Conveyor belts
Automated transport that moves items along a fixed path from producers to consumers — the fundamental logistics primitive of factory games. Belts turn resource movement into a spatial design problem: routing, merging, splitting, balancing throughput, and untangling spaghetti are the moment-to-moment gameplay of Factorio and Satisfactory. Designers use conveyors because they make automation visible and legible — you can watch your factory work, spot bottlenecks by eye, and feel throughput as a physical flow. Key decisions: belt tiers and speeds (upgrades that force redesign), merging/splitting rules and priority, whether belts carry discrete items or abstract rates, verticality (Satisfactory's 3D belts versus Factorio's plane), and the interaction with inserters or pickup logic. Pitfall: belt manipulation that's fiddly to place and edit becomes carpal-tunnel busywork at scale — dragging, mass-editing, and blueprinting tools are what keep the core loop enjoyable past the early game.
- Dev effort: Medium
- Timing: Real-time
- Common in: automation
Seen in
- Factorio
- Satisfactory