Conveyor belts

Description

Conveyor belts are used to transfer resources from one building to another.

There are currently 5 different tiers of conveyor belt in the game.

Tiers

All research are part of the engineering branch.

	Tier 1	Tier 2	Tier 3	Tier 4	Tier 5
Research	Conveyor Mk. 1 Research Amount 0 160 0	Conveyor Mk.2 Research Amount 3800 4900 450	Conveyor Mk. 3 Research Amount 4800 7700 1500	Conveyor Mk. 4 Research Amount 9900 19800 5500	Conveyor Mk. 5 Research Amount 20000 40000 10000
Speed	60 i/m	150 i/m	300 i/m	450 i/m	600 i/m
Building Cost	250	750	1750	3750	7750

Underground

Unlock

Underground Conveyor I

Research	Amount
	1350
	2800
	0

Speed: Dependant on connected conveyor belt tier. The Underground conveyor doesn't impose a speed limit of its own.

Building Cost: 3000 for every side.

Distance increases

Underground Conveyor II Research Amount 4850 5900 650

Underground Conveyor III Research Amount 9850 13900 3000

Underground Conveyor IV Research Amount 9500 20300 4000

Programmable Splitter

Programmable Splitter

Research	Amount
	600
	6000
	1100

Note: currently WIP.

Total Research Cost

(All total values do not include the programmable splitter as it is currently marked as work in progress.) Research required for the conveyor belts themselves (including all underground upgrades):

Research	Amount
	64050
	115460
	25100

Research required for the conveyor belts and all required technologies:

Research	Amount
	82250
	152630
	35400

Usage

Construction

To build conveyor belts open the conveyor belt menu.

Here you can select the elemnts you want to build as well as a selection to upgrade or dismantle existing conveyors. You also have a selection to make belts drop the items that are currently on them.

"Building" a conveyor in this mode doesn't actually place them or spend any resources. Instead a "ghost" is placed. This allows you to plan massive conveyor networks, even if you don't have the resources to actually build them.

Hovering over one of these ghosts will highlight a segment. Holding "Alt" (default) and clicking on it will build the highlighted section, spending the required resources.

Hovering over one of these ghosts while pressing "Shift" (default) and having either the "Upgrade" or "Dismantle" tool active will highlight all directly highlited sections, allowing you to mass upgrade or dismantle entire conveyor sections.

When merging or splitting conveyors a Distributor is automatically planned at the intersection. This automatically built Distributor is not to be confused with the Programmable Splitter, though it does have a basic filter system. The automatically generated version can not manually created.

Basic Distributor Filtering

When no filters are applied, the distributor works in a soft round-robin mode: It will send one item to each output, then start again from the first. If an output that would receive an item next is blocked (either by a setting, the output not having a conveyor connected or the connected conveyor being full or saturated) it is simply skipped.

The standard distributor has (when selected) a basic filter system for every output. The 5 buttons are (left-to-right): Priority output, Reset settings, Manual control, Block output, Resources. If the priority output is set then the distributor will first check this output. If it is not blocked it will send the incoming resource to this output. If multiple outputs are set as priority output it will operate with the same round-robin logit it uses during normal operation with everything besides the priority outputs being treated like blocked. Only after an item was unable to be sent do a priority output it will enter the distribution logic for the non-priority outputs.

The ”Reset Settings” button resets all output settings to the default values, those being non-priority, unblocked and no resource filter. The “Block output” toggle blocks the distributor from outputting any items to this output.

With the resources submenu you are able to set resource filters for this specific output. Items that are not on this filter will never be output here. Items that cannot be output to any side will instead block the distributor.

There are currently no input-side settings for the distributor

Underground Conveyor Belt

The underground conveyor belt does not impose a speed limit of its own, instead using the lower speed of whatever conveyor tiers are connected to its respective input and output side. The limitation that is lifted with research is it's range instead. It's default range is able to bridge 7 tiles. The advanced researches increase this limit by the following values:

Research	Range increase
Underground Conveyor II	+4
Underground Conveyor III	+6
Underground Conveyor IV	+10

At max research an underground connection therefore can bridge 27 cells.

Notes

If a conveyor section is connected directly to a machine or storage input hatch it seems to only accept items that it would be able to input into said input hatch. This behaviour requires further testing.