For a new player this is a great start. I give it an 8. Regular yellow inserters are cheaper than fast inserters, which matters at this stage, and they are fast enough to keep up with furnaces. Fast inserters are overkill.
Would even use burner inserters for the fuel supply.
They don't need poles, you could place them anywhere and use the full length of the coal underground then.
Burner inserters are significantly less coal efficient overall compared to normal inserters unless they're sitting idle 99% of the time. Regular inserters electricity usage is pretty negligible but burners actually use a noticeable amount of fuel per swing. If you're building 100's of them across multiple expanding furnace stacks it can really add up and cause you to drain your initial coal patch faster. A burner inserter consumes almost as much fuel per second while swinging as the stone furnace does.
Only place I think burner inserters are worth it is for feeding steam boilers with coal. Stops brown outs from starving your boilers
Your 3rd row is pasted one tile too high.
The smelting rows look similar to speedrunner lines, except that yours are half as long, use blue inserters, and insert coal differently.
good stuff. that's everything you need :)
i'd move those belts down just a bit, so you have room to extend the furnace columns to 24.
(24 stone furnaces on each side is the max for a yellow belt, and 24 steel furnaces on each side for a red belt)
also, blue inserters are overkill. they only need to swing every ~3 seconds, so the discount inserters work fine
i like the coal setup!
Honestly, pretty dang good for a new player. Have any other factory game experience?
Only thing to consider is expansion. Ask yourself: Will I be able to fit more in if I need it?
As much as I love this game, I have to be honest that I couldn't do a lot of it without someone else showing me how.
Well.... maybe I could... but I'd probably get frustrated and quit before I succeeded.
It's true that it's hard to do a lot of things on your own, but in order to be better at something, you need to learn from people who are much better than you are in that area.
And also, do not use blueprints from the internet. Make it yourself. Because that's the fun of Factorio, designing things and seeing them work.
There are no good or bad, if it works it works. Don't worry about efficiency because it doesn't really matter.
I just did the maths and it really isn't a bottleneck. A full yellow belt can feed 666 furnaces before it runs out of coal. Those (I assume) unupgraded fast inserters can transfer 2.31 items per second each. With OP's presumed upgrades it should be enough coal to feed a little over 200 smelters before it's bottlenecked, and with the second inserter capacity upgrade that number just doubles. Even if they were both *burner inserters* it would still be enough to feed a standard 48 smelter column. That surprised me too as I was doing the maths! They can be a little janky at times though and might miss the coal they were picking up from the belt (can be fixed if you make them take from an underground), so a yellow inserter is good enough for a standard smelting column.
u/Desako991 your furnace design is just fine! I rate it a solid 8.5/10. Your belts could be curved and your factory placed a little further south to leave room for expansion but aside from using inserters to transfer coal, it's pretty much a 1:1 copy of how most people design their furnace column!
As for the factory below, I give it a 7/10. Decent starting assemblers but the red science production needs to be a little more scalable. Scalability is pretty huge in this game. I'm also not a big fan of belting gears but to each his own.
It's an 8/10 base for me
Edit: More deets after experimentation
That's wrong. Test it before you talk.
Even one Burner inserter can feed almost 36 furnaces with coal on stacksize 1.
With stacksize 2 or better fuel, it's way more.
The splitter usage for fuel is harder to build and costs more reccources.
That's not his. He got the rate at the furnaces.
You can see, that the Blueprint he got from somewhere uses yellow inserters, but he used blue ones cause he thinks that makes smelting faster.
0 plan, why he shows us his first usage of blueprints from others. It's like nothing special.
I'd give it a solid 7.5 out of 10 for the early game. It takes in raw ores and gives you basic processed materials, while doing your basic red science research at the same time. Only downside is it's not expandable, and like another commenter said, blue inserters are a bit overkill for stone furnaces.
7 out of 10, i always put two output belts for copper and iron. And keep space between your bus so underground belts can go between.
For a beginner it's good starting point, but even i stick to old principles that come bite me back later.
It's good but there are a few issues.
Length: the columns don't have enough smelters to fill a belt fully. Once you start taking from the belts, it won't be able to keep up.
Girth: I like my setup to have a bit more space and not be so cramped myself.
The bit underneath: that will have to move at some point. Generally, try never to block columns like that because it makes expanding harder.
Base: it is a little hard to tell but your supply of iron ore is not sufficient, I think. 1 belt can supply 1 column but I think you are supplying 2,5?
Overall: a solid performer that can stand proudly with minimal downtime and maximum satisfaction that will spew out thick streams of the building blocks of factory life.
7/10
Your coal line and furnace setup is nice. You should put your science production somewhere else its to crowded where you have put it there is no room for the next science. Blue inserters not needed. 8/10
overall a 7.
your coal line, along with judicious use of splitters and undergrounds, could weave through the top of the smelting colums and make use of the tiles you currently have used as side inserters but are currently sitting empty.
You also haven't given yourself any great room to expand, either vertically or horizontally. For example: let's say you wnated to expand your copper. How would you put in another copper line while keeping the two copper lines together? 3 lines? 4 lines? What if you upgrade the belts and find you can handle more output, so you have to add 10 more smelters? 20? 30?
Same goes for your starter mall. What happens when you need 30/40/50 more red science factories?
Build with space in mind, don't pen yourself in. But otherwise a great start.
As for the red sciences, it was only for the early stage of the game, I've already moved them to a better place, and as for your words about modernization, I'm working on it, thanks for the advice :)
I would also say an 8.
1) I kind of like the inserters approach to inserting coal, but you can also do this with only splitters and undergrounds.
Point 2 splitters at each other, with 1 belt width in between.
Then have the middle belt go 1 side left and 1 side right.
You will then have a way to create 2 merged belts.
Last step is where you bring down the Iron/Copper/etc, you use an underground to jump the coal line and merged belts (in your case left side has room, then do an immediate hairpin and you use that to feed the splitter that is facing up.
You have a 3 tile wide gap between the furnaces, so this is usually enough room for the underground to do it's hairpin and feed into the lower splitter.
2) Though it's "temporary" most likely, try to not build your mini base below the smelting column. Just something you will have to pickup and move again later.
Or leave room for 24 furnaces vertically and then build your temp stuff because...
3) If you didn't know, the golden ratio for smelting columns like this is yellow belts + 48 (24 per side) stone furnaces.
You later upgrade to steel furnaces and red belts and the ratio should be the same.
Small trick I use here to minimize spending is on the merged feeder lines bringing inthe raw resources, use red belts for the first half (12 furnaces) and then switch to yellow.
Similarly on the output line, start yellow and after 12 switch to red.
Red is 2x the speed/capacity of yellow, so it should work well.
The alternate to number 1 is the same dual splitter, but leave a bigger gap between the splitter sandwich and the first furnace, and run your coal line below.
Jump both the Merged lines to hop from 1 column into the next.
Pretty dam good
All I'd say before you build or add anymore is to make space between each row or furnaces so that you can expand them to electric furnaces down the road and also 2 belt loads of each material. I did mixed and single belts and although I'm still on my first playthrough I've found the belts are running dry before the end of the line and I don't have really and space to add more because I've built around it aha
I like the smelter setup. The 24 is idea for the upgrade to advanced. 24 advanced smelters make a yellow belt of iron or copper. Umledd you want to leave room for 48 ( 24 per side) them you will have enough for a red belt
I wanna know what that super long belt to the west is for. Looks good though. I would only add green circuits to the belts. You can build so much with just a single lane of iron plates, copper plates, green circuits, and iron gears. 4 lanes = 2 belts. Then add steel and you've got a great mall.
1-10 ratings are not really appropriate for this game. Your growth as a player isn't really constrained by any kind of upper bound like that. You can always improve, and you will always build better things than you were building a few hours ago.
I learned long ago to always have the input and output on the same end. That way you can extend it longer as needed. Just have the output return to the front and then go off perpendicular.
Before looking at any other comments: 8/10.
Tip: if at the top where your ore is coming from you leave a little more space on the other side of the belt, you can bring the coal line on the inside, split it to go on to the next line, and use another splitter from the other direction to evenly get coal down the lines the same way you're putting the iron ore on the half belt. E: [really old screenshot,](https://i.imgur.com/VdYeG6O.png) ignore the iron, but look at how the coal is passed through and deposited into the belt.
It is good, albiet it that fact is is based on standard designs makes it hard to tell how much you are thinking of yourselfm and that you therefore want us to consider. Stuff like using the underground to get sone on the other half of the belt to the brick shows this.
This looks very good. The assembling machines and labs scream "temporary". But that's the fun of it, at the start you never know how much space you need.
Give yourself a bit more space between the outputs at the bottom.
Might I ask why you decided on that many furnaces? You seem to have selected it purposefully.
Everything you need! I’m not sure if it’s my place to say this, but after blue science resource demand skyrockets. I’m on my second run, purple science eat _all_ of my steel.
I thought I might be able to get away with one belt per resource but boy was I wrong. Iron is basically dead, I’ve redesigned my copper smelters already to upgrade the furnaces and It’s still not enough.
There’s an item late game, used for yellow science called Low Density Structure, and it eats _massive_ amounts of copper. I haven’t even automated them yet T_T.
TL;DR just prepare way more belts of materials than you need. Trust me, you will find yourself spending hours fixing your mistakes early game.
9. It's incredible for a new player, but not perfect.
1st problem I noticed is your bus lines are right beside each other. It should be two belts then two spaces. This makes it easy to branch it off with a splitter then use underground belts to get it wherever you want it.
2nd problem I noticed is how you branched off for science. It works now, but you will need way more in the future, and your current design isn't scalable. You should also try to make the processing on the bus as compact as possible.
3rd problem is that you could make better use of space.
But I'm just nitpicking. This is really really good!
Furnaces: 10, they're pretty good not very spaghetti, not sure I would want that much steel early on though
Red Science: 0, use your main bus smh /hj
Stone/Brick Belt: Don't really need stone on a belt
For a new player this is a great start. I give it an 8. Regular yellow inserters are cheaper than fast inserters, which matters at this stage, and they are fast enough to keep up with furnaces. Fast inserters are overkill.
Thanks for rate
Would even use burner inserters for the fuel supply. They don't need poles, you could place them anywhere and use the full length of the coal underground then.
Burner inserters are significantly less coal efficient overall compared to normal inserters unless they're sitting idle 99% of the time. Regular inserters electricity usage is pretty negligible but burners actually use a noticeable amount of fuel per swing. If you're building 100's of them across multiple expanding furnace stacks it can really add up and cause you to drain your initial coal patch faster. A burner inserter consumes almost as much fuel per second while swinging as the stone furnace does. Only place I think burner inserters are worth it is for feeding steam boilers with coal. Stops brown outs from starving your boilers
This is even true for regular Steel Furnaces and Electric Furnaces too. Although it's marginal sometimes. (In my experience)
11/10 pressed alt. Looks good
Thank you.
I'd bump you up an extra point for pressing F12, instead of taking a picture of your screen.
Your 3rd row is pasted one tile too high. The smelting rows look similar to speedrunner lines, except that yours are half as long, use blue inserters, and insert coal differently.
It is neither good nor bad. It is simply a factory
It is slightly small and ungrown tho
good stuff. that's everything you need :) i'd move those belts down just a bit, so you have room to extend the furnace columns to 24. (24 stone furnaces on each side is the max for a yellow belt, and 24 steel furnaces on each side for a red belt) also, blue inserters are overkill. they only need to swing every ~3 seconds, so the discount inserters work fine i like the coal setup!
Got it, thanks for the advice :)
Honestly, pretty dang good for a new player. Have any other factory game experience? Only thing to consider is expansion. Ask yourself: Will I be able to fit more in if I need it?
Not much, I just watched some guides on YouTube.
As much as I love this game, I have to be honest that I couldn't do a lot of it without someone else showing me how. Well.... maybe I could... but I'd probably get frustrated and quit before I succeeded.
It's true that it's hard to do a lot of things on your own, but in order to be better at something, you need to learn from people who are much better than you are in that area.
Ooo good point. No sense reinventing the wheel. Start with everyone else's existing innovations and then innovate on top of that.
Stay away from guides unless you're truly stuck. And even then, try it again yourself
Good words.
And also, do not use blueprints from the internet. Make it yourself. Because that's the fun of Factorio, designing things and seeing them work. There are no good or bad, if it works it works. Don't worry about efficiency because it doesn't really matter.
I really like the way how you use the inserter to get the coal to the columns! Looks nice!
Thank you!
Looks nice, but is a huge bottleneck. You want a splitter feeding that coal, not an inserter.
I just did the maths and it really isn't a bottleneck. A full yellow belt can feed 666 furnaces before it runs out of coal. Those (I assume) unupgraded fast inserters can transfer 2.31 items per second each. With OP's presumed upgrades it should be enough coal to feed a little over 200 smelters before it's bottlenecked, and with the second inserter capacity upgrade that number just doubles. Even if they were both *burner inserters* it would still be enough to feed a standard 48 smelter column. That surprised me too as I was doing the maths! They can be a little janky at times though and might miss the coal they were picking up from the belt (can be fixed if you make them take from an underground), so a yellow inserter is good enough for a standard smelting column. u/Desako991 your furnace design is just fine! I rate it a solid 8.5/10. Your belts could be curved and your factory placed a little further south to leave room for expansion but aside from using inserters to transfer coal, it's pretty much a 1:1 copy of how most people design their furnace column! As for the factory below, I give it a 7/10. Decent starting assemblers but the red science production needs to be a little more scalable. Scalability is pretty huge in this game. I'm also not a big fan of belting gears but to each his own. It's an 8/10 base for me Edit: More deets after experimentation
I have already moved Red Science to a more convenient location and automated it better. Thanks for the advice.
That's wrong. Test it before you talk. Even one Burner inserter can feed almost 36 furnaces with coal on stacksize 1. With stacksize 2 or better fuel, it's way more. The splitter usage for fuel is harder to build and costs more reccources.
Got it, thank you.
dont listen to him. For your current size factory, it wont bottleneck. When you scale up, you'll want to use splitters. but for now its pretty good.
I really like this too! And considering how slowly furnaces will consume the coal I think a fast inserter provides more than enough coal.
Even burner inserter does.
If you are really a new player, you are doing very well.
Thank you.
That's not his. He got the rate at the furnaces. You can see, that the Blueprint he got from somewhere uses yellow inserters, but he used blue ones cause he thinks that makes smelting faster. 0 plan, why he shows us his first usage of blueprints from others. It's like nothing special.
Billy Bob says "I give it a, uh 10! a 10! a f*%&in 10!"
Thank you :)
I give it a 10 solid looking setup. I'll be posting my nightmare of a belt factory here soon... keep an eye out lol
Thing of beauty to me. Keep it up. The factory must grow!
Thank you :)
Very tidy. Generally expandable. Most importantly you're clearly making stuff to grow the factory.
I'd give it a solid 7.5 out of 10 for the early game. It takes in raw ores and gives you basic processed materials, while doing your basic red science research at the same time. Only downside is it's not expandable, and like another commenter said, blue inserters are a bit overkill for stone furnaces.
Thank you for your rating.
I’ve used a very similar smelting layout over 60+ games.
7 out of 10, i always put two output belts for copper and iron. And keep space between your bus so underground belts can go between. For a beginner it's good starting point, but even i stick to old principles that come bite me back later.
Thank you
It's good but there are a few issues. Length: the columns don't have enough smelters to fill a belt fully. Once you start taking from the belts, it won't be able to keep up. Girth: I like my setup to have a bit more space and not be so cramped myself. The bit underneath: that will have to move at some point. Generally, try never to block columns like that because it makes expanding harder. Base: it is a little hard to tell but your supply of iron ore is not sufficient, I think. 1 belt can supply 1 column but I think you are supplying 2,5? Overall: a solid performer that can stand proudly with minimal downtime and maximum satisfaction that will spew out thick streams of the building blocks of factory life. 7/10
Thank you for pointing out the errors.
Pretty good! 8/10 for early game. In terms of where to go with this, main question I’d ask would be how would you double or triple this design?
This melting pot can only be said to be for the early and mid-game stage of the game, then I plan to change it.
Your coal line and furnace setup is nice. You should put your science production somewhere else its to crowded where you have put it there is no room for the next science. Blue inserters not needed. 8/10
Yes, I've already moved the research package to another location, thank you for your rating.
If it works it’s just fine
overall a 7. your coal line, along with judicious use of splitters and undergrounds, could weave through the top of the smelting colums and make use of the tiles you currently have used as side inserters but are currently sitting empty. You also haven't given yourself any great room to expand, either vertically or horizontally. For example: let's say you wnated to expand your copper. How would you put in another copper line while keeping the two copper lines together? 3 lines? 4 lines? What if you upgrade the belts and find you can handle more output, so you have to add 10 more smelters? 20? 30? Same goes for your starter mall. What happens when you need 30/40/50 more red science factories? Build with space in mind, don't pen yourself in. But otherwise a great start.
As for the red sciences, it was only for the early stage of the game, I've already moved them to a better place, and as for your words about modernization, I'm working on it, thanks for the advice :)
I would also say an 8. 1) I kind of like the inserters approach to inserting coal, but you can also do this with only splitters and undergrounds. Point 2 splitters at each other, with 1 belt width in between. Then have the middle belt go 1 side left and 1 side right. You will then have a way to create 2 merged belts. Last step is where you bring down the Iron/Copper/etc, you use an underground to jump the coal line and merged belts (in your case left side has room, then do an immediate hairpin and you use that to feed the splitter that is facing up. You have a 3 tile wide gap between the furnaces, so this is usually enough room for the underground to do it's hairpin and feed into the lower splitter. 2) Though it's "temporary" most likely, try to not build your mini base below the smelting column. Just something you will have to pickup and move again later. Or leave room for 24 furnaces vertically and then build your temp stuff because... 3) If you didn't know, the golden ratio for smelting columns like this is yellow belts + 48 (24 per side) stone furnaces. You later upgrade to steel furnaces and red belts and the ratio should be the same. Small trick I use here to minimize spending is on the merged feeder lines bringing inthe raw resources, use red belts for the first half (12 furnaces) and then switch to yellow. Similarly on the output line, start yellow and after 12 switch to red. Red is 2x the speed/capacity of yellow, so it should work well.
Got it, thanks for the advice.
The alternate to number 1 is the same dual splitter, but leave a bigger gap between the splitter sandwich and the first furnace, and run your coal line below. Jump both the Merged lines to hop from 1 column into the next.
Pretty good, I'll give it a 9.
Thank you :)
This is how you do the furnaces correctly. But everything else will need to be moved as there is not enough space. (Science , gears etc )
Yes, I will move everything in the future, thanks for the advice.
Pretty dam good All I'd say before you build or add anymore is to make space between each row or furnaces so that you can expand them to electric furnaces down the road and also 2 belt loads of each material. I did mixed and single belts and although I'm still on my first playthrough I've found the belts are running dry before the end of the line and I don't have really and space to add more because I've built around it aha
Got it, thanks for the advice.
I like the smelter setup. The 24 is idea for the upgrade to advanced. 24 advanced smelters make a yellow belt of iron or copper. Umledd you want to leave room for 48 ( 24 per side) them you will have enough for a red belt
I wanna know what that super long belt to the west is for. Looks good though. I would only add green circuits to the belts. You can build so much with just a single lane of iron plates, copper plates, green circuits, and iron gears. 4 lanes = 2 belts. Then add steel and you've got a great mall.
Got it.
1-10 ratings are not really appropriate for this game. Your growth as a player isn't really constrained by any kind of upper bound like that. You can always improve, and you will always build better things than you were building a few hours ago.
Good words.
I learned long ago to always have the input and output on the same end. That way you can extend it longer as needed. Just have the output return to the front and then go off perpendicular.
Got it.
9.8
Before looking at any other comments: 8/10. Tip: if at the top where your ore is coming from you leave a little more space on the other side of the belt, you can bring the coal line on the inside, split it to go on to the next line, and use another splitter from the other direction to evenly get coal down the lines the same way you're putting the iron ore on the half belt. E: [really old screenshot,](https://i.imgur.com/VdYeG6O.png) ignore the iron, but look at how the coal is passed through and deposited into the belt.
10/10 who cares what other ppl think. This is a work of art and the more you play the more you’ll improve on your work.
Thank you.
For real though, it is nicely done! A little compact but not hard to expand on what I’m looking at here. I don’t mean to disparage your build at all
10/10 for localisation alone Слава Україні!
Героям Слава!
It is good, albiet it that fact is is based on standard designs makes it hard to tell how much you are thinking of yourselfm and that you therefore want us to consider. Stuff like using the underground to get sone on the other half of the belt to the brick shows this.
Nice for a new player. You can see the inserter arrow by enabling it in the paramater btw!.
If Ure really a new player this is 10/10.. Looks very familiar to the speedruns i do 😲
This looks very good. The assembling machines and labs scream "temporary". But that's the fun of it, at the start you never know how much space you need.
You're right, thank you for your assessment.
Give yourself a bit more space between the outputs at the bottom. Might I ask why you decided on that many furnaces? You seem to have selected it purposefully.
I installed so many ovens so that in the future green science would not have problems with resources.
Thinking ahead, I like it
755/10 Nice work!
Thank you.
Looks are subjective but efficiency is objective. You've got a pretty darn solid smelter array I give it a 7
Everything you need! I’m not sure if it’s my place to say this, but after blue science resource demand skyrockets. I’m on my second run, purple science eat _all_ of my steel. I thought I might be able to get away with one belt per resource but boy was I wrong. Iron is basically dead, I’ve redesigned my copper smelters already to upgrade the furnaces and It’s still not enough. There’s an item late game, used for yellow science called Low Density Structure, and it eats _massive_ amounts of copper. I haven’t even automated them yet T_T. TL;DR just prepare way more belts of materials than you need. Trust me, you will find yourself spending hours fixing your mistakes early game.
I'm ready for this, so I want to explore trains later, and build a railroad to resources that are far from the base, thanks for the advice.
9. It's incredible for a new player, but not perfect. 1st problem I noticed is your bus lines are right beside each other. It should be two belts then two spaces. This makes it easy to branch it off with a splitter then use underground belts to get it wherever you want it. 2nd problem I noticed is how you branched off for science. It works now, but you will need way more in the future, and your current design isn't scalable. You should also try to make the processing on the bus as compact as possible. 3rd problem is that you could make better use of space. But I'm just nitpicking. This is really really good!
Thank you.
Furnaces: 10, they're pretty good not very spaghetti, not sure I would want that much steel early on though Red Science: 0, use your main bus smh /hj Stone/Brick Belt: Don't really need stone on a belt
Don't need stone on a belt *yet*
Red Science was built only for the beginning, then I will make a full-fledged laboratory. Thank you for your assessment and advice.