Deadlock's Stacking Beltboxes and Compact Loaders Continued

An unofficial community-maintained continuation of Deadlock's Stacking Beltboxes and Compact Loaders, updated for Factorio 2.1 and Space Age.

The original Stacking Beltboxes and Compact Loaders are combined into a single mod.

It adds:

• Compact 1×1 loaders for each supported transport-belt tier.
• Stacking beltboxes that compress supported items into dense item stacks.
• Unstacking recipes that restore the original items.
• Significantly increased belt throughput without changing belt speed.
• A public API for compatibility and bridge mods.

This continuation aims to preserve the original gameplay, graphics, concepts and modding API while updating the implementation for modern Factorio versions.

Factorio 2.1 and Space Age support

The mod supports Factorio 2.1 with Space Age either enabled or disabled.

When Space Age is enabled, the mod includes:

• Turbo compact loaders and beltboxes.
• Foundry crafting support for loader and beltbox recipes where appropriate.
• Stacked variants for additional Space Age resources and components.
• Support for selected spoilable items.
• Native freshness preservation while stacking and unstacking.
• Correct spoil times and exact spoil-result quantities.
• Correct rocket cargo weights for stacked items.

Supported additional Space Age items include:

• Calcite
• Carbon
• Holmium ore
• Holmium plate
• Ice
• Lithium
• Lithium plate
• Quantum processors
• Scrap
• Spoilage
• Tungsten carbide
• Tungsten plate

Selected spoilable items are also supported:

• Bioflux
• Jelly
• Jellynuts
• Nutrients
• Raw fish
• Yumako
• Yumako mash

Spoilable stacks retain the freshness of their ingredients. Unstacking restores items with the same freshness, and fully spoiled stacks produce the exact equivalent quantity of their spoil result.

Items whose spoil behavior cannot be represented safely are rejected instead of risking item loss, duplication or incorrect freshness.

Rocket capacity

Stacked items use the combined weight of all items represented by the stack.

For example, with the default stack density of five:

• An iron plate stack has a rocket capacity of 200.
• A steel plate stack has a rocket capacity of 80.

Rocket capacity automatically scales with the configured stack density and the source item's normal stack size.

Loader placement behaviour

By default, compact loaders share the fast-replacement group of transport belts.

This allows loaders and belts to replace one another during placement.

Players who do not want dragged belts to replace compact loaders can enable:

Mod settings → Startup → Strict fast replace loaders

With this setting enabled:

• Transport belts no longer replace compact loaders while dragging.
• Compact loaders can still replace and upgrade between loader tiers.
• Upgrade-planner progression remains available.

Compatibility

Tested with:

• Factorio 2.1
• Space Age enabled
• Space Age disabled
• Basic, fast and express transport-belt tiers
• Turbo transport belts with Space Age
• Compact loaders
• Stacking beltboxes
• Stacking and unstacking recipes
• Spoilable-item freshness
• Rocket cargo capacity
• Foundry crafting

The mod includes additional safety checks for compatibility with other mods that modify:

• Item stack sizes
• Item weights
• Fuel values
• Burnt results
• Spoilage
• Recipe categories
• Technologies

Inter-mod support

The original public modding API remains available for bridge mods and compatibility integrations.

Bridge mods should generally call the API from data-final-fixes.lua and verify that the global deadlock table exists before using it.

Main API functions:

• deadlock.add_stack(...)
• deadlock.destroy_stack(...)
• deadlock.destroy_vanilla_stacks()
• deadlock.add_tier(...)

Custom stacked items registered through the API receive the same safety handling for stack density, fuel results, spoilage and rocket weight where supported.

More detailed API documentation is available in the GitHub README.

Important

This is not an official release from the original authors or maintainers.

It exists to keep the mod usable on current Factorio versions while preserving the original project as closely as reasonably possible.

Should the original maintainers return and wish to resume development, this continuation can be archived, redirected or transferred as appropriate.

Credits

Original creator

• Deadlock989 — original concept, graphics and implementation

Original maintenance and ports

• Shane Madden
• MasterBuilder

Continuation maintainer

• goakiller900

Recent contributions

• yswb — Foundry crafting support and compatibility handling for games without Space Age
• Supershadow30 — new 64px mipmapped stacked-item artwork, testing of spoilage and freshness handling, and identification of the rocket-capacity issue
• hunter_beij — report concerning stacked fuel and burnt-result handling with Py Coal Processing

Thanks to everyone who has tested the continuation, submitted reports or contributed compatibility improvements.

Source code and test builds

Source code, development branches and automated test builds are available on GitHub:

https://github.com/goakiller900/deadlock-beltboxes-loaders-continued

Development builds can be downloaded from the GitHub Actions page. These builds may be untested and should not be used in important saves without making a backup first.

License

This project remains licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.