The purpose of faster transport belts

[Paranoide]

Hi everyone,

I've played Factorio now for a couple of hours (like 50 or something) so I haven't seen everything yet. But you develop those faster transport belts very early and I still only use the slowest ones.
Mathematically it doesn't make any difference for transporting stuff which belt is use: If I put an item let's say every 2 seconds onto the belt at the beginning then there will be an item at the end every 2 seconds, too, no matter how fast the belts are. Only the time for the first one to arrive at the end will differ with different speeds. But once the "flow" is working it doesn't matter anymore. I've already thought of density reasons but it still seems not very relevant.

So I just wonder what practical use they have (apart from mechanics like using belts to move more quickly through the world or using belts as a defense etc., I'm talking about just logistic mechanics). As said, I haven't seen/developed everything yet but I still couldn't come up with a sensible practical use of faster belts.

That's just something that bugs me so I thought I just ask some experts here! I hope it's not a too silly question...

[vanatteveldt]

Faster belts have higher throughput. If you use a belt to e.g. feed 30 smelters, you need to transport enough ore and coal per second to keep the smelters fed. With a yellow belt, you'll find that around 20 smelters will be able to empty out a single yellow belt. So, if you want to have more smelters on that line, you upgrade the belt to red.

Edit: see https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?tit ... port_belts

Throughput for yellow: 13/s, red: 26/s, blue: 40/s. This is using both lanes (sides) of a belt, so throughput per lane is half this number.,

A steel furnace will require 1 ore every (3.5/2=)1.75 seconds. So, a single yellow lane can supply around 13*1.75 = 22.75 smelters. A red lane can feed double that, and a blue lane can feed 70.

[BlakeMW]

There is little point to using faster transport belts (although I do like to use red belts to feed blocks of 32 steel furnaces - that is a row of 16 down both sides of a belt of ore). Usually by the time high throughput is needed you are better off using trains and logistic bots. If you have some ideological reason against logistic bots then faster belts are very helpful for taking advantage of prod3/speed3 beacon setups (altough prod3 modules have an interesting effect - they "stretch" resources so much that often a basic belt continues to suffice - for example when making electronic circuits with 4x prod3 modules in the copper wire and circuit assembler, copper plates are "stretched" by 96% which is like doubling the throughput of the copper plate belt)

Speed runners usually use very few red belts and no blue belts, reason is basic belts are so much cheaper than red/blue belts and have enough capacity for most things involved in launching a single rocket.

[Koub]

Once you start having megabases, you might be happy to trade your saturated 4-lane red belts main bus carrying iron and copper for 4-lane blue belts, instead of having to double it and redesign half of your factory.

[vanatteveldt]

Well I guess you can do everything using bots, but I generally use (trains+)belts for the 'bulk' goods on the main bus and bots for the rest. I'm not sure how many bots you need to replace a saturated blue belt that runs 100-200 tiles, but I'm afraid it's a high number...

[ssilk]

Faster belts have high impact if you have a lack of items (belts are not full).
In that case the distance (or better the time) of an item on the belts influence the total speed of your factory very deep! This effect is quite strong, cause in the end the total time on belts of all items must be added to the production time.

[Paranoide]

Faster belts have higher throughput. If you use a belt to e.g. feed 30 smelters, you need to transport enough ore and coal per second to keep the smelters fed. With a yellow belt, you'll find that around 20 smelters will be able to empty out a single yellow belt. So, if you want to have more smelters on that line, you upgrade the belt to red.

But isn't that assuming that the belts are always full? Or in other words, that the production of the items on that belt is higher than the consumption at the end of the belt?
Sure, I see that if you have a source of arbitrary or infinite production speed the faster belts provide more items per time. But in most cases (or at least in my most cases) it's like in this picture:



And in this case the choice of belt doesn't change anything, does it?

Faster belts have high impact if you have a lack of items (belts are not full).
In that case the distance (or better the time) of an item on the belts influence the total speed of your factory very deep! This effect is quite strong, cause in the end the total time on belts of all items must be added to the production time.

Well that depends... if the belts are not full BUT the items are produced constantly (one item every x seconds) it's exactly the case I described in my first post. Higher velocity belts transport a single item faster but the the distance between to items is also bigger (so that an item arrives every x seconds, too!).

[cswiger]

Yes-- unless your belts are getting filled, there's little point to using a faster belt.

And if you're overproducing and you fill the belt up back to the sources of production, again, there's little point to using a faster belt. Only if your consumption exceeds the capacity of the existing belt would a faster belt help.

[zytukin]

If you simply desire things to get from point A to point B at a faster rate, then a faster belt is an solution.
-like if you build a new storage area for something and want to empty the old one to demolish it

If you are trying to pull more stuff off a belt then it can supply, then a faster belt is a solution.
-another solution is more belts so there are less assemblers/whatever pulling off each belt

If a belt can't take stuff away from an assembler fast enough for it to unload items as fast as it is producing them, a faster belt is a solution.
-other solutions are slower assemblers or more belts

[vanatteveldt]

But isn't that assuming that the belts are always full? Or in other words, that the production of the items on that belt is higher than the consumption at the end of the belt?
Sure, I see that if you have a source of arbitrary or infinite production speed the faster belts provide more items per time. But in most cases (or at least in my most cases) it's like in this picture:

Yes. If you are not producing enough stuff to warrant faster belts, faster belts are not going to help you.

However, once you get a couple mining outposts running, you often have more ore than you can ever hope to process, so getting red belts from train station to smelter, and then red belts from smelter to circuit factory, and then red belts from circuit factory to the rest of the factory become useful (and in that order, generally)

(edit: I often end up iteratively expanding production and transport, e.g.: not enough green circuits! -> expand green circuit line -> not enough copper! -> add copper smelting -> not enough ore! -> upgrade ore belts -> copper doesn't make it to green circuits -> upgrade copper plate belts -> too many circuits for the belt -> upgrade green circuit belt etc. etc.

[Leveller]

This is the reason i need blue belts. And 4 of them. And i will soon need to add more when i make more furnaces.

[MalcolmCooks]

I found throughput of belts a bit hard to wrap my head around, because when your factory is fairly small, it hardly matters. It is how many items that something can transport across itself in one second. It's closely related to the consumption and production rates of your other factory buildings, assembly machines and smelters ect. I first ran into the throughput problem when I started making large mining outposts. The production rate of all the mining drills combined was larger than the throughput of a yellow belt, so it was getting backed up. You need to not only match the production rate of something to the consumption rate, but you need to make sure that your method of transporting the items from place to place has a high enough throughput to support that.

Also - a full belt is not a saturated belt. A saturated belt is what happens when items are being put on to the belt faster than they are being taken off. The items then reach the end of the belt and start to pile up, and eventually the whole belt is filled with items that are not in constant motion. In screenshots a completely compressed full belt, one that is carrying its absolute maximum number of items, looks the same as a saturated belt, because you can't see that the items are actually moving.

[AcolyteOfRocket]

In response to the OP I have been using a red belt recently in my Factory. The belt is used to supply multiple goods to a train via a buffering system and each of the goods is regulated by a smart inserter connected to a circuit network (I am avoiding using bots on this Factory).

Each inserter stops when there is a sufficient number of goods at the buffer, but the numbers cannot include any goods on the belt as I can't measure it.

So I use a faster belt to minimise holdup for control purposes.

I also use faster belts to debottleneck bits of the plant that need a high throughput but don't have space for expansion.

Otherwise, like the OP, I find I don't use faster belts - in fact I haven't yet made a single piece of blue belt in any of the games I have played.

[taiiat]

But in most cases (or at least in my most cases) it's like in this picture.

And in this case the choice of belt doesn't change anything, does it?

then you definitely don't have a situation where you need faster belts.
my Factory definitely needs them, because basic Belts are too slow to supply the throughput needed for all of the consumers. because the consumers process fast enough that basic Belts will basically only supply the first 10-15% of the machines being fed from it with just rare scraps getting past. fast Belts means 100% of the machines are getting the resources they need.

and similarly, getting enough throughput to your furnaces for Ores, when the Deposit is large enough that you can fit like, 16 Drills on it.
which in my Factory has another thing to note - there's enough Smelting production for example, that basic Belts move too slowly to evac the products. the Furnaces will be unable to get the plates onto the Belts because the Belt is just always full. faster Belts move the resources to buffer storage much more efficiently, and the Belts are therefore not always packed full, causing the Furnaces to back up and shut off.


you can certainly use basic Belts in many places where high speed isn't necessary due to the limited scale of the system. but there comes points where you need the extra speed inside your Factory (and no, not for crossing the Serengeti Desert with Belts, for distances that aren't long enough to bother with a Train).

ultimately though, if you use 4 Assemblers to just constantly manufacture fast Belts, you could just use them for everything and say w/e.

Also - a full belt is not a saturated belt.

QFT!

i can't tell if a Belt to a branch of my Factory has any problems until it suddenly starts to become empty, then it's a panic to figure out what went wrong.
since the only other state is jam packed, even if the Machines are consuming basically at the rate of supply.

[Neok]

Key here is not that the belts are faster, but they allow to carry more load over the same time, because they are faster.
Its not so much about the speed that the item arrives, but you can put more items on the belt cause the items travel faster.

[Sunder1977]

Faster belts have higher throughput. If you use a belt to e.g. feed 30 smelters, you need to transport enough ore and coal per second to keep the smelters fed. With a yellow belt, you'll find that around 20 smelters will be able to empty out a single yellow belt. So, if you want to have more smelters on that line, you upgrade the belt to red.

But isn't that assuming that the belts are always full? Or in other words, that the production of the items on that belt is higher than the consumption at the end of the belt?
Sure, I see that if you have a source of arbitrary or infinite production speed the faster belts provide more items per time. But in most cases (or at least in my most cases) it's like in this picture:



And in this case the choice of belt doesn't change anything, does it?

If your belts look like that you are playing Transport Tycoon, not Factorio.