The Crust Conveyor Belts

The Crust conveyor belts move solid goods between machines: Mk.1–5 on the surface, underground belts for crossings, and Conveyor Elevators for vertical shafts. That naming is from the wiki.gg Buildings list (snapshot older than 1.0). Throughput numbers were never published there — verify in 1.0.

Belts are not drones. If the job is “skip the spaghetti,” that is the drone page. This page is only the belt spine.

Why belts exist in this game

The Steam 1.0 blurb is a factory colony: mine, automate, run lines above and below the surface. Belts are the cheap, always-on spine. Drones steal overflow and long gaps. Colonists do not walk your ore.

A first factory that actually runs is usually: extractor → belt → refinery → belt → next craft. If that spine is missing, drones cannot save a badly placed pit.

Surface tiers: Mk.1 to Mk.5

Wiki.gg lists belts Mk.1–5. Treat each mark as a faster (or higher capacity) version of the same idea, like other factory games. Do not copy a items-per-minute table from a 2024 video into 1.0.

Practical rule until you have tooltip rates:

1. Lay Mk.1 for the first extractor–refinery pair.
2. Upgrade a segment only when you see the belt jammed packed, not because the research tree offered Mk.3.
3. Do not mix marks in a way you cannot read — a Mk.5 feeding a Mk.1 is a queue, not a flex.

Exact unlock costs: not on the wiki snapshot verify in current build.

Underground belts

The same list includes underground belts. Use them to cross another line without a spaghetti bridge. They are not elevators. If you need to change floor (surface factory vs underground mine), that is the elevator.

If an underground entrance faces the wrong way, the line looks built and moves nothing. Rotate before you spam a second tunnel.

Conveyor Elevator

Conveyor Elevator is the named vertical piece. The 1.0 store text talks about factories above and below the surface. Elevators are how solids change level. Horizontal Mk belts will not do that job.

A clean first shaft: mine on the low floor → elevator up → surface refinery. Do not refine underground until you know power and colonist paths work down there verify in current build.

What belts will not carry

Colonists, and probably fluids/gases, are not “a Mk.2 problem.” Gases have a Gas Extractor on the mining page; do not assume a belt will siphon Helium-3. If 1.0 added pipes, they are not documented on the 2024 wiki snapshot — check the build menu verify in current build.