The Beltway - A new way to mange your production chain
The Beltway
I recently discovered how Plastanium Conveyors can have their content extracted via Unloaders and quickly realized how great these can be to manage complex supply chains with maximal output. I have called this system The Beltway.
There's two characteristics important to using Unloaders with Plastanium Conveyors which makes them so effective:
1- They only extract as much as your production blocks can hold, meaning, the rest of the materials are free to keep traveling to another production block, a Launchpad or the Core, making your factory waste no raw materials. This also means production blocks can be stacked along the Plastanium Conveyor path as needed. Launchpads can be used to clear excess materials so they don't clog the Beltway.
2- When open to any resource type, Unloaders will extract multiple materials as long as the Plastanium Conveyor carries them and they match the resources your production block needs. Which means that the same Unloader, connected directly to a production block, can extract both Sand and Coal to a Silicon Smelter for instance.
These two characteristics make these blocks extremely efficient when it comes to building a complex factory, and I designed a few schematics to take advantage of these features.
Core Principles
The Beltway has a few design principles that you should keep in mind when creating your factory:
- The Beltway always connects to the Core. Multiple main Plastanium Conveyors are pointed to different areas of the map. Each main Conveyor can have tributaries, but otherwise, they will all lead to the Core, which promotes zero waste of resources.
- Each Conveyor must be tailored to a specific production chain. That means that if your Conveyor is holding only Lead and Sand, you're not going to build a Silicon Smelter factory because you're missing Coal on The Beltway.
- The same Conveyor can hold multiple production chains, as long as you can provide the raw materials to support them. You can input Sand and Coal to the Beltway and make both a Graphite factory and a Silicon factory in sequence and they will output their results directly into the Beltway. Outputs can be used by other factories further down The Beltway, as in the case of Pyratite.
- Be mindful of clogging The Beltway. Use Launchpads to clear excess material and keep things flowing smoothly.
Schematics
Here's a list of different schematics. What becomes clear is that because we're using Unloaders that will extract any usable resource and deploy them around the production blocks, the design of our factories remains pretty much the same.
Graphite Press
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Silicon Smelter
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Kiln
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Pyratite Mixer
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Posted Jan 22, 2025, 10:31 AM UTC