Question on a effecient way to make many objects move certain objects.

So the basics is to if you ever seen a game like factorio, with all the parts and peices moving around on belts, but much smaller and only left to right up and down but instead of lots of 'stuff' its only one way runs in a sence. more or less its a 2D mining game, you mine blocks, and based on the block might drop some resources that you can send back for upgrades research, etc, you dont accualy collect the resources, they have to make there way back to the base on a transport system you lay out, so i can have a area like 5x5, i might dige the middle 3 layers out, and on the bottom add a belt to move items to one side to head to the base. only resources would be moving, no npcs or players, just resources that are droped. So the question is a effecient means to do it. I was thinking just make the belts more or less move but then when there is no resources to move seems like a waste of processing time, so was curious if any one has any ideas of a simple effecient means to move objects like resources, without relying on physics, or alota processing power. I see games like factorio that can move thousands of objects at a time, but i am estimating maybe on a 100x100 map area, there might be at any time a max of maybe 100 resources to accualy move to the base, once there at the base there added to the total and deleted, the player lays out the transport system where they want and can pick up and move them around. In a sence the game is more or less like Dig-N-Rig in the way i have the layout/look and how i am thinking of moving resources around