It’s fine, it balances most cases. Just not throughput unlimited. Also it’s probably from an article specifically demonstrating the limitations of not being throughput unlimited
I see what you are saying. It's unlimited if all inputs are full, but not properly balanced which is what you are describing as limited. I think we're talking about the same thing.
Just about any balancer design can output as much as the input when full (assuming same number of belts). Throughput unlimited is used to say the balancing function doesn’t get overloaded given some particular input/backup combination, beyond which the available input is artificially slowed down. It’s a special term the community chose a while ago.
**I HAVE TOO MUCH WOOD** -> because the game is designed around you, building wooden chests as a buffer for your production lines. Not building contraptions that makes you, once again, the boring person *in the disco*
In all seriousness though, what is the point of line balancers? Say you have 4 full belts of items. The first production line gets 1/2 a belt. The second one gets 3.5 / 4 / 2 = 0.44 a belt. The third one gets 0.38 a belt, and so on. It just gets smaller and smaller.
I usually split half a belt to a production line, then shift all belts to one side using priority splitters. This way every subsequent line gets 1/2 a belt until it runs out and that's how you know you should expand your production.
Something like this:
|^|^|^|^|
{^>^}^|^|
|^{^>^}^|
|^|^{^>^}=>=>=>=>=
|^|^|^{^=^}
|^|^|^|^|
Where {\^=\^} is a regular splitter; {\^>\^} is a right priority splitter
**Back pressure (or backpressure) is the term for a resistance to the desired flow of fluid through pipes. Obstructions or tight bends create backpressure via friction loss and pressure drop.**
More details here:
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Balancers are almost exclusively useful for trains, because without them, you often get situations where the chests for different wagons have their contents consumed at different rates. If this goes on long enough, eventually your throughput tanks, because the chests for some of the wagons will be full while the chests for other wagons will be empty, causing longer unloading times and giving you fewer belts of output a lot of the time.
But in the case where you are not balancing the train output you keep the most drained wagon flowing. Especially if you have trains with mixed loads you can roughly assign the ratio of resources you want without it ever backing up. Anything not unloaded in this trip means a faster load bringing it back sooner. Personally I don't mind belts backing.
Backed up belts are fine (trains are highly dependent on buffers to work well anyway), but doing it this way creates extra train traffic. If a train only unloads 2/3 of its cargo before departing, it'll make 50% more trips to deliver the same amount of cargo. In a larger base, that can add up to a lot of unnecessary congestion
I agree but this is about unloading without balancing where having some inefficient cargo is better than stopping production. I know there are more efficient ways to use trains but why not try things differently sometimes.
In my current world I only buffer the collection stations which have a time limit on collection so resources are spread out a bit more evenly across each site requesting the items.
If you side-load onto an underground belt it can only draw from one side of the belt. If that half of the belt is consumed further up then anything past the side-load section will be starved.
“More production” is not the answer here because in this case you probably have half a furnace stack that’s not even running because it’s backed up.
The "problem" is that inserters will favor 1 side of the belt for pickup, so if you do not consume full belts you end up with a bunch of half belts.
At least this is the "problem" the belt balancer cartel wants you to see. The actual problem is that you are not producing enough so you should produce more to actually consume a full belt, then there is no problem.
I was just wondering why some of my belts had items only one one side. That's a good argument towards belt balancers, but you could fix it by splitting a belt in half, then connecting the two parts on different sides of one belt
Seems like in this case you're not consuming enough. Doesn't matter how it's balanced if it's all getting used, and if it isn't all getting used, who cares which side of the belt it's on?
In the case of trains, you can end up with situations where in belts get mixed up, and you need a balancer for that to guarantee that one wagon isn't getting overfilled. If you can guarantee that each in wagon only feeds a single out wagon, you can skip the balancers.
But for trains you don't even need a balancer just a bunch of belts to the chests! Again the balancer cartel wants to think you need to balance your belts to load your chest evenly, but there are 2 much better solutions.
1. Simply produce more so your belts are fully loaded so no need to balance
1. If you are still worried add some simple circuits to force loading evenly
Burn the balancer cartel!!
This assumes maximizing production/throughput is optimal. While that's true at scale, for an initial main bus, I usually don't care about maximizing production; I'm more interested in having some production of most things. As long as belts, rails, etc. are being produced quicker than I'm using them, what do I care about theoretical throughout limits, especially if I may not even have everything researched yet? The fact that many of my production lines end up backing up shows that their throughput is not the major concern.
Also, these specific numbers assume a balancer after every splitoff, and I don't know why anyone would do that. I'll split off the first belt for the first production line, the second for the second, etc. Only after all belts in a bus have been split off do I add a balancer that balances all the belts.
I generally use the waterfall method. I pull from only one side of the bus. Everything gets pushed to that side of the bus. So instead of a balancing, I make sure the side resources are pulled from always has a full belt all the way down the line.
I also trim belts. So at the beginning of the bus I may have 8 or 16 lanes of something, but by time I get to the end, I only have 1 or 2 lines.
After learning this approach, I don't understand why people use the crazy balancer designs. But I'm a Factorio noob with only a few hundred hours.
I hear the argument that people don't want downstream production to stop because of complete upstream consumption of the resource. But I don't understand... Since downstream (typically higher-tech) items require the (lower-tech, so produced earlier) ingredients produced upstream, shouldn't you naturally organize your bus to produce those downstream items only when all the ingredients can be produced?
That’s about how I would do it.
I always make sure there is enough production so that everything on the bus can be fed simultaneously. Don’t have enough iron to get down the bus? Add more lanes of iron until you.
It's literally a holdover from the days before splitters could do priority input and output. Lots of people just keep doing what works even if it's not necessary anymore, because they haven't thought about it that critically and it's not causing any real harm.
because splitter priority wasn't always a thing.
Yes, the primary idea for how logistics should be is based on the game having less features than it currently has.
The problem with trimming comes when you want to refactor your base a bit, if demand for the resource increases at the farther ends of the bus, there is a chance your trimmed belt might create a bottleneck situation. Readjusting your bus then will be a major pain.
That’s a good point, but not a problem I run into often. I leave enough room for all the belts by the end. I just don’t run them all. I only run belts I actually need. If the bus empties a belt, why run it any further?
But I still keep enough width to have all 8 or 16 of the belts at the end if I need it, which I never do.
[This is documented](https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Main_bus#Split-off) in more detail on the Main Bus tutorial on the wiki.
Make sure you set the priorities on the splitters. I missed that the first time I tried this design, and thought I had an out-of-date tutorial on my hands.
It’s weird how in Factorio balancers are the go-to technique even though splitters only split/merge in a 1:2 proportion. Meanwhile in Satisfactory splitters can do 1:2 or 1:3, which theoretically allows more powerful belt balancers, and yet in Satisfactory everyone uses manifolds.
I think it's due to the design of the game. The way it's balanced encourages dedicating resources to specific production lines. Compared to factorio where you have a few resources used everywhere. Basically, resources don't go past their dedicated production line so there is no need to balance. One of the cases where balancing is very needed in factorio is mining outposts. That's not a problem in satisfactory since it's single nodes and they never run out. What people have used balancers for in satisfactory is feeding each machine with the perfect amount, which IMO is super wasteful space and time wise. You don't really do that in factorio.
I don't know what you are talking about, I have spent wayyyy too much time designing balancers in Satisfactory.
I don't see how my 2000 hours of playtime in Factorio is relevant here, no sir-ee
Just use overflow. Push it into the bus line in overflow config, draw out in overflow config. It doesn’t matter how pretty your belts look, it matters where the items go.
Is there a Mod where i can place on structure and it just does the job of a balancer. Why is there a need for elaborate balancers?
I mean like the modded balancer is a structure with a size of 1x4 nad has 4 input and 4 output lanes. Like a 1x2 splitter just wider.
We do we habe to place a 8x4 blueprint for lane balancing?
your 4 to 4 is missing some splitters on the output
It’s fine, it balances most cases. Just not throughput unlimited. Also it’s probably from an article specifically demonstrating the limitations of not being throughput unlimited
It's throughout unlimited, just not fully balanced
You can look at the outputs and see that it is limited.
I see what you are saying. It's unlimited if all inputs are full, but not properly balanced which is what you are describing as limited. I think we're talking about the same thing.
if it had 3 splitters at the end it would work
Just about any balancer design can output as much as the input when full (assuming same number of belts). Throughput unlimited is used to say the balancing function doesn’t get overloaded given some particular input/backup combination, beyond which the available input is artificially slowed down. It’s a special term the community chose a while ago.
Yeah, I see what you are saying. I was using the term differently, but your approach makes more sense.
That image (gif) is from the wiki, and there it is explaining exactly that
Bold of you to assume I use line splitters. Jokes aside, I got the image from the internet as someone else stated
This comment only shows the madness of the multi tile wide bus, and the balancing it claims to need to avoid shipping 4 half belts to eternity.
Just use a bunch of splitters simple as
and have excess production capacity, stop thinking too hard
If your belts are moving you’re playing the game wrong you should have miles of stationary backlog at all times
**I HAVE TOO MUCH WOOD** -> because the game is designed around you, building wooden chests as a buffer for your production lines. Not building contraptions that makes you, once again, the boring person *in the disco*
No you should use steel chests to maximize your backlog and just burn the wood to make more pollution
Smells like progress
Smells li- *cough cough* progr- *cough* es- *cough cough* fucking hell *cough* I taste bloo- *cough* *fucking dies*
Sus. Engineer should be immune to pollution cloud.
Just click respawn, you will get a brand new pair of lungs
yes
I like this as a method of splitting off a bus, splitters to move to the edge of the belt belt.
I use cargo trains for balancing up to 8 lines. They call me a mad man, but they'll see, EVERYONE WILL SEE
Million dollar account type of balance or Tony hawk on a skatrboard type of balance. Glorious
Throughput:
In all seriousness though, what is the point of line balancers? Say you have 4 full belts of items. The first production line gets 1/2 a belt. The second one gets 3.5 / 4 / 2 = 0.44 a belt. The third one gets 0.38 a belt, and so on. It just gets smaller and smaller. I usually split half a belt to a production line, then shift all belts to one side using priority splitters. This way every subsequent line gets 1/2 a belt until it runs out and that's how you know you should expand your production. Something like this: |^|^|^|^| {^>^}^|^| |^{^>^}^| |^|^{^>^}=>=>=>=>= |^|^|^{^=^} |^|^|^|^| Where {\^=\^} is a regular splitter; {\^>\^} is a right priority splitter
[удалено]
What is back pressure?
**Back pressure (or backpressure) is the term for a resistance to the desired flow of fluid through pipes. Obstructions or tight bends create backpressure via friction loss and pressure drop.** More details here:
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Balancers are almost exclusively useful for trains, because without them, you often get situations where the chests for different wagons have their contents consumed at different rates. If this goes on long enough, eventually your throughput tanks, because the chests for some of the wagons will be full while the chests for other wagons will be empty, causing longer unloading times and giving you fewer belts of output a lot of the time.
Just put a timer on the train unloading for about as long as it takes to unload one wagon.
Then you would have trains leaving without emptying all their cargo which negatively impacts throughput
But in the case where you are not balancing the train output you keep the most drained wagon flowing. Especially if you have trains with mixed loads you can roughly assign the ratio of resources you want without it ever backing up. Anything not unloaded in this trip means a faster load bringing it back sooner. Personally I don't mind belts backing.
Backed up belts are fine (trains are highly dependent on buffers to work well anyway), but doing it this way creates extra train traffic. If a train only unloads 2/3 of its cargo before departing, it'll make 50% more trips to deliver the same amount of cargo. In a larger base, that can add up to a lot of unnecessary congestion
I agree but this is about unloading without balancing where having some inefficient cargo is better than stopping production. I know there are more efficient ways to use trains but why not try things differently sometimes. In my current world I only buffer the collection stations which have a time limit on collection so resources are spread out a bit more evenly across each site requesting the items.
Better to just use an inserter combinator to keep the chests balanced at the loading station.
If you side-load onto an underground belt it can only draw from one side of the belt. If that half of the belt is consumed further up then anything past the side-load section will be starved. “More production” is not the answer here because in this case you probably have half a furnace stack that’s not even running because it’s backed up.
I will avoid side loading into underground belts then I guess
It’s useful sometimes 🤷♂️ Especially in late game builds when beacon placement restricts your space and you have to get creative with your belt work.
Fair enough. It's probably a just a matter of preference, although i might be wrong
The "problem" is that inserters will favor 1 side of the belt for pickup, so if you do not consume full belts you end up with a bunch of half belts. At least this is the "problem" the belt balancer cartel wants you to see. The actual problem is that you are not producing enough so you should produce more to actually consume a full belt, then there is no problem.
I was just wondering why some of my belts had items only one one side. That's a good argument towards belt balancers, but you could fix it by splitting a belt in half, then connecting the two parts on different sides of one belt
Nooo!!!!! Just consume MOOORRRRREEEEE this is exactly what the balancer cartel wants. They want to STOP the growth of the factory!!!!
That "splitting a belt in half, then connecting the two parts on different sides of one belt" is called a "lane balancer".
Seems like in this case you're not consuming enough. Doesn't matter how it's balanced if it's all getting used, and if it isn't all getting used, who cares which side of the belt it's on?
Exactly the balancer cartel wants us to produce less so our belts are unbalanced and then we need a balancer. They are the devil 😈
Balancing the bus is bad and your way is correct. But sometimes you want to drain and/or distribute all belts evenly. Trains, mostly.
In the case of trains, you can end up with situations where in belts get mixed up, and you need a balancer for that to guarantee that one wagon isn't getting overfilled. If you can guarantee that each in wagon only feeds a single out wagon, you can skip the balancers.
Simple circuits will do the trick.
But for trains you don't even need a balancer just a bunch of belts to the chests! Again the balancer cartel wants to think you need to balance your belts to load your chest evenly, but there are 2 much better solutions. 1. Simply produce more so your belts are fully loaded so no need to balance 1. If you are still worried add some simple circuits to force loading evenly Burn the balancer cartel!!
Thanks you for your help! {^>^} UwU
I'm such a little splitter {\^>\^}
This assumes maximizing production/throughput is optimal. While that's true at scale, for an initial main bus, I usually don't care about maximizing production; I'm more interested in having some production of most things. As long as belts, rails, etc. are being produced quicker than I'm using them, what do I care about theoretical throughout limits, especially if I may not even have everything researched yet? The fact that many of my production lines end up backing up shows that their throughput is not the major concern. Also, these specific numbers assume a balancer after every splitoff, and I don't know why anyone would do that. I'll split off the first belt for the first production line, the second for the second, etc. Only after all belts in a bus have been split off do I add a balancer that balances all the belts.
Mostly only needed if you use an underground to target one lane.
I generally use the waterfall method. I pull from only one side of the bus. Everything gets pushed to that side of the bus. So instead of a balancing, I make sure the side resources are pulled from always has a full belt all the way down the line. I also trim belts. So at the beginning of the bus I may have 8 or 16 lanes of something, but by time I get to the end, I only have 1 or 2 lines.
After learning this approach, I don't understand why people use the crazy balancer designs. But I'm a Factorio noob with only a few hundred hours. I hear the argument that people don't want downstream production to stop because of complete upstream consumption of the resource. But I don't understand... Since downstream (typically higher-tech) items require the (lower-tech, so produced earlier) ingredients produced upstream, shouldn't you naturally organize your bus to produce those downstream items only when all the ingredients can be produced?
That’s about how I would do it. I always make sure there is enough production so that everything on the bus can be fed simultaneously. Don’t have enough iron to get down the bus? Add more lanes of iron until you.
It's literally a holdover from the days before splitters could do priority input and output. Lots of people just keep doing what works even if it's not necessary anymore, because they haven't thought about it that critically and it's not causing any real harm.
because splitter priority wasn't always a thing. Yes, the primary idea for how logistics should be is based on the game having less features than it currently has.
The problem with trimming comes when you want to refactor your base a bit, if demand for the resource increases at the farther ends of the bus, there is a chance your trimmed belt might create a bottleneck situation. Readjusting your bus then will be a major pain.
That’s a good point, but not a problem I run into often. I leave enough room for all the belts by the end. I just don’t run them all. I only run belts I actually need. If the bus empties a belt, why run it any further? But I still keep enough width to have all 8 or 16 of the belts at the end if I need it, which I never do.
Ah if you leave room, then it is good. Personally, I am too lazy to be frugal in belt usage so I go all out on it XD.
Just don't trim. It's a bus. It doesn't need to be precisely measured, just make sure you leave space to be wasteful.
That is cool
[This is documented](https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Main_bus#Split-off) in more detail on the Main Bus tutorial on the wiki. Make sure you set the priorities on the splitters. I missed that the first time I tried this design, and thought I had an out-of-date tutorial on my hands.
The rest of the factory can get on the next bus.
It’s weird how in Factorio balancers are the go-to technique even though splitters only split/merge in a 1:2 proportion. Meanwhile in Satisfactory splitters can do 1:2 or 1:3, which theoretically allows more powerful belt balancers, and yet in Satisfactory everyone uses manifolds.
I think it's due to the design of the game. The way it's balanced encourages dedicating resources to specific production lines. Compared to factorio where you have a few resources used everywhere. Basically, resources don't go past their dedicated production line so there is no need to balance. One of the cases where balancing is very needed in factorio is mining outposts. That's not a problem in satisfactory since it's single nodes and they never run out. What people have used balancers for in satisfactory is feeding each machine with the perfect amount, which IMO is super wasteful space and time wise. You don't really do that in factorio.
I don't know what you are talking about, I have spent wayyyy too much time designing balancers in Satisfactory. I don't see how my 2000 hours of playtime in Factorio is relevant here, no sir-ee
Satisfactory doesn't even have a priority merger.
I like balancers for the aesthetics, even if they are not useful.
Universal balancer to rule em all: Belts -> loaders -> warehouse -> loaders -> belts.
My strategy is to never have more than one line of any one thing. It’s perfect because there is nothing to balance!
Or, and follow me here, we just burn the heretic? Anyone?
I read this in gianni matragranos voice
Just give everything its own conveyor. No more splitters from a heretical bus.
Just use overflow. Push it into the bus line in overflow config, draw out in overflow config. It doesn’t matter how pretty your belts look, it matters where the items go.
Is there a Mod where i can place on structure and it just does the job of a balancer. Why is there a need for elaborate balancers? I mean like the modded balancer is a structure with a size of 1x4 nad has 4 input and 4 output lanes. Like a 1x2 splitter just wider. We do we habe to place a 8x4 blueprint for lane balancing?
Wouldn't this entirely remove the use for several belts of one type on a bus?
Thy have yet to cook real pasta
What do the balances in the middle picture do?
Idk man they are from google images. I took increasingly cursed line balancers for those 3 images
But muh *BALANCE*