Compact Smelting with Buffer Chests

[AmigoGumball]

So, I've been enjoying Arumba's Factorio videos recently, especially his single player modded series which you can watch here.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... AFZtyAxQqI
In his videos, he introduced me to the idea of having buffer chests on each individual furnace. This helps to suppress fluctuations of resource use (eg. starting research, creating more production) and drops in resource production (eg. running out of power at a mining base, miners drying up) simply and effectively. However, I thought that his setup consumed a disproportionately large amount of space for the extra functionality and I spent a few hours messing around in the map editor to create a better setup. Here's what I came up with...



This setup is small, has buffer chests, lights, only requires basic power poles and is easily upgradable to electric furnaces as shown. What do you guys think and are there any improvements you could make? Thanks

[ssilk]

It is much more effective to separate the buffer.

When it is about efficiency, I recommend this setup:
https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... /Cascading

There are hundreds of variants!
See also this, because this depends, how you join the belts together at the end: https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... s/Priority

Most efficient are the bots, which can also expand your storage to really big amounts:

Code: Select all

 Belt from the furnaces >=======|=====|==============|============> to production
                                ||===|             /=|
   Splitter cascade 1:16    ->   ||=||           R-:-R
   		    	 					  |||            R-:-R
                                   |===========  R-:-R
                                      IIIIIIIIII R-:-R
                                      PPPPPPPPPP R-:-R

                              Robo    SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
                              port    SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
                                      SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
                                      SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
 Legend:                              SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
= and :  is belt
|
| is a splitter

I : Smart inserters, which stop inserting when limit of storage chests is reached
P : Active Provider
R : Requester Chest
S : Storage Chest
- : Fast inserters

[rk84]

Im still using this for smelting https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ?f=8&t=181

[DerivePi]

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ss+storage

This is a link discussing mass storage options, and this is a picture of Medusalem's robot storage system.

mass storage.jpg (807.79 KiB) Viewed 14803 times

As noted in the link, it doesn't make sense to have mass storage on the ore side except to handle fluctuations at the railroad station. Due to a different stack size, it makes sense to store plates over ores. As for having a buffer at the furnaces, the input and output belts should be the same size and, with a properly balanced smelting line, should remain maxed out (54 (53) furnaces for a full express belt).
Also on this link is a schematic that shows a way for transitioning between chest storage to robot storage.

[ssilk]

Another throught:

- Too much buffer is not good. You don't see, how much you have left now.
- The furnaces have a buffer of 100 items, which is quite big
- Fast smelting -> big pollution, big need of energy, slower smelting -> less pollution
- it's much more efficient and cheaper to have an on-demand production.

Not that it isn't good to have some buffer, but you need not that much. Depends on the stage of game, but between 1,000 (early game) and 100,000 (late game) is enough in most cases.

[MeduSalem]

Ah well my ridiculously oversized mass storage...

- it's much more efficient and cheaper to have an on-demand production.

Pretty much this. Saves a lot of space and trouble. Especially if you consider moving the storage elsewhere

The downside is that beacons are pretty much useless when you have on-demand production. But then again we will have switches for the electric network anyways with 0.12, so beacons will once again have their place in layouts... since hypothetically we could turn the entire grid with the beacons off if the attached assemblers/furnaces aren't used, which is pretty much what I am going to do then.

[ssilk]

Beacons are in my opinion only useful, if we can switch them automated on/off and also switch the modules inside. Maybe we can "reprint" the modules. A simple recipe: red module plus an electric circuit: Voilla, it's a blue circuit. I think a dynamic usage of modules would bring the game really forward.

Suggestions:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=7904
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=3674