Factorio Wiki: Transport belts/Physics

Cite as: Factorio Wiki: Transport belts/Physics
Original: https://wiki.factorio.com/Transport_belts/Physics
sha256: a9063eba1ec24d07545c03fa3fa7550134763056f0d109a46a3d6a2d41949e1b
Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20260918000532/https://wiki.factorio.com/Transport_belts/Physics
Accessed: 2026-10-26
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Credit: Official Factorio Wiki editors; see the page history.
Notes: The wiki's account of belt density (4 items per tile per lane), lanes, and compression, which the Lua API's belt speed note links to. Used where Wube's own words stop.

Cited on

A belt has two lanes that move independently, each holding 4 items per tile whatever the item, so a full straight belt tile holds 8. Since 0.17 the spacing is 8 pixels in a 32-pixel tile, which gave the basic belt 15 items per second; before it was 9 pixels and 13.33 items per second.	`Definitions`	Publisher
Belts compress themselves: anything that puts an item on a belt (an inserter, a splitter, a side-loading belt, a drill) can use any gap wider than the standard spacing, squeezing the items for a moment until the belt opens the gap to full size, so a belt fills without holes before it backs up. Wube made this automatic in 0.16.25.	`Definitions`	Dev blog