Conveyor Belt

"So you know how your FICSIT Inc. factory can be turned into this incredibly intricate maze of conveyor belts in every direction, merging, splitting, crossing each other above and below? Conveyor belts carry, after all, the life-blood of our company!"

- Caterina Parks's assistant Steve

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Conveyor Belts are structures used to transport items between buildings. They come in five marks with different building costs, throughput, and appearance. Conveyor Belts can only be built between building connection ports or Conveyor Poles.

Item transportation
Once a Conveyor Belt is connected to a building's output (such as a Miner), it will begin to pull items out from the building's output slot. Conversely, a belt connected to a building's input port will attempt to push items into its input slot, provided it accepts the supplied item and there is enough storage space. Items on the belt can be manually picked up. Items cannot be manually dispensed onto a belt; this can be done by constructing a temporary Storage Container.

If the belt doesn't lead anywhere, items will not fall off the belt, instead, they will simply stop on the belt. The same occurs if the connected building is either full or cannot accept the item on the belt.

Belts cannot transport items in stacks, each item (visually) on the belt represents one item. Lower mark Belts can also cause bottlenecks especially in the early game, where Miners are capable of producing more items per minute than the belt can transport.

Each mark has higher throughput (measured in items/min) than its predecessor, and also appears more visually advanced.

Pioneer transportation
Besides serving their primary purpose as transporting items, Conveyor Belts also move pioneers. The transportation speed roughly matches how fast items are moving on the belt.

Relative cost
How expensive a Conveyor Mk. is can be calculated by "how many materials used to construct one meter of Conveyor can be made from 60 ore/min" (e.g. how many Steel Beams can be made from 60 Iron Ore and Coal/min), using only default recipes: Since 60 Alclad Aluminum Sheets can be produced from 60 of each raw resource, Mk.5 Conveyors are the cheapest, as their material is the most abundant. On the contrary, only 3.75 Encased Industrial Beams can be produced, rendering Mk.4 Conveyors the most expensive.

This means the order of how cheap a Conveyor Mk. is to construct is 5, 1, 3, 2, 4 from cheapest to most expensive.

Construction
A single Conveyor Belt segment can be from ~0.5 up to 56 meters long (exactly seven Foundations), calculated using the euclidean distance formula $$\sqrt{(\Delta x)^2+(\Delta y)^2+(\Delta z)^2}$$. The minimum turn radius is two meters. The building cost is roughly 0.5 materials per meter, rounded up to nearest integer.

The maximum slope is 35°, calculated using $\arctan{\frac{z}{\sqrt{x^2+y^2}}}$ (in degrees, where x, y, and z are the belt's displacement on the axes). Conveyor Belts cannot incline along the Z-axis while turning in the XY plane. They will do one, then the other. The greatest possible rise in the shortest distance is 31 meters vertically and 45 meters horizontally.

When building between poles, the first snapping point will always be the input and the second the output, unless if the first point is connecting to an input of another building or conveyor belt. Once constructed, the belt cannot be reversed, but can be directly up/downgraded into other conveyor marks by aiming at them with the other mark.

Belts can be built on top of some buildings, such as Constructors, provided there is a valid spot for a conveyor pole to be automatically placed on. They can also intersect each other, some non-colliding entities, and terrain freely.

Encroaching other's clearance
This means the belt is being constructed through other buildings. Conveyors have to be always constructed second, after the buildings they are being connected to are already built, with two exceptions:
 * The second Conveyor Pole can be built alongside the belt, once it is snapped to one end
 * Conveyor Splitters and Mergers can be built on existing belts, however, this doesn't respect the foundation grid.
 * It may be due to directional errors, such as connecting a building's output to another building's output.

The floor is too steep
This means the floor below where the Conveyor Pole would be built is too uneven. Using a flat surface, such as a Foundation, could help.

The conveyor belt is too short/long/steep
Refer to § Construction above.

Belt welding
The maximum length of 56 meters per segment can be bypassed by doing the following in sequence:
 * First build 2 segments of belts end-to-end
 * Remove the belt support at the joint
 * Place a Merger at the joint
 * Dismantle the Merger
 * The 2 belt segments are now welded into a single segment. Use this method to extend the belt length.

Tips

 * Conveyor ports on buildings display whether they are output or input. Outputs have green 〕 arrows, inputs orange ≡ symbols.

Trivia

 * A single item occupies roughly 1.186 meters on a belt.
 * 843 items fit on a belt 1000 meters long.
 * Marks 1-3 show the belt reversed at the underside. Marks 4-5 have metal on the bottom, but still, show the reversed belt when clipped through.
 * In the Conveyor Belt Speeds video, Conveyor Belts can be clearly heard from further away (especially higher marks), but they are quite quiet in-game.
 * Higher tiers of belts generally have guards at the edges to protect items (and the pioneer) from slipping off the sides. Take note this does not totally prevent the pioneer though, one can be slingshot out from sharp turns.
 * Conveyor Poles supporting a Conveyor Belt can be deconstructed without affecting the now floating belt.
 * Conveyor Belts themselves are drawn via a custom shader implemented to support the "spline" meshes to be instanced; while the items are instanced meshes, making them expensive to update.
 * Items on a Conveyor Belt Mk.1 are out of sync from the top animation and can move at different speeds.

Current issue

 * Higher tier Belts may sometime suffer throughput loss due to various unconfirmed reasons, reducing the actual throughput below indicated transport rate. For example, the belt mk.5 may have slightly lower throughput when built in long sections, or after certain amount of splitting and/or merging.

History

 * Patch 0.4.0.12: Another attempt at fixing leaves looking weird in conveyor belts.
 * Patch 0.4.0.11: Fixed more conveyor belt items.
 * Patch 0.4.0.10: Fixed Aluminum Casing having the wrong texture in conveyor belts.
 * Patch 0.4.0.7: Fixed issues with items not rendering properly in conveyor belts #PraiseBen
 * Patch 0.4.0.4:
 * Fixed Aluminum Casing texture in conveyor belts
 * Improved conveyor belt renderer stability
 * Patch 0.4.0.0: Implemented a new Conveyor Item Renderer (Experimental)
 * We are testing this new system to reduce the cost of having many conveyors items moving. It is still work in progress but can already have positive effects depending on your system. We are continuing to work on this while Update 4 is on Experimental.
 * Known issue: Some conveyor belt items look odd due to the new Conveyor Subsystem, this will be fixed soon
 * Known issue: Conveyor belt items can visually disappear in some situations
 * Patch 0.3.8.6: Fixed jumping off Conveyor Belts not properly carrying momentum
 * Patch 0.3.6.6 through Patch 0.3.6.13: Reworked conveyor networking and fixed conveyor replication glitches
 * Patch 0.3.6: Increased maximum length from 48 to 56 meters
 * Patch 0.3.4.0: Renamed Conveyor Belt to Conveyor Belt Mk.1
 * Patch 0.3: Greatly nerfed the pioneers' walking and running speed on belts, making belt-launched jetpack flight inefficient. (work around by using Hyper Tube Cannon)
 * Patch 0.1.15: Increased the capacity of Mk.4 and Mk.5 belts from 450 to 480 and 660 to 780 items per minute respectively.
 * Patch 0.1.14: Made Conveyor Belt Mk.5 available alongside Conveyor Lift Mk.5.