Automation
This page contains information about blocks and machines that are used to automate production.
Conveyors
Conveyors provide the simplest way of moving items around. There are multiple blocks that can interface with machines as well as items moving along conveyor belts. Belts are cheap, but require some setup, and items move at a relatively slow speed.
Conveyor Belts
Conveyor Belts are blocks used to transport items. They can pick up dropped items or items from conveyor ejectors. Conveyor inserters can take items from conveyor belts. If there are no conveyor inserters present, the item will be dropped at the end of the conveyor belt line.
Conveyor belts have 4 different types: standard conveyor belts (yellow) , double-lane conveyor belts (red), triple-Lane conveyor belts (purple) and express conveyor belts (green). Items do not collide with each other on conveyor belts, therefore they do not have an inherent throughput limit, meaning that multi-lane belts are only useful either for aesthetic purposes or when using conveyor grabbers.
There are three different recipes for crafting conveyor belts:
Double-lane and triple-lane conveyor belts are upgrades of normal conveyor belts (they are crafted normal/double belts and iron/steel plates). They can take inputs from multiple sides.
Express Conveyor Belts are faster versions of normal conveyor belts. They are crafted with normal conveyor belts and Engine Lubricant.
Belts are directly inspired by Factorio.
Conveyor Inserters/Ejectors
Conveyor Inserters are blocks that take items from conveyor belts and outputs them into a storage space. Conveyor ejectors are the opposite; they take items from storage and place them onto conveyor belts.
Conveyor inserters have 21 storage slots, but ejectors have only nine. However, ejectors can be upgraded with ejection speed and stack ejection upgrades, up to level 3. Inserters have an option to destroy surplus items if the input buffer has run full, otherwise the items that can neither be inserted in the target nor the inserter's buffer is simply dropped.
The ejector has a whitelist/blacklist system (the default mode is blacklist with no restrictions - this means that everything will go through). To change between whitelist and blacklist, click the white arrow pointing to whatever is enabled. To add an item to the whitelist/blacklist, click on one of the blue squares next to the storage space with the item you want to add.
Conveyor Ejector recipes:
Conveyor Inserter recipes:
Conveyor Splitter
The Conveyor Splitter is a type of conveyor belt that splits items evenly onto 2 lanes.
Important: Ejectors will simply place items onto whatever conveyor belt is in front of them. If an ejector is placed facing a splitter with no other belts between them, the ejector will place the items onto the splitter's output belt, meaning it will skip the splitting section entirely.
It's crafted with 6 Steel Ingots, 2 Pneumatic Pistons and a Vacuum Tube.
The splitter can be used to split a belt's output into 2 lanes, or create belt balancers, setups that balance out imbalanced lanes to prevent clogging.
Splitters are also taken directly from Factorio. For information about belt balancers, see Balancer Mechanics.
Conveyor Sorters
Conveyor Sorters are blocks that can sort various items to a specific conveyor belt. They do not have a buffer and simple move items to connected conveyor belts based on their filter options, therefore they can sort items as quickly as they receive them.
The sorter has six outputs with five slots each, making it able to route multiple items to one belt. The outputs have three modes:
- Whitelist, where it routes if the item matches with the filter
- Blacklist, where it route if the item does not match with the filter
- Wildcard, if the item doesn't match with any of the filters
The sorter requires integrated circuits to make, meaning silicon and therefore an electric arc furnace are required. If the sorter is unavailable, a simple inserter inserting into a crate with multiple filtered ejectors can act as a substitute, although this way, sorting speed is limited by the ejectors.
Pneumatic Tubes
Pneumatic Tubes provide an alternate way of moving items. The tubes behave more like cables or fluid ducts, sending items instantly, instead of relying on slow moving entities. They also require less setup for the connections themselves, while conveyor belts have a minimum distance of three blocks (ejector, belt, inserter), a pneumatic tube can eject and insert within one single block.
Pneumatic tubes do come with their downsides, though. They are way more expensive, require power in the form of compressed air to work, and while their base speed (one stack per 0.25 seconds) is substantially faster than an ejector, it cannot be upgraded, making it slower than a fully upgraded conveyor ejector.
Like conveyors, pneumatic tubes have multiple recipes with different efficiencies:
Pneumatic tubes need compressed air to work. Per operation, they will use up 50mB, if constantly busy, they will use 200mB per second. Air has to be connected to the ejecting part of the tube, fluid pipes will not connect to any other part of the pneumatic line. The air needs to be pressurized, starting at 1 PU, meaning to use pneumatic tubes, at least one compressor is necessary. Compression levels have different range limits, so depending on how the tubes are used, multiple compressors may be required:
- 1 PU: 10m
- 2 PU: 25m
- 3 PU: 100m
- 4 PU: 250m
- 5 PU: 1000m
Note that the range limits apply to the direct distance from the source tube to the receiving block, the actual length of the entire line doesn't matter. A tube that forms a 500m wide loop with the sending and receiving blocks right next to each other can be powered with just 1 PU.
Pneumatic tubes can have their redstone behavior configured. By default, ejecting tubes will be disabled by redstone, but this an be inverted, making them only work if redstone is supplied.
The ejecting tubes have 15 filter slots which work identically to the conveyor ejectors. Each filter option can be configured which trait to filter by (item, item+meta, ore dictionary names, bedrock ore grade) and the entire filter grid can be either set to blacklist or whitelist. Without configuring anything, the tube is set to blacklist with no filter, therefore allowing all items to pass.
Ejecting tubes have two additional settings, one allows to configure the order of recipients (round robin, sorted by distance, or random), and the other the order of slots to access when pulling items from the source (first item in grid, last item in grid or random slot). For most direct 1:1 connections, neither option really matters. Recipient order may be beneficial when sending items to an array of machines, effectively splitting the amount of sent items fairly. Source order may matter in certain edge cases, for example if a slot in a crate with mixed contents is constantly being replenished, the ejecting tube will only ever access that one slot, not sending any of the other items, in which case random slot order may be preferred.
Tubes will not connect to containers automatically, they need to be configured to connect. Right-clicking a tube with a screwdriver will cycle through all neighboring containers and place an ejector port. Shift right-clicking will do the same but for an inserter port. A single pneumatic tube block can have both an ejector and inserter port at the same time, however there can only ever be one port of a type on the same block.
All these traits and settings make pneumatic tubes very powerful and useful in cases where conveyor belts wouldn't really work, both on super short distances (i.e. single-block) and very long distances (hundreds of blocks), at the cost of requiring a source of compressed air, and not having direct sorting options. Indeed, it is often best to combine the use of tubes and belts, with the tubes connecting outposts (processing plants or bedrock ore mines) with a factory, which then ejects the received items onto a conveyor belt for proper sorting.
Material Automation
Producing vast quantities of materials is vital during the mid- to late-game for the incredibly advanced and complex machines you'll be producing. Always keep in mind the infinitely renewable resources available to you, including bedrock ores and bedrock oil.
These machines are useful for extracting the two aforementioned materials indefinitely and automatically:
- The Large Mining Drill, which, when provided with the appropriate drill-bit and fluid, can mine Bedrock Ore.
- The Hydraulic Fracking Tower, which, when provided with Fracking Solution, can extract Crude Oil from Bedrock Oil.