Beyond Belts

Three transport-belt tiers past Turbo for Factorio 2.0 (Space Age):

Tier	Speed (default)	Crafted on
Hyper	90 items/s	Vulcanus (metallurgy)
Extreme	120 items/s	Vulcanus (metallurgy)
Ultimate	150 items/s	Aquilo (cryogenics)

Every tier ships a transport belt, splitter and underground belt. Lane splitters are added automatically when the optional lane-balancers mod is installed (see Compatibility below). All speeds and underground reach values are configurable in the startup settings.

Compatibility

Mod	Status
vanilla-loaders-hd ≥ 2.0.0	✅ optional
aai-loaders (with sane-balance setting)	✅ optional
loaders-modernized ≥ 2.0.0	✅ optional
deadlock-beltboxes-loaders	✅ optional
black-rubber-belts-remastered	✅ optional
lane-balancers ≥ 1.2.2 (adds matching lane splitters for every tier)	✅ optional
AdvancedBeltsSA (legacy fork)	❌ incompatible (declared ! in info.json)
AdvancedBeltsSA-VL (previous name)	❌ incompatible (declared ! in info.json)
DeadlockBlackRubberBelts	n/a — replaced upstream by black-rubber-belts-remastered

Settings

Key	Default	Range
bb-hyper-speed / bb-extreme-speed / bb-ultimate-speed	90 / 120 / 150	15–180 (engine cap)
bb-hyper-u-dist / bb-extreme-u-dist / bb-ultimate-u-dist	17 / 21 / 27	3–1024
bb-sane-loader-balance	off	uniform recipe across all loader integrations

Architecture

tiers.lua is the single source of truth for tier metadata (name, colour, speed setting, recipe category, etc.). All generators consume it:

tiers.lua                              ← single source of truth
├── prototypes/items.lua               ← generates 9 items
├── prototypes/entities.lua            ← generates 9 entities
├── prototypes/recipes/advanced-recipes.lua   ← generates 9 recipes
├── prototypes/technologies.lua        ← generates 3 technologies
└── prototypes/integrations/           ← cross-mod integrations
    ├── black-rubber-belts-remastered.lua
    ├── vanilla-loaders-hd.lua
    ├── aai-loaders.lua
    ├── loaders-modernized.lua
    ├── deadlock-beltboxes-loaders.lua
    └── lane-balancers.lua             ← registers tiers via lane_balancers_handle()

Each integration self-guards with if not mods["..."] then return end, so the file is a no-op when the corresponding mod isn't installed.

data.lua orchestrates the data stage. data-final-fixes.lua only runs the integrations that depend on prototypes from other mods being created first (currently: deadlock-beltboxes-loaders + the AAI sane-balance recipe override).

Adding a new tier

1. Append an entry to the tiers list in tiers.lua with all required fields (key, name, colours, settings refs, max-health, recipe category, etc.).
2. Add the matching speed and underground-distance settings to settings.lua.
3. Drop the icon PNGs into graphics/icons/ and graphics/technologies/.
4. Extend the per-shape ingredient tables in prototypes/recipes/advanced-recipes.lua and the per-tier loader recipes in each prototypes/integrations/*.lua. Lane splitters are picked up automatically by the lane-balancers integration when that mod is installed; no extra wiring needed.

No other code changes required — entity, item and technology generation pick up the new tier automatically.

Credits

Fork chain (oldest first):

• Warnone — original Advanced Belts mod
• Buggi — Space Age fork (AdvancedBeltsSA)
• knnide (this fork: beyond-belts — bug fixes, refactor, modern integrations, rename

Contributions welcome via the source repository.