items pass by in a given time.

So there are two opportunities to enhance the throughput:

More density
Sometimes items have little spaces next to each other that aren't big enough for other items to fit in. In this case reordering the items can still increase the density. This can be done by temporary increasing the belt speed on a single tile or by merging 2 lanes with an inserter.

Transport belts density.gif

More speed
In case your belts already are at maximum density you can still upgrade your speed with better belts. But first you have to find the bottleneck.

The bottleneck can be seen quite easy, if there is a part of a belt, where the items sometimes stop or don't move (or don't move fast) at maximum density and suddenly they come to a point, where this 'stop and go' releases itself and they run free and are not so tight on the belt. This is in most cases the exact place, where you need to optimize your belts.

Moving other Entities: About highways, advanced defenses and moving boxes

Moving fast can be essential to defend alien attacks in time. Running on a belt will increase or decrease the movement speed of the player accordingly to the belts speed. That is why building a belt towards your defenses can be beneficial.

However, the player is not the only unit that can be moved by transport belts. Also, biters and spitters can be moved. This can be abused to improve your defense. Firstly biters will have a harder time to reach your walls when placing express transport belt in front of them. Secondly spitters can be moved closer to your walls. That way more turrets can attack a single spitter at once.

Another useful usage are cars on transport belts. Cars have an inventory and can be filled by inserters. They can be used as moving boxes on belt. This has several advantages: Firstly the throughput of the belt-car-boxes is amazingly high, secondly the inserter stack size bonus does apply here and make inserters more effective.

Transport belts movement.gif   Transport belts defence.jpg   Transport belts carboxes.gif

See also

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