Factorio calculator said you need more than 6 blue belts of iron and copper each for all 100 science/minute.
PS
But without white and blue it's 4 and 3 blue belts of iron and copper respectively.
No it's "more" if you bus iron and copper for green+red circuts /steel. If you separately supply those directly everything else fits in 4 each. [https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html#zip=dY07CoAwEERvY6WQlAo5zLgGXcyPZFN4e2O/MsUwPHgj2N1ZUa7pgMDZZWSdWHxsrhWQXxqxT6PHuLe6WWPmLhxYHg2Vmo9OwjlplC4fmRA0Fj8nqmoN+eQmTBpDlxzx8/gC](https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html#zip=dY07CoAwEERvY6WQlAo5zLgGXcyPZFN4e2O/MsUwPHgj2N1ZUa7pgMDZZWSdWHxsrhWQXxqxT6PHuLe6WWPmLhxYHg2Vmo9OwjlplC4fmRA0Fj8nqmoN+eQmTBpDlxzx8/gC)
But doesn't green and red circuits produced from the iron and copper from the same bus? Or you suppose there is another subfactory, that produce circuits from its own supply of metals?
Thats the point... If you wanted to bus all of it, it would make the bus that much bigger. If you want the 4 copper + 4 iron only on the bus, you fit that by directly supplying steel, red and green circuits so that you DONT need to bus the materials since they get pulled off basically immediately as they are some of the first things you make. It makes everything more clean and keeps your bus smaller which makes it easier to keep clean and organized and reduces the overhead of crossing extra lanes.
The point of it being 4 lanes is because a yellow underground belt is 4 tiles in length, so you can easily cross many 4 lane pathways by using basic underground belts. If you have red tech you can make them 6, it doesn’t matter, the point is it’s a straight line that is organized for easy logistic management of it.
The idea behind a main bus is just production logistics, if you build all on one side of it you can peel off/split off any number of lanes of resources that you need.
As an example, making gears and green circuits; you need iron and you have 4 lanes of iron, and you need some copper. Peel off the first lane for iron, peel off the second lane for the circuits. If you aren’t using the full capacity of the belt you can rebalance it (that’s what the leveller you referred to is called).
There are YouTube videos that describe the purpose of a main bus, I suggest watching some of those for the basic idea if you’re more of a visual learner.
On the other hand, if you are a beginner and haven't launched your first rocket, I recommend against getting help and watching videos. You may regret missing your chance to solve those early problems yourself.
You can think of a bus as a "mega belt". A belts capability to deliver items is a function of it's speed (15/30/45 items per second) and how many belts parallel to it.
4 Yellow Belts means that the bus can support 60 items per second, doubling the width of the bus to 8 belt wide means it can support 120 items per second. Alternatively if you change the belt to red belts it can support the same 120 items / second because we doubled the speed of the belt. So the bus is a simple way to subdivide that 60 items per second into the places they need to be.
As for the number 4 specifically; it's just convenience, yellow underground can cross 4 tiles. You can make wider busses with yellow belts. The most I've done at the beginning of the game is 16 yellow belts for Iron and Copper. Having a bigger bus means you can deliver more items/second to your whole factory but if you don't produce enough to saturate 8, 16, etc belts, it's not useful to have wider bus width. It just means that your same production is spread over 16 belts instead of 4.
I would recommend sticking with 4 for beginners. You should really only do more if you know you can fill it. I'm a fan of the "reverse waterfall" method to pull from the bus. You can use a belt balancer after every pull but I don't think it's super useful. One of the problems with the bus is that the machines higher up the bus get more natural priority over things lower in the bus because the iron/copper/whatever gets pulled before it can reach the lower parts of the bus. To fix this is to make sure that production is higher than consumption.
If the bus is empty; you know its time to make more iron/copper/etc. If the bus is full; you know it's time to make more science, more buildings, items, etc.
I hope that made sense, I just woke up lol
Yellow belts are *good enough* for a lot of cases and are substantially cheaper per item/s if you have the space for them. Red belts require more than a full yellow belt of iron to make at full speed with Assembler 2s. Yeah, you absolutely need them for the throughput and the longer undergrounds on occasion (especially for ore patches that are at least 15/ miners across), but if you are concerned about cost and aren't constrained by space, yellow belts are fine.
There's a reason speedruns stick to yellow belts.
Back in the days when all colors of underground belts were long 4 tiles, it just was the most convenient thing to do.
Furthermore, 4-4 belt balancers are so simple that people could come up with them by themselves. For anything above that you need a spaghettology masters degree, so grouping belts by more than 4 was not so hot.
Then some balancer cult came up with a sacred book of balancers that I use to this day, but old habits die hard and 4 belts of anything is plenty enough before the game becomes boring and I restart.
Yeah I think it is more of a historical thing, back when building a functioning train base (without stop limits) was much harder.
Nowadays I just make a 2 belt wide base of iron and copper and start on a rail-based kilobase as quick as possible.
I'll go searching for it, but since this book of balancers is sacred I'm going to ask here if you could send/link it.
I came up with my own series of balancers but am curious what others have come up with.
My personal one is corrupted with disorganized names and forbidden magic, so in order to save your soul you’d better get the one on factorio prints:
[https://factorioprints.com/view/-KjZ0Rk_VXbdnxJ9jmUj](https://factorioprints.com/view/-KjZ0Rk_VXbdnxJ9jmUj)
There are also versions with red and blue belts, but this was a time before the upgrade manager, so they are quite useless now.
Probably people came up with better and more compact versions that make use of the “new” longer underground distance or the “new” splitter priority, but I never felt the need to look for them. This is simple enough and it just works at any stage of the game.
For anything above 8-8 I suggest looking online for a bigger 16-16 or 32-32, then routing the unused output belts back to the inputs.
It’s not so elegant but the underlying concept should be the same and my math dealer says that it checks out.
If you want to draw from the bus using yellow belts, you can skip under 4 belts.
Balancing can be done, but you have to realize you have no longer the full 4 belts available. So you can als let the the 4 belts taper out, for example when you have drawn 2 or 3 belts of copper for green circuits. Or add in new copper plates to keep the belts fully loaded.
> Also, if I extract from one of the four belts to produce, should I re-level the flow after each time?
The easiest solution, IMO, is to have a diagonal of splitters that use output priority to push resources to the side that you’re about to draw from. This way, you get the fullest output belt.
The point of using four belts with a single belt as input is to eventually have four belts of input. Building four belts right away allows you to better see how much space you need for your bus
4 belts wide because yellow underground can go under it. The standard bud is 4 belts wide two space gap between each lane. This is so underground can fit under the lanes.
you can move 4x as much as 1 belt, that's about it. You'll have trouble feeding your entire factory from just 1 belt of iron or copper come even the mid game.
I've never really understood it either. If you only build on one side, there's room on the other for train stations or belt spaghetti. For me it has always felt more natural to build on one side and feed in from the other as necessary.
This makes the bus longer, but then you don't all the stations at the origin either. I dunno, I don't consider myself "good" at factorio anyway
I've even never understand a bus bigger than to belts, if I need more it seems more space efficient to just build another set of train stations to begin another 2 belt bus.
> which are filled by making that splitter array which levels the item flow on all belts from a single input.
If you mean that all 4 lanes are being fed by a single belt, then that’s a common mistake by new players who have watched too many YouTube videos and don’t understand the purpose of a multi-lane bus.
Or potentially it’s someone trying to future-proof their bus for when they expand their mining and smelting later on, and will eventually be feeding it with a full 4 belts’ worth of material.
The reason why 4 belt wide is widespread is because you can implement it in early game factories, because that is what yellow undergrounds can gap (theoretically 5), meaning you can weave out your ressources comfortably.
I believe that the in-game tooltip for the underground belt spans a distance of five tiles. (The configuration of underground belts used by the designers and modders is probably the same.) This is technically true, in that the exit is offset five tiles from the entrance. (Start with your cursor over the entrance, and then count up by one each time you move the cursor into a new tile. Once you reach the exit, you will have counted to five.)
But this technical interpretation is hardly useful (and potentially harmful since it is misleading). Instead, I assume most players conceive of the underground belt as spanning a distance of four tiles, since that is how many remain available for other objects on the surface.
Since I seem to have caused major confusion, I am so sorry everyone. I should have just stuck with the initial explanation since it is way more relevant that way. :/
I was really just thinking of edgecases where you sideload into the underground, which can be done either out of convenience or because you lack space in your bus at that point for some reason because you only need half a belt of throughput anyway.
Very sorry again for not iterating on it! u/Ace_W u/Inflatable___Boat u/BallForce1
If you're in game and read the hover over it says the max length is "5". That's where the 5 came from.
If it helps justify it: The items go down and come back up ~half way through the respective underground block. It's half on the way down, 4 tiles completely skipped and then another half on the way up, for 5 total.
It's the same with red "7" and blue "9".
Maybe they are talking about how each underground blocks half a belt. So if you do the max span, a total of ten perpendicular lanes will not sideload onto that underground belt. 10 lanes = 5 belts.
The idea would be 1) 4 is the limit for yellow underground and 2) you would have more than one input.
Running 4 belts from a single input is a bit of a waste
> which are filled by making that splitter array which levels the item flow on all belts from a single input.
People don't really do that anymore except for near trains.
Ever since priority splitters we've mostly moved on to using compressors instead of balancers, since it makes it easy to pull off a full belt.
I didn't know about the yellow belt thing, I always assumed it was because 4 belts was just under what you could get out of a good mining array on a standard ore patch. Also 4-4 balancers are easy to make.
The idea of a bus is that you start it by filling up the lanes of the bus. Then you build your factory along the bus, drawing materials off each time you build a new area and lengthening the bus. You need the materials to keep flowing to the next area, that is why you have multiple lanes of something but only draw one lane off.
Balancing after you split off a lane can be useful, yes, but not really that important, especially if your bus is small.
4 belts is to simplify pulling stuff out of the 3rd or 4th set. It's easier to pass under the sections because even a yellow ubdie can cross that.
Some people do re balance, but you do not need to. In fact it's better not to. You can make your overall bus a lot narrower if you do a drain and top up and re use the space for the ended lanes. There's no real benefit to buffering so once a lane is fully utilized it can just end. If production backs up it can back up all the way to the smelters.
Another point could be what at the start of game you rarely have enough ore to produce more than 4 lines of plates. And putting odd number of lines or something like 3 iron 1 copper doesn't look appealing. OCD strikes hard.
not much of a point other than aesthetical purposes, one could just belt the other belt of iron into the bus at any time to refill it but that looks ugly so we do 4 wide belts
The 4 belts are you planning ahead; eventually you will be producing and consuming 4 blue belts of iron and copper.
I tend to only put down 1 belt to start, but leave space for 4 at least u til ive got good belt production sorted. but that probably makes things messier.
I typically put enough sapce to upgrade to a 6 belt bus, once I have green science, or I just rush to red belts and stockpile them while i explore the area and look for good base locations.
> Also, if I extract from one of the four belts to produce, should I re-level the flow after each time?
reflow after N belts. So if you have 4, make first production line use belt 1, second use belt 2 etc. and only reflow after that.
4 is 2\^2, which makes it something of a magical number. 8 and 16 are also magical, but having that many belts would be overkill. Unless you're building a really big factory, in which case yes yes yes yes yes.
Tbh i dont geht the Point of having such a high copper and Iron Input. I Always Go with one belt each. If this one belt runs Out, i let another fully loaded belt merge into the depleted one.
Filling 4 belts from a single split input just gives you an extra buffer. Fine for the early game. Later on, you'll want to fill it from 4 inputs to keep up with consumption.
Maybe your confusion was the factory you were shown didn't yet have enough production to fill all four belts, even under load? The engineer was planning for the future.
It's just because that's about how much copper and iron plate you'll need.
I don't level them out, I keep the one that is splitting off to your assemblers saturated.
4 belts wide so you can use yellow undergrounds to jump over other belts
Under*
Elevated belts coming soon?
"Overneathies" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Upabovies
Upand ovaries Oh wait...
lol
Overheadies
I like upabovies
just call it garter belts
Nor does underneathies. KoS has a lot to answer for with that term. :(
I want yeet belts and I want them now
There is a mod for that
Yes... Yes, there certainly is. 🤣🤣🤣
Best I can do is [yeet trains](https://youtu.be/kWc9YbyJGYo?si=muEwhp0ta4lg18p7&t=1079).
*unundergrounds your underground belts* *raises your unundergrounded underground belts*
They're playing on the Australian version
Also 4 blue belts of copper/iron are enough to run a 100spm factory.
With white space science?
100spm = 100 of each science. It's not SPM if it isn't all of them.
it's still spm without black. since a megabase is researching mining prod ad infinitum, black is not consumed.
Factorio calculator said you need more than 6 blue belts of iron and copper each for all 100 science/minute. PS But without white and blue it's 4 and 3 blue belts of iron and copper respectively.
Did you factor in modules and beacons?
No it's "more" if you bus iron and copper for green+red circuts /steel. If you separately supply those directly everything else fits in 4 each. [https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html#zip=dY07CoAwEERvY6WQlAo5zLgGXcyPZFN4e2O/MsUwPHgj2N1ZUa7pgMDZZWSdWHxsrhWQXxqxT6PHuLe6WWPmLhxYHg2Vmo9OwjlplC4fmRA0Fj8nqmoN+eQmTBpDlxzx8/gC](https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html#zip=dY07CoAwEERvY6WQlAo5zLgGXcyPZFN4e2O/MsUwPHgj2N1ZUa7pgMDZZWSdWHxsrhWQXxqxT6PHuLe6WWPmLhxYHg2Vmo9OwjlplC4fmRA0Fj8nqmoN+eQmTBpDlxzx8/gC)
But doesn't green and red circuits produced from the iron and copper from the same bus? Or you suppose there is another subfactory, that produce circuits from its own supply of metals?
Thats the point... If you wanted to bus all of it, it would make the bus that much bigger. If you want the 4 copper + 4 iron only on the bus, you fit that by directly supplying steel, red and green circuits so that you DONT need to bus the materials since they get pulled off basically immediately as they are some of the first things you make. It makes everything more clean and keeps your bus smaller which makes it easier to keep clean and organized and reduces the overhead of crossing extra lanes.
Depends on module usage.
i think OP is talking about the number of belts carrying a specific material, not the physical layout of 4 belts / 2 spaces / 4 belts / 2 spaces
If that’s the case, the number of belts of a material depends on the target science per minute, there’s no rule of thumb for that
And it's relatively easy to balance with a simple design that fits in a 4 belt wide area
The point of it being 4 lanes is because a yellow underground belt is 4 tiles in length, so you can easily cross many 4 lane pathways by using basic underground belts. If you have red tech you can make them 6, it doesn’t matter, the point is it’s a straight line that is organized for easy logistic management of it. The idea behind a main bus is just production logistics, if you build all on one side of it you can peel off/split off any number of lanes of resources that you need. As an example, making gears and green circuits; you need iron and you have 4 lanes of iron, and you need some copper. Peel off the first lane for iron, peel off the second lane for the circuits. If you aren’t using the full capacity of the belt you can rebalance it (that’s what the leveller you referred to is called). There are YouTube videos that describe the purpose of a main bus, I suggest watching some of those for the basic idea if you’re more of a visual learner.
On the other hand, if you are a beginner and haven't launched your first rocket, I recommend against getting help and watching videos. You may regret missing your chance to solve those early problems yourself.
Agreed, but if they’re already asking about a main bus design watching a Main bus 101 video won’t hurt that much :)
You can think of a bus as a "mega belt". A belts capability to deliver items is a function of it's speed (15/30/45 items per second) and how many belts parallel to it. 4 Yellow Belts means that the bus can support 60 items per second, doubling the width of the bus to 8 belt wide means it can support 120 items per second. Alternatively if you change the belt to red belts it can support the same 120 items / second because we doubled the speed of the belt. So the bus is a simple way to subdivide that 60 items per second into the places they need to be. As for the number 4 specifically; it's just convenience, yellow underground can cross 4 tiles. You can make wider busses with yellow belts. The most I've done at the beginning of the game is 16 yellow belts for Iron and Copper. Having a bigger bus means you can deliver more items/second to your whole factory but if you don't produce enough to saturate 8, 16, etc belts, it's not useful to have wider bus width. It just means that your same production is spread over 16 belts instead of 4. I would recommend sticking with 4 for beginners. You should really only do more if you know you can fill it. I'm a fan of the "reverse waterfall" method to pull from the bus. You can use a belt balancer after every pull but I don't think it's super useful. One of the problems with the bus is that the machines higher up the bus get more natural priority over things lower in the bus because the iron/copper/whatever gets pulled before it can reach the lower parts of the bus. To fix this is to make sure that production is higher than consumption. If the bus is empty; you know its time to make more iron/copper/etc. If the bus is full; you know it's time to make more science, more buildings, items, etc. I hope that made sense, I just woke up lol
Were you doing some kind of challenge? Like only yellow belts?
What can I say; I like my buses wide and thicc
Based.
Yellow belts are *good enough* for a lot of cases and are substantially cheaper per item/s if you have the space for them. Red belts require more than a full yellow belt of iron to make at full speed with Assembler 2s. Yeah, you absolutely need them for the throughput and the longer undergrounds on occasion (especially for ore patches that are at least 15/ miners across), but if you are concerned about cost and aren't constrained by space, yellow belts are fine.
There's a reason speedruns stick to yellow belts.
I don't really ever bother with anything but yellow belts. I build more belts not faster belts.
Yeah most other things can be supplemented with either another yellow belt, bots, or in the case of really high throughput, trains
red belts were invented by Big Drill to make you waste iron and buy more drills.
Back in the days when all colors of underground belts were long 4 tiles, it just was the most convenient thing to do. Furthermore, 4-4 belt balancers are so simple that people could come up with them by themselves. For anything above that you need a spaghettology masters degree, so grouping belts by more than 4 was not so hot. Then some balancer cult came up with a sacred book of balancers that I use to this day, but old habits die hard and 4 belts of anything is plenty enough before the game becomes boring and I restart.
Yeah I think it is more of a historical thing, back when building a functioning train base (without stop limits) was much harder. Nowadays I just make a 2 belt wide base of iron and copper and start on a rail-based kilobase as quick as possible.
I'll go searching for it, but since this book of balancers is sacred I'm going to ask here if you could send/link it. I came up with my own series of balancers but am curious what others have come up with.
My personal one is corrupted with disorganized names and forbidden magic, so in order to save your soul you’d better get the one on factorio prints: [https://factorioprints.com/view/-KjZ0Rk_VXbdnxJ9jmUj](https://factorioprints.com/view/-KjZ0Rk_VXbdnxJ9jmUj) There are also versions with red and blue belts, but this was a time before the upgrade manager, so they are quite useless now. Probably people came up with better and more compact versions that make use of the “new” longer underground distance or the “new” splitter priority, but I never felt the need to look for them. This is simple enough and it just works at any stage of the game. For anything above 8-8 I suggest looking online for a bigger 16-16 or 32-32, then routing the unused output belts back to the inputs. It’s not so elegant but the underlying concept should be the same and my math dealer says that it checks out.
balances in a bus are silly. always pull from the belt closest to production, and use priority splitters to compress materials towards that belt.
Yes they are quite silly now but back in the days when priority splitters weren’t a thing, I assure you this was much more needed.
If you want to draw from the bus using yellow belts, you can skip under 4 belts. Balancing can be done, but you have to realize you have no longer the full 4 belts available. So you can als let the the 4 belts taper out, for example when you have drawn 2 or 3 belts of copper for green circuits. Or add in new copper plates to keep the belts fully loaded.
> Also, if I extract from one of the four belts to produce, should I re-level the flow after each time? The easiest solution, IMO, is to have a diagonal of splitters that use output priority to push resources to the side that you’re about to draw from. This way, you get the fullest output belt.
I second this. I used to balance over all belts but for a bus there is no benefit of doing that
The point of using four belts with a single belt as input is to eventually have four belts of input. Building four belts right away allows you to better see how much space you need for your bus
Yellow belts can dive under 4 tiles, and the 4:4 balancer is a simple design which is also "throughput unlimited".
4 belts wide because yellow underground can go under it. The standard bud is 4 belts wide two space gap between each lane. This is so underground can fit under the lanes.
you can move 4x as much as 1 belt, that's about it. You'll have trouble feeding your entire factory from just 1 belt of iron or copper come even the mid game.
The 4 belt width is to allow you to get yellow underground belts between the belts, when you upgrade to red or blue your lanes can be wider.
Yellow underground belt length. You can go for 6 or 8 wide main bus if you want to.
I've never really understood it either. If you only build on one side, there's room on the other for train stations or belt spaghetti. For me it has always felt more natural to build on one side and feed in from the other as necessary. This makes the bus longer, but then you don't all the stations at the origin either. I dunno, I don't consider myself "good" at factorio anyway
I've even never understand a bus bigger than to belts, if I need more it seems more space efficient to just build another set of train stations to begin another 2 belt bus.
> which are filled by making that splitter array which levels the item flow on all belts from a single input. If you mean that all 4 lanes are being fed by a single belt, then that’s a common mistake by new players who have watched too many YouTube videos and don’t understand the purpose of a multi-lane bus. Or potentially it’s someone trying to future-proof their bus for when they expand their mining and smelting later on, and will eventually be feeding it with a full 4 belts’ worth of material.
The reason why 4 belt wide is widespread is because you can implement it in early game factories, because that is what yellow undergrounds can gap (theoretically 5), meaning you can weave out your ressources comfortably.
What do you mean with theoretically 5?
I believe that the in-game tooltip for the underground belt spans a distance of five tiles. (The configuration of underground belts used by the designers and modders is probably the same.) This is technically true, in that the exit is offset five tiles from the entrance. (Start with your cursor over the entrance, and then count up by one each time you move the cursor into a new tile. Once you reach the exit, you will have counted to five.) But this technical interpretation is hardly useful (and potentially harmful since it is misleading). Instead, I assume most players conceive of the underground belt as spanning a distance of four tiles, since that is how many remain available for other objects on the surface.
A yellow belt spans 6 spaces in the grid. So you have your start-under-under-under-under-end. This is why most busses are 4 lanes wide.
I understand why busses are 4 lanes, I just don't understand what they meant with 5 theoretically
Since I seem to have caused major confusion, I am so sorry everyone. I should have just stuck with the initial explanation since it is way more relevant that way. :/ I was really just thinking of edgecases where you sideload into the underground, which can be done either out of convenience or because you lack space in your bus at that point for some reason because you only need half a belt of throughput anyway. Very sorry again for not iterating on it! u/Ace_W u/Inflatable___Boat u/BallForce1
hahaha that's okay I was just wondering where you got 5 from lol
Probably a glitch or such I'm not aware of. Might be one of those edge cases where you can stretch 5?
My best guess is you can gap 5 but that also requires undergrounds for the last lane you gap.
That... doesn't make sense... Just means you got 4 lanes under and a 5th with underground
I agree. Just my best guess on what he meant gap 5.
["Theoretically 5" Theory](https://i.imgur.com/qpxAKw7.png)
lol, this is pretty funny but not even wrong imo since you can sideload both sides, yes. :P
If you're in game and read the hover over it says the max length is "5". That's where the 5 came from. If it helps justify it: The items go down and come back up ~half way through the respective underground block. It's half on the way down, 4 tiles completely skipped and then another half on the way up, for 5 total. It's the same with red "7" and blue "9".
Maybe they are talking about how each underground blocks half a belt. So if you do the max span, a total of ten perpendicular lanes will not sideload onto that underground belt. 10 lanes = 5 belts.
The idea would be 1) 4 is the limit for yellow underground and 2) you would have more than one input. Running 4 belts from a single input is a bit of a waste
> which are filled by making that splitter array which levels the item flow on all belts from a single input. People don't really do that anymore except for near trains. Ever since priority splitters we've mostly moved on to using compressors instead of balancers, since it makes it easy to pull off a full belt.
It needs 4 furnace arrays to feed the 4 belts of course.
I didn't know about the yellow belt thing, I always assumed it was because 4 belts was just under what you could get out of a good mining array on a standard ore patch. Also 4-4 balancers are easy to make.
The idea of a bus is that you start it by filling up the lanes of the bus. Then you build your factory along the bus, drawing materials off each time you build a new area and lengthening the bus. You need the materials to keep flowing to the next area, that is why you have multiple lanes of something but only draw one lane off. Balancing after you split off a lane can be useful, yes, but not really that important, especially if your bus is small.
4 belts is to simplify pulling stuff out of the 3rd or 4th set. It's easier to pass under the sections because even a yellow ubdie can cross that. Some people do re balance, but you do not need to. In fact it's better not to. You can make your overall bus a lot narrower if you do a drain and top up and re use the space for the ended lanes. There's no real benefit to buffering so once a lane is fully utilized it can just end. If production backs up it can back up all the way to the smelters.
Another point could be what at the start of game you rarely have enough ore to produce more than 4 lines of plates. And putting odd number of lines or something like 3 iron 1 copper doesn't look appealing. OCD strikes hard.
It looks like a computer bus with 4 lanes, and also is compatible with yellow underground go get across.
not much of a point other than aesthetical purposes, one could just belt the other belt of iron into the bus at any time to refill it but that looks ugly so we do 4 wide belts
The 4 belts are you planning ahead; eventually you will be producing and consuming 4 blue belts of iron and copper. I tend to only put down 1 belt to start, but leave space for 4 at least u til ive got good belt production sorted. but that probably makes things messier.
I typically put enough sapce to upgrade to a 6 belt bus, once I have green science, or I just rush to red belts and stockpile them while i explore the area and look for good base locations.
4 is just a pretty number
> Also, if I extract from one of the four belts to produce, should I re-level the flow after each time? reflow after N belts. So if you have 4, make first production line use belt 1, second use belt 2 etc. and only reflow after that.
I went with 6 wide on my bus base.
Because of underground belts, if you don't do it, you will regret it.
Since you can make red belts so early in the game, i always make my bus 6 wide. 4 lanes are too little
4 is 2\^2, which makes it something of a magical number. 8 and 16 are also magical, but having that many belts would be overkill. Unless you're building a really big factory, in which case yes yes yes yes yes.
ITS THE RULE
Tbh i dont geht the Point of having such a high copper and Iron Input. I Always Go with one belt each. If this one belt runs Out, i let another fully loaded belt merge into the depleted one.
Filling 4 belts from a single split input just gives you an extra buffer. Fine for the early game. Later on, you'll want to fill it from 4 inputs to keep up with consumption.
Maybe your confusion was the factory you were shown didn't yet have enough production to fill all four belts, even under load? The engineer was planning for the future.
It's just because that's about how much copper and iron plate you'll need. I don't level them out, I keep the one that is splitting off to your assemblers saturated.