Alright, time to get the rest of this factory connected up.

Also needed to build one final building, for sinking and uploading.

With that, everything is powered up and running, and we can do some auditing.

For starters, I was producing about half of the Screws that I should have been, due to an abberant Mk.1 lift here.

Next, I spotted that I actually never connected the Raw Quartz feed here, for the last couple of Quartz Crystal constructors in this line.

That feed was supposed to come from the overflow here, on the next floor up.

That meant swapping the splitters on this Raw Quartz line to Smart Splitters.

Also neglected to ever connect the Iron Ingot feed here, for Iron Plates.

Somehow, I must’ve planned to have unbalanced belt feeds, that both deadend at this merger? Definitely didn’t end up with that, this whole floor just has one Iron Ingot feed, as the throughput needed is less than the capacity of a Mk.4 belt.

So, that’s gone.

Next, I realized that this little balancer that takes my 3 Iron Ore lines and evenly combines them into 2 produces 282/min on each of the two belts. And yet, I used Mk.3 belts for them.

Unfortunately, after a while, I realized that this did NOT fix my Iron Ore issues. Because while this balancers does evenly split the ore across 2 belts, the Smelters downstream are not PULLING evenly from the two belts.

And thus, the lack of a Smart Merger in the game strikes again.

So, screw it. Forget even belts. One Miner can feed one Mk.3 belt, which feeds 7 Smelters for Cast Screws. The other 2 Miners can feed a Mk.4 belt for 13 Smelters, for Iron Plate. No crossovers or balancing issues, and it all runs like clockwork.

So, that was all the issues I could find. I THINK the facility will equalize out to 100% efficiency now, with a little time, so let’s go do a few side errands.

With the new facility online, I can FINALLY tear down my LAST temporary factory on the map.

No need to bother recovering the goods, I’ll just sink it all. the new factory will be full up by the time I could cart the materials over.

I also figured I should do the Mk.4 upgrade to Advanced Iron Plate. I go through them QUITE quickly when I’m building signs, second only to Quartz Crystal, and since my Quartz Crystal availability is now DRASTICALLY increased, I figured this might end up being more of a bottleneck, without an upgrade.

Not much to see here, I guess, except that some of the belts in view are upgraded. But this should now be producing about 74/min Advanced Iron Plate, double what it was before.