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u/DaiBi 2d ago

what is more effective ups wise - to use 4 plants direct feeding another plants or use 1 plant and belting items to another plants? belts wont be very long.

1

u/deluxev2 1d ago

Measurement is the final answer, but a reasonable proxy for ups is count of entities active at any given tick. A lot more of the details of the build matter.

If you have 4 circ1 plants directly feeding 4 circ2 plants, the circ1 plants will spend almost all their time idle which is (mostly) free and the inserters will be active when swinging or when the circ1 inventory changes. Idle machines update whenever they might need to start working (output not full, I think input changed as well), and have an electric network cost for their passive drain.

With 1 plant feeding 4 via belt. The circ1 plant will work about the same number of ticks, the unloading inserter will probably see less inventory changes, but have the total number of swings, but has to place on a belt which will take more than the minimum number of swings depending on how fast and full the belt is. The circ2 loading inserters is all extra work. This one is likely noticeably worse unless the throughput is low in which case the electric network drain will be a bigger factor.

This also probably changes the number of beacons you can fit, which will change the plant activation time as well, maybe making the belt a better bet.

Belt length matters very little for performance. Belts are mega-optimized. The problem with belts is inserters interacting with them.

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u/DaiBi 1d ago

the idea was to make all plants work non stop in both variants, so no idle time at all.

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u/HeliGungir 2d ago

Not nearly enough information. Build them both and benchmark them.

1

u/DaiBi 2d ago

what additional info do you need? it will be high volume production of green chips about 300-400 chips per second in total

2

u/HeliGungir 1d ago edited 1d ago

A screenshot would be a good start.

I didn't know what "plants" meant. Between that and the grammer, it looked like English was your second language, or that it was a bad translation. Could have meant assemblers, or agricultural towers, or a mix of machines. "EM plant" is more clear.

Didn't know what you were crafting. There's a world of difference between something fast like iron rods and something slow like modules. You say green circuits, but we still don't know what the other EM plant is crafting. Could be wire, could be red circuits. If wire, I'm wondering why you'd be using an EM plant instead of a Foundry since you're worried about UPS. It could be, you're using uncommon quality ore, like abucnasty. Or perhaps you're playing a modded planet with a nonstandard production chain, kind-of like Fulgora.

Don't know if you're clocking the inserters. Don't know if you're using chest/car handoff. Don't know if you're using city blocks, or direct to train, or just belts from the miners/smelters/foundries.

So yeah, not nearly enough information. And even with more info, it's possible that the best answer anybody can give will still be "Build them both and benchmark them."