Spiral conveyors

[rustic patio]

A common complaint when building multi-floor factories is that freight elevators are too unwieldy for a single lane going one direction, but manually spiraling conveyors is both kinda ugly and very tedious.

So why not take inspiration from IRL spiral conveyors and make a "spiral" mode/piece that goes up 1-2 height at a time in a 3x3 footprint. It's still less throughput than a freight elevator that uses both directions or fully utilizes one direction, plus it can't dig its own path, but it could serve as a nice middle ground between raw belts and the full-blown elevator. (Note that part of the space savings is not needing loaders, so it saves a lot more room than the 3x3 size suggests.)

Attached a couple reference images.

[lavish pendant]

I would absolutely love a device the size of a 2-3 feeder that can go vertical. Similar in design to the freight elevators, but limited in height to say 6 blocks. That would make multi layer factories much much easier.

[empty nova]

A spiral belt works well enough, but it's a bit of a pain to build it and it's basically the size of a freight elevator. The one nice bit is you can side load into the spiral for a low output rate usage.