How to Transport More Than 600 Items per Minute

Six hundred is two different ceilings in this game, and the fix depends on which one you hit. Working that out first saves rebuilding the wrong thing.

Which 600 did you hit?

Pipeline Mk.2 caps at 600 m³/min. If you are moving a fluid, this is your limit, and it is the highest pipe in the game. There is no Mk.3.

Conveyor Belt Mk.5 carries 780/min and Mk.6 carries 1200/min. If you are moving solids and stuck at 600, you are not actually at the belt ceiling — you are on a Mk.4 (480) or you have a slower segment somewhere. Check the whole run before assuming you need a new strategy.

That distinction matters because the solid case usually has an easy answer and the fluid case does not.

Solids: you probably have a bottleneck, not a ceiling

Belt throughput is set by the slowest segment in the run, not the average. A single Mk.2 segment left in the middle of a Mk.5 line caps the whole thing at 120/min.

Before redesigning anything:

1. Walk the entire line and check every segment mark. Lifts count too, and they are easy to forget when you upgraded the horizontal runs.
2. Check the splitters and mergers. They pass through at belt speed, but a merger combining three inputs into one output cannot exceed the output belt’s rate.
3. Check what is feeding it. A belt running at 400/min because the miner produces 400/min is not a belt problem.

If everything is Mk.6 and you still need more than 1200/min through one path, then you have a real ceiling, and the answer is to stop thinking in single lines.

The four ways past a real ceiling

1. Run parallel lines

The simplest and most common answer. Two Mk.6 belts carry 2400/min. Nothing about the game restricts you to one belt per route.

The cost is space and splitter complexity at both ends. In practice this is what most large factories do, because it is straightforward and it scales linearly.

2. Move the problem upstream

Often the better answer: do not transport the raw material at all. If you are hauling 1500 iron ore per minute across the map to smelt it, move the smelters to the ore instead and haul ingots, which are fewer items for the same output.

Every processing step you do at the source reduces the item count you have to move. This is the single largest lever available, and it does not require any new technology.

3. Use alternate recipes that need less input

A recipe that produces the same output from fewer raw units reduces belt load proportionally. Coated Iron Plate, for instance, produces plates from substantially less iron ore than the standard recipe, and less ore in means fewer items on the belt behind it.

This is worth checking before building parallel infrastructure, because a recipe change costs nothing to transport.

4. Trains

For long distances with high volume, a train sidesteps the per-belt limit entirely. A freight platform’s throughput is set by the belts feeding it, so two Mk.6 belts into one platform gives 2400/min into the train.

The catch is that trains deliver in batches rather than continuously, so the receiving end needs buffers. And the infrastructure is not cheap: 50 MW per station plus 50 MW per platform, constantly, plus 25 to 110 MW per locomotive.

Fluids: the 600 ceiling is real

There is no pipe above Mk.2, so 600 m³/min per pipe is genuinely the limit. Options:

Parallel pipes. Same answer as belts. Two Mk.2 lines give 1200 m³/min.

Process at the source. Refine crude oil where it comes out of the ground and move the products rather than the crude. Often the products are solids, which belts handle far more easily than pipes handle fluids.

Trains or fluid trucks. A fluid freight platform is limited by the pipe feeding it, so this only helps if you feed it with multiple pipes — but it does remove the head lift problem entirely, which is usually the real reason a long fluid run is painful.

Do not fight sloshing. If your Mk.2 line is delivering somewhat under 600 and fluctuating, that is normal pipe behaviour rather than a fault. Add a buffer at the consumer rather than adding pipes.

What not to do

Do not overclock the extractor and leave the belt alone. You will produce more than you can move, the miner will back up, and you will have spent power for nothing.

Do not build a load balancer to fix throughput. Balancers distribute what arrives; they do not increase it.

Do not upgrade only the visible part of the line. The Mk.2 segment you forgot is inside a wall.

Working out what you actually need

Before building parallel anything, calculate the demand. A row of machines consuming a given recipe has a fixed input requirement, and that number is usually lower than the extractor’s maximum output.

If your miner produces 1200/min and your consumers want 900/min, you do not need 1200/min of belt. Underclocking the miner to match demand is cheaper than doubling the belt run, and it saves power rather than spending it.

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that most often makes the whole problem disappear.

A worked example

Say you are extracting 1200 iron ore per minute from a set of nodes and want it all in one place.

The naive approach is a Mk.6 belt, which carries exactly 1200/min. It works, but it leaves no headroom, and every splitter and merger on the route is a place where sloshing of the belt equivalent — momentary backups — costs you throughput.

The better approach is to ask what the ore is for. If it is becoming iron ingots, smelt at the source. 1200 ore becomes 1200 ingots, which is the same item count, so that alone does not help. But if those ingots become plates at 2 ingots per 1 plate, then transporting plates instead of ingots halves your belt load to 600/min — back inside a single Mk.5 belt with room spare.

The general rule this illustrates: move the item furthest along the production chain that still makes sense, because each step usually reduces item count. The exception is steps that increase count, which are worth doing at the destination instead.

When parallel lines are genuinely correct

Sometimes there is no processing step to move upstream, because you are transporting a finished good or a raw resource that has no local use.

In that case parallel is the answer and there is no shame in it. Two things make it cleaner:

Split at the source, merge at the destination, rather than splitting and merging repeatedly along the route. Fewer junctions means fewer places for backups to form.

Keep the lines separated physically. Running two belts through the same corridor makes both harder to trace when something goes wrong, and belt-tracing is most of factory debugging.

Common mistakes