Conveyor throughput, splitters and mergers in Moon Sweepers

A conveyor lane moves capsules at 1.1 m/s with 0.75 m between them. That gives 88 capsules per minute per lane (60 x 1.1 / 0.75). It is an ideal figure computed by MoonSweepers.me from game constants and described as not measured, so a real belt can only be at or below it.

What that means in kilograms depends on the capsule. The Packager makes capsules of at most 1 kg, so a lane of dust moves up to 88 kg/min. Half-kilogram capsules would halve that to 44 kg/min. A moonstone item on the belt is a single 2 kg block, so a lane of stone can carry up to 176 kg/min in the ideal case. Foundry applies exactly this rule when it counts the lanes in a plan.

• A 2 chambers : 5 presses block takes 100 kg/min of raw dust. At 88 kg/min per lane that is 2 lanes of 1 kg capsules, not one.
• The same block makes 100 kg/min of stone, which is 50 blocks per minute. That fits in one lane.
• A single chamber outputs 25 kg/min of sand, well under one lane.

The conclusion is that dust is the cargo that saturates belts first, because it is the lightest item per capsule. The cure is more lanes in parallel, not a faster belt: according to the 1.0.4 data there are no speed upgrades for belts or machines.

• Since patch 1.0.4 a merger alternates between its two inputs. This is an official note.
• How a splitter divides items between its outputs is not documented. 50/50 is natural to assume but is not established.
• Reasoning, not a measurement: a merger has one output, which is still one lane. Merging two full lanes cannot give more than 88 capsules per minute downstream.
• Earlier tools modelled these two as handling three logical resources. In game they are 1 in / 2 out and 2 in / 1 out on capsules, which is how Foundry now describes them.

No source lists the causes of a blocked line, so treat this as a checklist built from the confirmed rules.

• A Stone Press has separate IN DUST and IN SAND ports and stores 12 kg of each. Feed each port with its own resource, and expect a full port to back up its lane.
• A Pressure Chamber waits about 3 s after its last input before it processes an incomplete batch. A slow trickle is not a stuck line.
• A Packager scans about every 0.35 s, a ceiling near 171 attempts per minute that nobody has measured, and stores 100 kg.
• The world holds at most 90,000 capsules since patch 1.0.5.

Laid conveyor costs $0.5 per metre, in sections of up to 30 m, so a full section is $15. Prefabricated pieces are priced separately: straight $40, curved $55, incline $75 and support $15. Foundry adds the per-metre cost for every lane in a plan, and assumes a placeholder length per link that you can edit.