Conveyor Belt Mk.III

Conveyor Belt Mk.III is the fastest standard conveyor belt in Dyson Sphere Program. It is a logistics building used to transport items between miners, processors, storage, and other belt-connected structures, and it can also work with sorters or connect directly to certain buildings such as miners, oil extractors, storage tanks, and logistics stations. Like other conveyor belts, it can be upgraded or downgraded in place with the upgrade tool.

Mk.III belts carry 30 items per second or 1,800 items per minute. A full belt holds one item per tile and one item per connection between tiles, so items move at fifteen tiles per second. Its stack size per inventory slot is 300. Because belt throughput is high, production lines that use Mk.III belts still need sorters with enough throughput to keep up; otherwise the belt’s capacity is wasted. This is especially important when multiple items must be moved around a single machine or when several outputs are being merged.

Mk.III belts can be placed in multiple shapes by cycling the pathing mode while building. Belts can be laid in straight, cornered, or diagonal segments, which helps both with compact factory layouts and with working around awkward terrain, especially near planetary poles. They can also be raised and lowered to pass over or under obstacles, or to reach stacked ports on buildings such as splitters and storage buildings. The default slope limit is 0.5 rise over run until Super Magnetic Field Generator is researched.

A few practical placement rules make belts much easier to use:

• Pressing the belt rotation key while placing switches the direction of the next turn.
• The altitude of the current point can be adjusted with the up and down arrow keys, and zero resets the belt to ground level.
• Holding the snapping-modifier key while placing disables building snapping, which makes it easier to run belts over other buildings or belts.
• The belt editor requires two tiles of leveling at each end before it can turn, though the downhill side can sometimes be shortened by removing a segment and placing the turn one tile earlier.
• The basic placement altitude limit is 12 above ground, which allows up to 13 stacked belts; researching Vertical Construction raises this limit by 6 per level, up to 48.

Belts can also be merged. Joining belts together is allowed only in the direction that their cargo merges, and when a joining belt feeds into a straight belt, the straight belt has priority. Items can be placed onto or removed from a belt directly by clicking a belt segment to open its interaction dialog, which is useful for manual balancing, testing, or inserting missing materials.

When deleting belts, holding the delete-modifier key while clicking removes the entire connected belt segment within build range at once, which is much faster than removing pieces individually.