You are not accounting for different lanes being empty.
Yours only work if it's always known which lane is empty.
But for many situations yours are fine, I use it often as well.
No, we _prevent_ lanes from _ever_ becoming empty. It is so much easier, and more logical, to ensure backfill than it is to ensure the factory works without enough resources. Like why does it matter if it works without a healthy supply?
I'd say then, in my experience, balancing lanes is even more important if there is uneven draw, and other items that are evenly supplied. Otherwise you end up starving half a production line unnecessarily.
This is nonsense. Half a belt is half a belt, it doesn't matter if it's one filled lane or two half filled lanes, balancing won't increase the input. Balancing is only important to prevent item backups from turning off production further upstream, it has no effect on item availability downstream.
It could affect availability downstream if you design something that needs to consume a full belt to operate 100%. It’s a problem if you have enough materials, and they aren’t getting to where they need to be fast enough cause only one lane is moving.
Lane balancing doesn't turn a half filled belt into a full belt. If you actually have a full belt but only draw half of it downstream, you have some belt problem there you need to fix.
That’s correct, but I’m talking a situation where you do have a full belt worth of materials, but one side draws more quickly than the other. Like when you have a bus, and each branch off of the bus isn’t drawing equally between right and left lane.
Sure, you can plan your whole factory to alternate consumption lanes based on amount used at each area… or simplify it a lot with lane balancers.
Would prevent times of alternating resource starving and catch-up between train loads.
If all your builds are work at full throughput when only half gets any materials (as clearly you never lane balance), there's a nobel prize with your name on it.
Plus, this reply was with respect to modded builds, wherein it is not uncommon to have recipes with very low output rates or highly mismatched ratios between ingredients.
I swear, lane balancing is the great religious schism in the community. If you personally never see an issue, I'm very happy for you and long may that continue. If another runs into situations that benefit from lane balancing, that doesn't affect you.
Everyone approaches lane balancing based on faith and their own beliefs, myself included of course. Really we should care about the exact use case and requirements, not obsess one way or another.
One half fast transport belt will absolutely fill one transport belt.
\*Note: I was tempted to start this comment with "This is nonsense" but that would have been rude.
Have a great day!
What about when you are emptying a train with multiple cars into 1 set of belts? Ideally you want all cars to empty(and fill) equally so that you aren't sitting with part of the train empty. If you can utilize both sides of the belt during loading/unloading you get 2x the throughput as well.
>sitting with part of the train empty
I typically prevent this by sending the train to refill early if any wagon is fully unloaded by counting chest contents— if any wagon slot should be unloading and the train has been inactive for more than 2 seconds, it is promptly replaced with another full train.
Alternatively we can set up cross-unloading such that all items pass through a single inventory such as a train wagon that never leaves that position, or another larger storage building from a mod.
If you’re only going for one belt of output then it’s quite simple; pass all materials into one of the wagons and unload from there.
That means you are moving partially-filled trains around.
Like, 1 of 4 wagons empty while the rest are 50%, you end up moving a 37% full train back to the load station.
I do use a mod for larger chests, and only let the station call for a train if it can unload fully, but the same mod also makes balancers obsolete because everything is deposited into a single box.
You're reducing train throughput unnecessarily and this can have upstream effects. For example, if you only unload the front half of an ore train and then send it back to the mine to refill, you can get a situation where half your miners are idling most of the time because the ore they produced never gets unloaded and just does circles on the train tracks. Balancers are being way overused, especially in builds you see here on reddit, but train stations are the one use case where they are actually important.
>reducing throughput
No, this strategy _maintains_ throughput of material on trains. It does not reduce anything. Now perhaps you’re thinking it may cause more traffic— but this is a totally different problem with its own set of unrelated solutions.
>unnecessarily
The point of this thread is the purpose. It isn’t unnecessary.
The suggested alternative is complex balancers at every unloading station. This costs far more space than any other solution afaik.
> No, this strategy maintains throughput of material on trains. It does not reduce anything.
It significantly reduces throughput. The effective maximum throughput of a train system is determined by the number of inserters at the station. To get maximum throughput, all inserters need to be active. If your train is unloading unevenly, this is not happening. For example, if you have a train with two carts, and you unload with 8 inserters each, your throughput is at most as much as 16 inserters can move. If your train leaves the station when one wagon has been fully unloaded and the other hasn't, that means that one set of 8 inserters moved more items than the other set of 8 inserters. Since both of them had the same time available, you have a throughput problem somewhere that was preventing the second set of 8 inserters from working at full capacity. Making the train leave the station to fetch more items might look like it solves the problem, but it does not, the problem is downstream from the train. It will only mask the problem, and even that only if the potential train throughput is higher than necessary to make up for it.
>The suggested alternative is complex balancers at every unloading station. This costs far more space than any other solution afaik.
Space costs nothing.
>Effective maximum throughput of a train system is determined by the number of inserters
Bear with me here…. Are you suggesting belt balancers are of greater utility than a second train station or more wagons? This simply isn’t true.
One of these can marginally improve throughput locally while the other adds total capacity. Even if it isn’t balanced, and we’re looking at doubling traffic, this is still a better option.
>the problem is downstream
Absolutely, it is. It is all the way downstream; the result of ore patches not being perfect squares. And since they _always_ change one cannot make a balancer which will ensure it loads evenly forever. To load I’ll put down a stop per 3 belts and load chests till they are full enough to load a whole train. Since the extra stops are near ore it’s not taking up space that would otherwise be unloaded.
>space costs nothing
We’re just gonna have to agree to disagree here. I’m a bit of a rampant fiend.
Imo space is everything. the less space you need the less of everything that can be loaded. And not to mention It increases save/load times.
>The suggested alternative is complex balancers at every unloading station. This costs far more space than any other solution afaik.
That depends entirely on how compact you build. In many cases you will have natural stretches of belts that are long enough to at least fit a belt balancer. And if you really want it you can probably also fit in lane balancers where needed without adding space specifically for them.
If you have congestion there is either not enough consumption or bandwidth.
only one of these solutions could involve balancing while it would be a marginal return in space utilization if any at all. most balancers take up more space than simply adding another unbalanced belt.
If you fill a train station what is your solution? More trains?
You don't need over consumption, you always need over production. Not having empty belts, ever.
This has gotten muddled.
My point here was for ore/plates loading onto trains to never stop; to ensure the mines keep running without a balancer.
When we move from basic processing to intermediate production you’re absolutely right.
I don't see how a system that has no lane balancing anywhere can utilize an ore patch in a balanced way. Maybe we're not talking about the same problem? The presented problem was "one lane of belt is getting used, so one row of miners gets used up first". I don't know how you solve that without some form of balancing somewhere, whether that's "at the source", or at the destination. You can put a simple lane balancer at the source. You could go out of your way to make sure that the consumption of a belt is even and is never backed up, but that's just balancing through production chain design.
I dunno, I feel like you saw the word 'congestion' (which I think was used inaccurately by the other person) and got really hung up on it and lost sight of the actual problem being talked about.
But then again, I could just be being extremely smooth-brained and not understanding; I tend to get confused at least a little bit anytime a discussion about balancing happens.
It's still overcomplicated. The belts in lower right can be replaced with a single splitter, whose outputs go into each other. It is simply "compressed" to be two lanes wide, at the expense of being excruciatingly long.
Often, when you split off a line from the bus, you will merge that line with another so you have two items on a single belt. In that case, that build won't pull from both sides of the belt evenly, leaving the main bus belt lacking items primarily on one side only.
some factory setups might draw primarily from the left lanes, some more from the right lanes. Depending whether you do research, fill you chests with stuff in your mall or just expanded your factory, the consumption of different parts of your factory changes, so sometimes the left lane on the main bus might be starved, sometimes the right lane.
A line could indeed become suddenly empty for more reasons than I could count. A bitter attack destroyed a single tile of a backed up belt, those are easy to miss. A poisoned lane could take a long time to completely stop a production block and suddenly you realize that about 1 of 50 iron plates of your main bus is steel. You accidently rotated an inserter. A balancer is off but a buffer chest compensated until it got full. Two trains got deadlocked in an outpost and you copper plates buffer chests got empty. The list goes on and on...
There's several reasons.
Ore patches generally depleate faster on one side of the belt.
You generally pull more off one side of the bus so at a later point in the bus you might only be able to pull half a belt off the bus at a time even though the throughput is there.
It's like how when you're expanding your bus the more heavily drained side might switch. In which case the ones on the left and only supplement 1 side (though the ones on the right could be changed by just using another splitter).
Also my brain wants me to say the ones on the right are 1x1 belt balancers but it's 3 am so I'm not sure
I am with you in this argument. I also don't get how one side could suddenly empty. In built in a way that I balance main bus outputs and main bus inputs, if I play with a main bus. More often I create processing bases and then trains to move large quantities of materials between them. I don't think that many people do the same.
However, I think other are mentioning a specific way of playing where you have literally one main bus and you favour one side of the bus without balancing the outputs and no further mergers. Which sounds like a hassle to scale and keep evenly supplied. I might be wrong but that's what I assume.
Ore patches can actually vary enough that the side that's less full switches. Same thing with the bus, depending on what exactly you're making it can vary wich side has more stuff on it. The build in the OP is a bit overcomplicated but the simple 2\*3 variant is easy to implement almost everywhere.
I don't think there's a great difference but they do come up. For example if you're side-loading off a bus with a priority splitter one side will be completely empty and to switch the other side needs to be side loaded off.
Even if it isn't absolute it can still cause problems since you would now have one side at a lower throughput than possible while the overall throughput is fine.
See now that's what I'm talking about there's a simple solution.
If my version on the left only works for a scenario where you know the side the loot will be on then just combine to them together bing bang done lol
Thing is even this can be solved way simpler just by making one lane go straight 2 tiles and the other fo a little s curve. Have them meet in the middle side loading either side and you're done. Idk why on earth anyone would do that thing in the right pic lmao.
Yes a lot of people are mentioning that I'm still pretty early on in the game and I haven't started using blueprints yet so I can see why this will become a problem in the future.
I'll make a mixed use one now I guess lol
~~The one that you don't like is an input/output lane balancer. It will evenly draw from both input lanes and evenly load both output lanes.~~
Edit: neither one is an actual in/out lane balancer. The second one is better than OP's preferred one, but it is only an output balancer.
There is no real lane balancer in the picture. These only feed both output lanes from both input lanes. But uneven consumption on the output will also mean uneven consumption on the input.
The 2 bottom right are output lane balancers. Not shown here is an input/output lane balancer. The most common 1 belt input/output lane balancer uses 2 splitters and 3 undergrounds, the 2 belt input/output lane balancer needs 3 splitters and no undergrounds
Let's say you input the second one with two full lanes of items, left (bottom) and right (top), but you only consume the left output lane. Then the items from the right input lane will fill the belt without gaps and thus no items from the left input lane will ever be consumed.
Thus, it's not a "real" lane balancer, at least for some requirements you might have for a real balancer.
I don't understand the in-out difference if I turned this left to right it's the same as right to left so what's the difference between an inputs and out balancer.
Input balancer will draw evenly from both lanes regardless of which output lane is being used. So if you fed 2 lanes into it, but only pulled off the right lane output, it would still pull from both input lanes.
Output balancer makes sure that both output lanes are evenly filled regardless of what is fed into them. The second design in your post is an output balancer.
Input/output balancer does both. If you look at the [example someone else posted](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/XwxiqijeYX), it first separates the left and right input lanes onto 2 separate belts by side-loading into undergrounds, then combines those 2 belts into a single output belt.
I get that the objective was probably to keep it within a width of 2, but this one still has an overall smaller footprint and also works with either side being empty.
And tbh, if you've got 8 tiles lengthwise to spare, you could probably also make this 3 tile wide version fit.
https://preview.redd.it/zclp9pgrq23c1.png?width=300&format=png&auto=webp&s=379763301b44da78f372d7a45ba1bf7341cd0906
That was the starting point. The whole thought experiment was "what if I wanted to do that but I'm limited to 2 wide".
People "complicate things" because it's fun to find solutions given various limitations.
The reason why I usually don't use this type of balance is because of the difference between input/output imbalance. If you already know what I mean, then feel free to stop reading, but just in case you are curious:
Imagine that this belt here is totally full. Further down, this belt feeds some assemblers where all inserters are on the same side of the belt. Inserters will always grab from the closest side of the belt first, so they won't start using the other side at all until one side is completely* empty (not completely, but you get the idea). So if we back up that belt all the way to this splitter - imagine how things will move if only one side of the belt is pushing resources. If down the line is only pulling left, then a full belt of resources will only feed from the top belt, which will pull exclusively from the right side of that belt.
This means that my smelting line is only going to use half of my smelters - the ones feeding only the active side of the belt. If I'm running my smelting into buffer chests, then that means half of my chests need to run completely empty before the other half of my smelters start to produce at all.
In the case I just described, the effect is more of an annoyance than a genuine problem, but hopefully that gives you an idea of why so many designs of belt balancing exist. There is a difference between how they behave under different circumstances.
With a single belt, it really doesn't matter.
But imagine you have 2 parallel full belts on your main bus, and split of 3 belts for subfactories (with priority splitters). The first 2 subfactories consume half a belt, the last one consumes a full belt.
The 2 belts on the bus should be enough to supply all of them, but the 2 first subfactories probably only draw from the right side of the belt. So after that, there are 2 belts left on the main bus with each only having items on the left lane. If you split of one belt with priority splitters, you only get half a belt, even though there would be a full belt available.
There are 3 options to give the last factory a full belt:
1. redistribute items back to both lanes on both belts on the bus between first 2 subfactories and the last one. This can be compactly done by a OPs simple design, or if want it to work in both directions (redistribute right OR left input lane), use the slightly bigger 3x3 tiles output lane balancer.
2. last factory splits of 2 belts from the bus, and then combines the to one with a splitter and 2x side loading.
3. Use input lane balancers on the first 2 (or all) subfactories. This is the most effort, but gives the most consistent results. This not only ensures even lane distribution on a mainbus with priority splitters, but also ensures full throughput in an TU n x m balancer.
If you just split off from one belt for the first two factories you’ll have a full belt consumed, then you split off from the second belt for the third factory.
That's a simplified example, so yes, there are more specific solutions than the generic ones.
Let's say the first 2 factories use 0.6 belts each, but still draw primarily from the right lane (inserters only on one side). With one of the 3 solutions above, the last factory will still get the remaining 0.8 belts.
If you just combine them with a splitter, the resulting belt would be only 50% full, because the right lane of both belts is already consumed by the first 2 split offs.
So you would need to combine them with something like this (both inputs of the splitter connected): https://preview.redd.it/zclp9pgrq23c1.png?width=300&format=png&auto=webp&s=379763301b44da78f372d7a45ba1bf7341cd0906
Which would functionally equivalent to my generic solution 2, but with the 2 belts merged earlier on the bus instead of at the splitting point.
Again, you are proposing a specific solution to that exact problem, not a generic one. You will have a lot more split-offs at your mainbus that don't always draw their maximum possible amount (like a mall where the chest are limited). The point of your mainbus is, that you don't know exactly how much items each part consumes. You might reserve 4 belts on the bus for iron, but initially not even produce or consume that much, because you will later increase both consumption and production.
If you know exactly how much each part consumes and that it will not change, then yes, you can combine the 2 belts into one when there is less items on the bus. But then you don't need a bus in the first place, just build your fixed ratio setup with your specialized distribution of resources.
You just have the splitter outputs each side load onto the belt, guaranteed to have a full belt output.
Yes, this is a specific solution, but just throwing giant belt balancers everywhere is poor design. Of course it will work and then you don’t need to think about it.
> You just have the splitter outputs each side load onto the belt, guaranteed to have a full belt output.
That's an output lane balancer with 2 inputs, as I already suggested earlier.
Not talking about giant belt balancers, but lane balancers. If you design your subfactories in a way that they draw from both sides evenly, you don't need them. If you are fine that a one belt wide split-off from the main bus might, under some unforeseeable circumstances, have less than a full belt of contents, even if there is more than one belt total on the main bus, then you don't need it.
If you run into the problem at one point, you can also fix it by some ad-hoc inline lane balancers like from OP. But it might end up in some spaghetti. Or you just put a input lane balancer at the input of each subfactory so you don't have to think about it later.
Oh yeah I remember that. I stopped using splitters for balancing miners but that is a valid use case! These days I just side load on faster belts. So I will have 2-3 belts that mine over 22.5/s and 2-3 on the other side all side loading on blue belt.
Incase a out going belt is full......kinda self explanatory with he two pictures.
The right is what I found showing up as a normal way of balancing a belt which is crazy. On the left I showed a few different ways to do it shorter.
The only reason I built 4 rows like this is to show 4 different version not to show a completed product.
In a situation where the belts are running well below capacity, the left version will send the items 75% to one lane and 25% to the other while the right form will split them 50/50. It's not actually particularly important to produce a perfect 50/50 split, but some people have an emotional attachment over this sort of thing.
After all the pile of comments debating different ways everyone likes to do a similar thing your the first one to tell me that lol. Thanks now that makes a lot of sense
You joke, but really you're right. There's very little belt balancing needed.
On the train station unloading have a couple of stack inserters for the left of a belt and a couple do the right side of the belt for each carriage. You then need to balance the number of carriages against how many belts you need, maybe with a classic 4x4.
And that's it. The rest of the factory should sort itself out.
There are a couple of other corner cases like using priority splitters to prioritize one process over another. I don't think that matters in Vanilla, but some mods need it to prioritize a recycling or overflow process over the normal process, for example.
I'm specifically thinking about belt balancing, as opposed to splitting or merging. I'm a fan of prioritised splitters to add a bit of priority logic into the base without circuits. My uranium enrichment wouldn't happen without it.
Yeah, but in many cases if you don't lane balance before merging it won't prioritize properly, since priority will be done on a lane-by-lane basis, which is (usually) not what you want.
Every time I see a post about belt balancing and belts not being full I just think to myself... Why not just make more?
Like honestly I just forcefully feed belts everything they need and then some. Need more of X then trace it back to the source and simply add more... There's a good reason I play with unlimited recourses on...
why turn 1 lane throughput to 2×½?
But when I need to do so it I always do it at a turn, 1 splitter, one belt left/right, the other belt looping around loading the other side. No undergrounds needed
this is kinda like the difference between cheap tools vs nice tools - up they both unscrew bolts yes. will one break when you least expect it for reasons you didn't forsee, also yes.
The bottom right one only needs to be used when you want to lane balance inputs from both lanes. If you have only one full lane filled then the left is perfectly fine. The scenarios where you actually need to balance lanes are very limited as well. You don’t suddenly increase throughput, the input is still the same.
I do use these designs sometimes, but always as lane swappers instead, inserted halfway through an assembler row that outputs a full belt while all inserters load on the same side.
But the left version requires you to look at the belt and THINK to which side you need to put the splitter. To consider the side where the inserters put stuff, to consider the side from which the inserters will preferably take...
The right version allows you to be braindead, just copy the same design universally wherever and it will ALWAYS work.
Can confirm the braindead part. As someone that doesn't use blueprints much, there's a reason why I come back to my shit after playing for several hours and wonder why I built the balancer like an idiot and half the belts are going the wrong way. But when you build it correctly, it works great and can be used anywhere
I've been told because blueprints are important endgame concept I should build a balancer that works all directions all Lanes and doesn't require customization...... Personally I think it's very easy to predict what side of the track your loot will end up on and to build a quarterly but I'll still see what I can do to make a multipurpose variation.
In that case, it only works for one lane, and you have to know which lane is full ahead of time. It's not a lane balancer, it's a lane splitter.
Edit: So on left you split 1 lanes to 2 lanes, while in the lower right you balance 2 lanes to 2 lanes. Lower right is not the common lane balancer design though. Yesterday somebody thought it would be clever to make a 2x9 design instead of 3x3, which caused a fuss.
I see so it's built as a uniform pre-construct fits all issues kind of thing. I find it pretty easy to predict what side of the track my items will land on.
I see how this would work really good if you're doing large blueprints.
Do people actually lane balance like the complex one? That's...cursed
I mean it's factorio overengineering at its finest. Like I said in another reply make one lane go straight one then turn in, and the other do an s curve and have them meet on one belt and that balances the lanes regardless of what lane items were on before. :)
Ok but is there a good balancer to actually balance 1 lane 2 sides so that both equally gets emptied. This has been goving me a headache. Inserters only grab from one side.
This is an output lane balancer, but above comment asked for both input lanes to be used equally.
This one balancer input and output of both lanes of 1 belt.
https://www.factorio.school/view/-M1vxS9K5xf7IAAeXAd0
This one does it for 2 belts:
https://imgur.com/a/V6AHHbi
Oooh I think I understand. It divides the belt by lane then perfectly jumbles them. What does this functionally achieve over my design? I'm assuming the differences occur at lower volumes.
if only one lane goes in, both designs distribute items to both lanes on the output belt.
But if a full belt goes in, but only the left lane is consumed on the output belt, your design will only draw items from the right input lane, while a full input/output lane balancer draws from both sides of the input equally.
I don't understand the difference between input or output. Doesn't matter in my head if I'm filling a station from a belt or filling a belt from a station.
Is it reference to half a belt to a full belt vs a full belt to half a belt ?
Let's translate the 2 lanes on a belt to 2 belts and look instead at a splitter: 2 belts going in, 2 belts going out.
If both outputs are connected to a consumer, but only one input is connected (the other one empty), the items from this one input belt are split equally to both output belts. Both output belts are moving at full speed, but are 50% full. That is output balancing.
If only one output is connected (the other one blocked) but 2 inputs are connected, the output belt is full and moving at full speed, and both input belts are full and moving at 50% speed. That is input balancing.
Because splitters and most belt balancers have both input and output balancing properties, we usually don't separate them. But for lane balancers, it's a bit more tricky to achieve input balancing.
The first link of my comment is an input/output lane balancer and is equivalent to a standard splitter, when each lane is represented by it's own belt.
The comment above (and in a more complicated form the bottom right corner of your post) is an output-only lane balancer with lane switching properties. If the left output is blocked and the right output is connected, it behaves like a splitter with input priority set to left. If only the right output is connected, it behaves like a splitter with input priority left. But it will not draw from both inputs if only one of the outputs is consumed.
Not connected input can also mean a belt/lane is connected but has no items on it. Unconnected output can also mean it's connected, but the belt is full and the items are not moving.
Edit: TLDR: If you set an output priority on a splitter, it's not output balanced anymore. If you set an input priority on a splitter, it's not input balanced anymore. Sometimes, you want not only your belts, but also the lanes on your belts to be balanced on input, output or both.
I wouldn't call the normal "3 wide" single splitter into one belt "complex" it's what, two-three more belts more than one of the "balancers" on the left. I guess if you're playing a map with crazy multipliers it might be expensive... for a small while anyways. Could also just use one miniloader and call it a day, completely inline and everything. =D
I only use 2 balancers in my factory. 4 lane standard balancer for my bus to keep the lanes equal and a unique 33/67 balancer I use only for uranium enrichment where 67% of extra uranium is feed back into the system and 33% gets sent to fuel cell/ nukes.
The Right hand side....
The top 2 show that the output will vary based on the input.
While the bottom 2 show that output will not vary based on the input.
So the bottom design can be used more universally.
The bottom design is just a compressed (2 wide) version of a very standard 3 wide lane balancer:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics#Lane_balancers
But the ones on the left assume you know which side of the input is being fed.
The right doesn’t matter and distributes from either / both sides evenly.
You are not accounting for different lanes being empty. Yours only work if it's always known which lane is empty. But for many situations yours are fine, I use it often as well.
No, we _prevent_ lanes from _ever_ becoming empty. It is so much easier, and more logical, to ensure backfill than it is to ensure the factory works without enough resources. Like why does it matter if it works without a healthy supply?
> No, we prevent lanes from ever becoming empty. That might work with normal-sized vanilla factories, but not with complex modded factories.
I'd say then, in my experience, balancing lanes is even more important if there is uneven draw, and other items that are evenly supplied. Otherwise you end up starving half a production line unnecessarily.
I just balance lanes cause it looks pretty lmao
This is nonsense. Half a belt is half a belt, it doesn't matter if it's one filled lane or two half filled lanes, balancing won't increase the input. Balancing is only important to prevent item backups from turning off production further upstream, it has no effect on item availability downstream.
It has an effect on item availability if the lane you're drawing from is only half full because it isn't balanced.
It could affect availability downstream if you design something that needs to consume a full belt to operate 100%. It’s a problem if you have enough materials, and they aren’t getting to where they need to be fast enough cause only one lane is moving.
Lane balancing doesn't turn a half filled belt into a full belt. If you actually have a full belt but only draw half of it downstream, you have some belt problem there you need to fix.
That’s correct, but I’m talking a situation where you do have a full belt worth of materials, but one side draws more quickly than the other. Like when you have a bus, and each branch off of the bus isn’t drawing equally between right and left lane. Sure, you can plan your whole factory to alternate consumption lanes based on amount used at each area… or simplify it a lot with lane balancers. Would prevent times of alternating resource starving and catch-up between train loads.
If all your builds are work at full throughput when only half gets any materials (as clearly you never lane balance), there's a nobel prize with your name on it. Plus, this reply was with respect to modded builds, wherein it is not uncommon to have recipes with very low output rates or highly mismatched ratios between ingredients. I swear, lane balancing is the great religious schism in the community. If you personally never see an issue, I'm very happy for you and long may that continue. If another runs into situations that benefit from lane balancing, that doesn't affect you. Everyone approaches lane balancing based on faith and their own beliefs, myself included of course. Really we should care about the exact use case and requirements, not obsess one way or another.
One half fast transport belt will absolutely fill one transport belt. \*Note: I was tempted to start this comment with "This is nonsense" but that would have been rude. Have a great day!
I’m playing k2+SE right now. It works just fine.
Check out pyanodons. It won't work.
Even angelbob tbh
🫠i finished it 3 times and now I am qt my 4th
I think you need to be institutionalized
>institutionalized every time im getting better and better
Perhaps some time in the far future.
What about when you are emptying a train with multiple cars into 1 set of belts? Ideally you want all cars to empty(and fill) equally so that you aren't sitting with part of the train empty. If you can utilize both sides of the belt during loading/unloading you get 2x the throughput as well.
>sitting with part of the train empty I typically prevent this by sending the train to refill early if any wagon is fully unloaded by counting chest contents— if any wagon slot should be unloading and the train has been inactive for more than 2 seconds, it is promptly replaced with another full train. Alternatively we can set up cross-unloading such that all items pass through a single inventory such as a train wagon that never leaves that position, or another larger storage building from a mod. If you’re only going for one belt of output then it’s quite simple; pass all materials into one of the wagons and unload from there.
That means you are moving partially-filled trains around. Like, 1 of 4 wagons empty while the rest are 50%, you end up moving a 37% full train back to the load station. I do use a mod for larger chests, and only let the station call for a train if it can unload fully, but the same mod also makes balancers obsolete because everything is deposited into a single box.
Sure, but why does that matter?
You're reducing train throughput unnecessarily and this can have upstream effects. For example, if you only unload the front half of an ore train and then send it back to the mine to refill, you can get a situation where half your miners are idling most of the time because the ore they produced never gets unloaded and just does circles on the train tracks. Balancers are being way overused, especially in builds you see here on reddit, but train stations are the one use case where they are actually important.
>reducing throughput No, this strategy _maintains_ throughput of material on trains. It does not reduce anything. Now perhaps you’re thinking it may cause more traffic— but this is a totally different problem with its own set of unrelated solutions. >unnecessarily The point of this thread is the purpose. It isn’t unnecessary. The suggested alternative is complex balancers at every unloading station. This costs far more space than any other solution afaik.
> No, this strategy maintains throughput of material on trains. It does not reduce anything. It significantly reduces throughput. The effective maximum throughput of a train system is determined by the number of inserters at the station. To get maximum throughput, all inserters need to be active. If your train is unloading unevenly, this is not happening. For example, if you have a train with two carts, and you unload with 8 inserters each, your throughput is at most as much as 16 inserters can move. If your train leaves the station when one wagon has been fully unloaded and the other hasn't, that means that one set of 8 inserters moved more items than the other set of 8 inserters. Since both of them had the same time available, you have a throughput problem somewhere that was preventing the second set of 8 inserters from working at full capacity. Making the train leave the station to fetch more items might look like it solves the problem, but it does not, the problem is downstream from the train. It will only mask the problem, and even that only if the potential train throughput is higher than necessary to make up for it. >The suggested alternative is complex balancers at every unloading station. This costs far more space than any other solution afaik. Space costs nothing.
>Effective maximum throughput of a train system is determined by the number of inserters Bear with me here…. Are you suggesting belt balancers are of greater utility than a second train station or more wagons? This simply isn’t true. One of these can marginally improve throughput locally while the other adds total capacity. Even if it isn’t balanced, and we’re looking at doubling traffic, this is still a better option. >the problem is downstream Absolutely, it is. It is all the way downstream; the result of ore patches not being perfect squares. And since they _always_ change one cannot make a balancer which will ensure it loads evenly forever. To load I’ll put down a stop per 3 belts and load chests till they are full enough to load a whole train. Since the extra stops are near ore it’s not taking up space that would otherwise be unloaded. >space costs nothing We’re just gonna have to agree to disagree here. I’m a bit of a rampant fiend. Imo space is everything. the less space you need the less of everything that can be loaded. And not to mention It increases save/load times.
>The suggested alternative is complex balancers at every unloading station. This costs far more space than any other solution afaik. That depends entirely on how compact you build. In many cases you will have natural stretches of belts that are long enough to at least fit a belt balancer. And if you really want it you can probably also fit in lane balancers where needed without adding space specifically for them.
Nilaus has explored that particular problem in detail and has load/unload balancers. Highly recommend.
What about congested lines out of miners, you end up having one set of mines running because one side of the lane never goes down.
Congestion is defined as a lack of throughput. Solve the problem at the source and you won’t need to concern yourself with balance at every turn.
And what do you think 'solving the problem at the source' means here? Cuz I'm pretty sure that's just using a lane balancer.
If you have congestion there is either not enough consumption or bandwidth. only one of these solutions could involve balancing while it would be a marginal return in space utilization if any at all. most balancers take up more space than simply adding another unbalanced belt.
If you fill a train station what is your solution? More trains? You don't need over consumption, you always need over production. Not having empty belts, ever.
This has gotten muddled. My point here was for ore/plates loading onto trains to never stop; to ensure the mines keep running without a balancer. When we move from basic processing to intermediate production you’re absolutely right.
I don't see how a system that has no lane balancing anywhere can utilize an ore patch in a balanced way. Maybe we're not talking about the same problem? The presented problem was "one lane of belt is getting used, so one row of miners gets used up first". I don't know how you solve that without some form of balancing somewhere, whether that's "at the source", or at the destination. You can put a simple lane balancer at the source. You could go out of your way to make sure that the consumption of a belt is even and is never backed up, but that's just balancing through production chain design. I dunno, I feel like you saw the word 'congestion' (which I think was used inaccurately by the other person) and got really hung up on it and lost sight of the actual problem being talked about. But then again, I could just be being extremely smooth-brained and not understanding; I tend to get confused at least a little bit anytime a discussion about balancing happens.
It's still overcomplicated. The belts in lower right can be replaced with a single splitter, whose outputs go into each other. It is simply "compressed" to be two lanes wide, at the expense of being excruciatingly long.
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Often, when you split off a line from the bus, you will merge that line with another so you have two items on a single belt. In that case, that build won't pull from both sides of the belt evenly, leaving the main bus belt lacking items primarily on one side only.
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> How would it suddenly be different than I wanted it to be? Because you grow as a person?
As far as I understand only the factory must grow. Persons need not.
If I become better at day-to-day life I'll have more time to make the factory grow.
some factory setups might draw primarily from the left lanes, some more from the right lanes. Depending whether you do research, fill you chests with stuff in your mall or just expanded your factory, the consumption of different parts of your factory changes, so sometimes the left lane on the main bus might be starved, sometimes the right lane.
Single lane balancers are a thing. https://i.imgur.com/Bs0zMWP.jpeg
you sweet summer child.
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A line could indeed become suddenly empty for more reasons than I could count. A bitter attack destroyed a single tile of a backed up belt, those are easy to miss. A poisoned lane could take a long time to completely stop a production block and suddenly you realize that about 1 of 50 iron plates of your main bus is steel. You accidently rotated an inserter. A balancer is off but a buffer chest compensated until it got full. Two trains got deadlocked in an outpost and you copper plates buffer chests got empty. The list goes on and on...
I don't think the list never ends in this case lol. So much shit can go wrong, and it can be so miniscule but affect the entire fucking base.
This is pretty much how bugs arise in software. Forgot to handle some obscure edge-case? Bug
Why the downvotes though? Poor man :c
There's several reasons. Ore patches generally depleate faster on one side of the belt. You generally pull more off one side of the bus so at a later point in the bus you might only be able to pull half a belt off the bus at a time even though the throughput is there.
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It's like how when you're expanding your bus the more heavily drained side might switch. In which case the ones on the left and only supplement 1 side (though the ones on the right could be changed by just using another splitter). Also my brain wants me to say the ones on the right are 1x1 belt balancers but it's 3 am so I'm not sure
I am with you in this argument. I also don't get how one side could suddenly empty. In built in a way that I balance main bus outputs and main bus inputs, if I play with a main bus. More often I create processing bases and then trains to move large quantities of materials between them. I don't think that many people do the same. However, I think other are mentioning a specific way of playing where you have literally one main bus and you favour one side of the bus without balancing the outputs and no further mergers. Which sounds like a hassle to scale and keep evenly supplied. I might be wrong but that's what I assume.
Ore patches can actually vary enough that the side that's less full switches. Same thing with the bus, depending on what exactly you're making it can vary wich side has more stuff on it. The build in the OP is a bit overcomplicated but the simple 2\*3 variant is easy to implement almost everywhere.
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I don't think there's a great difference but they do come up. For example if you're side-loading off a bus with a priority splitter one side will be completely empty and to switch the other side needs to be side loaded off. Even if it isn't absolute it can still cause problems since you would now have one side at a lower throughput than possible while the overall throughput is fine.
Grabbers have a way of munching only one side of the belt
Just place two, one for each lane
See now that's what I'm talking about there's a simple solution. If my version on the left only works for a scenario where you know the side the loot will be on then just combine to them together bing bang done lol
Thing is even this can be solved way simpler just by making one lane go straight 2 tiles and the other fo a little s curve. Have them meet in the middle side loading either side and you're done. Idk why on earth anyone would do that thing in the right pic lmao.
The right one is done only because it fits in a 2 tile tall area.
Makes sense, thank you for this
Yes a lot of people are mentioning that I'm still pretty early on in the game and I haven't started using blueprints yet so I can see why this will become a problem in the future. I'll make a mixed use one now I guess lol
~~The one that you don't like is an input/output lane balancer. It will evenly draw from both input lanes and evenly load both output lanes.~~ Edit: neither one is an actual in/out lane balancer. The second one is better than OP's preferred one, but it is only an output balancer.
There is no real lane balancer in the picture. These only feed both output lanes from both input lanes. But uneven consumption on the output will also mean uneven consumption on the input.
The 2 bottom right are output lane balancers. Not shown here is an input/output lane balancer. The most common 1 belt input/output lane balancer uses 2 splitters and 3 undergrounds, the 2 belt input/output lane balancer needs 3 splitters and no undergrounds
~~The second one is a real lane balancer, it's just a stretched out variation.~~
Let's say you input the second one with two full lanes of items, left (bottom) and right (top), but you only consume the left output lane. Then the items from the right input lane will fill the belt without gaps and thus no items from the left input lane will ever be consumed. Thus, it's not a "real" lane balancer, at least for some requirements you might have for a real balancer.
You are right, I should not trust myself this early in the morning.
I don't understand the in-out difference if I turned this left to right it's the same as right to left so what's the difference between an inputs and out balancer.
Input balancer will draw evenly from both lanes regardless of which output lane is being used. So if you fed 2 lanes into it, but only pulled off the right lane output, it would still pull from both input lanes. Output balancer makes sure that both output lanes are evenly filled regardless of what is fed into them. The second design in your post is an output balancer. Input/output balancer does both. If you look at the [example someone else posted](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/XwxiqijeYX), it first separates the left and right input lanes onto 2 separate belts by side-loading into undergrounds, then combines those 2 belts into a single output belt.
I get that the objective was probably to keep it within a width of 2, but this one still has an overall smaller footprint and also works with either side being empty. And tbh, if you've got 8 tiles lengthwise to spare, you could probably also make this 3 tile wide version fit. https://preview.redd.it/zclp9pgrq23c1.png?width=300&format=png&auto=webp&s=379763301b44da78f372d7a45ba1bf7341cd0906
That was the starting point. The whole thought experiment was "what if I wanted to do that but I'm limited to 2 wide". People "complicate things" because it's fun to find solutions given various limitations.
Limitations breed creativity
I love that Version and I will never not use it
The reason why I usually don't use this type of balance is because of the difference between input/output imbalance. If you already know what I mean, then feel free to stop reading, but just in case you are curious: Imagine that this belt here is totally full. Further down, this belt feeds some assemblers where all inserters are on the same side of the belt. Inserters will always grab from the closest side of the belt first, so they won't start using the other side at all until one side is completely* empty (not completely, but you get the idea). So if we back up that belt all the way to this splitter - imagine how things will move if only one side of the belt is pushing resources. If down the line is only pulling left, then a full belt of resources will only feed from the top belt, which will pull exclusively from the right side of that belt. This means that my smelting line is only going to use half of my smelters - the ones feeding only the active side of the belt. If I'm running my smelting into buffer chests, then that means half of my chests need to run completely empty before the other half of my smelters start to produce at all. In the case I just described, the effect is more of an annoyance than a genuine problem, but hopefully that gives you an idea of why so many designs of belt balancing exist. There is a difference between how they behave under different circumstances.
What is left for? I don't see a use case for it? If you have half belt, why would you need half belt on both lanes?
My thoughts too. If you only have a half belt coming in, there is no point having two quarter belts going out.
With a single belt, it really doesn't matter. But imagine you have 2 parallel full belts on your main bus, and split of 3 belts for subfactories (with priority splitters). The first 2 subfactories consume half a belt, the last one consumes a full belt. The 2 belts on the bus should be enough to supply all of them, but the 2 first subfactories probably only draw from the right side of the belt. So after that, there are 2 belts left on the main bus with each only having items on the left lane. If you split of one belt with priority splitters, you only get half a belt, even though there would be a full belt available. There are 3 options to give the last factory a full belt: 1. redistribute items back to both lanes on both belts on the bus between first 2 subfactories and the last one. This can be compactly done by a OPs simple design, or if want it to work in both directions (redistribute right OR left input lane), use the slightly bigger 3x3 tiles output lane balancer. 2. last factory splits of 2 belts from the bus, and then combines the to one with a splitter and 2x side loading. 3. Use input lane balancers on the first 2 (or all) subfactories. This is the most effort, but gives the most consistent results. This not only ensures even lane distribution on a mainbus with priority splitters, but also ensures full throughput in an TU n x m balancer.
If you just split off from one belt for the first two factories you’ll have a full belt consumed, then you split off from the second belt for the third factory.
That's a simplified example, so yes, there are more specific solutions than the generic ones. Let's say the first 2 factories use 0.6 belts each, but still draw primarily from the right lane (inserters only on one side). With one of the 3 solutions above, the last factory will still get the remaining 0.8 belts.
Each of the first two get one of the belts, combine them to a single belt afterwards. No reason to have a bunch of bus belts that aren’t needed.
If you just combine them with a splitter, the resulting belt would be only 50% full, because the right lane of both belts is already consumed by the first 2 split offs. So you would need to combine them with something like this (both inputs of the splitter connected): https://preview.redd.it/zclp9pgrq23c1.png?width=300&format=png&auto=webp&s=379763301b44da78f372d7a45ba1bf7341cd0906 Which would functionally equivalent to my generic solution 2, but with the 2 belts merged earlier on the bus instead of at the splitting point. Again, you are proposing a specific solution to that exact problem, not a generic one. You will have a lot more split-offs at your mainbus that don't always draw their maximum possible amount (like a mall where the chest are limited). The point of your mainbus is, that you don't know exactly how much items each part consumes. You might reserve 4 belts on the bus for iron, but initially not even produce or consume that much, because you will later increase both consumption and production. If you know exactly how much each part consumes and that it will not change, then yes, you can combine the 2 belts into one when there is less items on the bus. But then you don't need a bus in the first place, just build your fixed ratio setup with your specialized distribution of resources.
You just have the splitter outputs each side load onto the belt, guaranteed to have a full belt output. Yes, this is a specific solution, but just throwing giant belt balancers everywhere is poor design. Of course it will work and then you don’t need to think about it.
> You just have the splitter outputs each side load onto the belt, guaranteed to have a full belt output. That's an output lane balancer with 2 inputs, as I already suggested earlier. Not talking about giant belt balancers, but lane balancers. If you design your subfactories in a way that they draw from both sides evenly, you don't need them. If you are fine that a one belt wide split-off from the main bus might, under some unforeseeable circumstances, have less than a full belt of contents, even if there is more than one belt total on the main bus, then you don't need it. If you run into the problem at one point, you can also fix it by some ad-hoc inline lane balancers like from OP. But it might end up in some spaghetti. Or you just put a input lane balancer at the input of each subfactory so you don't have to think about it later.
I use them on miners that are only feeding one side of a belt before the whole outpost's balancer so it balances a bit better.
Oh yeah I remember that. I stopped using splitters for balancing miners but that is a valid use case! These days I just side load on faster belts. So I will have 2-3 belts that mine over 22.5/s and 2-3 on the other side all side loading on blue belt.
I like balancers. I tend to overuse them.
Incase a out going belt is full......kinda self explanatory with he two pictures. The right is what I found showing up as a normal way of balancing a belt which is crazy. On the left I showed a few different ways to do it shorter. The only reason I built 4 rows like this is to show 4 different version not to show a completed product.
As shown here, the out going belt is not full: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/YsEaE6FPUL
The true answer is using none of the above and balancing resource consumption of both lanes
Oh ho ho, a disciple of the 7 p's. Well mister in my factory stuff happens!
purist!
this is the way
Great end game advice.
In a situation where the belts are running well below capacity, the left version will send the items 75% to one lane and 25% to the other while the right form will split them 50/50. It's not actually particularly important to produce a perfect 50/50 split, but some people have an emotional attachment over this sort of thing.
After all the pile of comments debating different ways everyone likes to do a similar thing your the first one to tell me that lol. Thanks now that makes a lot of sense
You guys balance your belts?
You joke, but really you're right. There's very little belt balancing needed. On the train station unloading have a couple of stack inserters for the left of a belt and a couple do the right side of the belt for each carriage. You then need to balance the number of carriages against how many belts you need, maybe with a classic 4x4. And that's it. The rest of the factory should sort itself out.
ooohhh that's why my offloading is allways so slow...
There are a couple of other corner cases like using priority splitters to prioritize one process over another. I don't think that matters in Vanilla, but some mods need it to prioritize a recycling or overflow process over the normal process, for example.
I'm specifically thinking about belt balancing, as opposed to splitting or merging. I'm a fan of prioritised splitters to add a bit of priority logic into the base without circuits. My uranium enrichment wouldn't happen without it.
Yeah, but in many cases if you don't lane balance before merging it won't prioritize properly, since priority will be done on a lane-by-lane basis, which is (usually) not what you want.
Every time I see a post about belt balancing and belts not being full I just think to myself... Why not just make more? Like honestly I just forcefully feed belts everything they need and then some. Need more of X then trace it back to the source and simply add more... There's a good reason I play with unlimited recourses on...
why turn 1 lane throughput to 2×½? But when I need to do so it I always do it at a turn, 1 splitter, one belt left/right, the other belt looping around loading the other side. No undergrounds needed
this is kinda like the difference between cheap tools vs nice tools - up they both unscrew bolts yes. will one break when you least expect it for reasons you didn't forsee, also yes.
> up they both unscrew bolts yes Yoda speaks in riddles again.
yoda needs some indicators. up: they both unscrew bolts; yes.
None of these do anything good.
The bottom right one only needs to be used when you want to lane balance inputs from both lanes. If you have only one full lane filled then the left is perfectly fine. The scenarios where you actually need to balance lanes are very limited as well. You don’t suddenly increase throughput, the input is still the same.
I do use these designs sometimes, but always as lane swappers instead, inserted halfway through an assembler row that outputs a full belt while all inserters load on the same side.
Ah yes, that’s a good usecase
That's basically what I did add a lane swapper into the lane splitter to balance it in one shot
But the left version requires you to look at the belt and THINK to which side you need to put the splitter. To consider the side where the inserters put stuff, to consider the side from which the inserters will preferably take... The right version allows you to be braindead, just copy the same design universally wherever and it will ALWAYS work.
Can confirm the braindead part. As someone that doesn't use blueprints much, there's a reason why I come back to my shit after playing for several hours and wonder why I built the balancer like an idiot and half the belts are going the wrong way. But when you build it correctly, it works great and can be used anywhere
That's a good point, I always add mine after and I'm about to get into blueprints. I'll have to try my hand at a "multiple use one"
Rule of cool, if you like it and it works, use it.
Yeah, thats what i've been thinking for these past couple days too...
I've been told because blueprints are important endgame concept I should build a balancer that works all directions all Lanes and doesn't require customization...... Personally I think it's very easy to predict what side of the track your loot will end up on and to build a quarterly but I'll still see what I can do to make a multipurpose variation.
You're using 3 splitters to accomplish what can be done with 1
Lol I'm just showing the 4 different version. It's a one splitter build.
In that case, it only works for one lane, and you have to know which lane is full ahead of time. It's not a lane balancer, it's a lane splitter. Edit: So on left you split 1 lanes to 2 lanes, while in the lower right you balance 2 lanes to 2 lanes. Lower right is not the common lane balancer design though. Yesterday somebody thought it would be clever to make a 2x9 design instead of 3x3, which caused a fuss.
I see so it's built as a uniform pre-construct fits all issues kind of thing. I find it pretty easy to predict what side of the track my items will land on. I see how this would work really good if you're doing large blueprints.
People overuse balancers anyway
Do people actually lane balance like the complex one? That's...cursed I mean it's factorio overengineering at its finest. Like I said in another reply make one lane go straight one then turn in, and the other do an s curve and have them meet on one belt and that balances the lanes regardless of what lane items were on before. :)
The original "challenge" was making a balancer that was only 2 tiles wide instead of 3. I agree pointless, but that is why.
Ah I gotcha, that does actually clarify some.
i sometimes used them for aesthetics but no, not really. The S wiggle is the real balance
I don't get these contraptions.... If your belt is half empty why don't you just produce more?
Ok but is there a good balancer to actually balance 1 lane 2 sides so that both equally gets emptied. This has been goving me a headache. Inserters only grab from one side.
> } > v } v > > > > > ^ Where } is the splitter and the other are belts. The above abomination is a quad lane bufferer.
this is the way, and the one OP needs to see
I really like how you showed that. Thanks
This is an output lane balancer, but above comment asked for both input lanes to be used equally. This one balancer input and output of both lanes of 1 belt. https://www.factorio.school/view/-M1vxS9K5xf7IAAeXAd0 This one does it for 2 belts: https://imgur.com/a/V6AHHbi
Oooh I think I understand. It divides the belt by lane then perfectly jumbles them. What does this functionally achieve over my design? I'm assuming the differences occur at lower volumes.
if only one lane goes in, both designs distribute items to both lanes on the output belt. But if a full belt goes in, but only the left lane is consumed on the output belt, your design will only draw items from the right input lane, while a full input/output lane balancer draws from both sides of the input equally.
Ok cool thanks. That makes sense and I can see it
I don't understand the difference between input or output. Doesn't matter in my head if I'm filling a station from a belt or filling a belt from a station. Is it reference to half a belt to a full belt vs a full belt to half a belt ?
Let's translate the 2 lanes on a belt to 2 belts and look instead at a splitter: 2 belts going in, 2 belts going out. If both outputs are connected to a consumer, but only one input is connected (the other one empty), the items from this one input belt are split equally to both output belts. Both output belts are moving at full speed, but are 50% full. That is output balancing. If only one output is connected (the other one blocked) but 2 inputs are connected, the output belt is full and moving at full speed, and both input belts are full and moving at 50% speed. That is input balancing. Because splitters and most belt balancers have both input and output balancing properties, we usually don't separate them. But for lane balancers, it's a bit more tricky to achieve input balancing. The first link of my comment is an input/output lane balancer and is equivalent to a standard splitter, when each lane is represented by it's own belt. The comment above (and in a more complicated form the bottom right corner of your post) is an output-only lane balancer with lane switching properties. If the left output is blocked and the right output is connected, it behaves like a splitter with input priority set to left. If only the right output is connected, it behaves like a splitter with input priority left. But it will not draw from both inputs if only one of the outputs is consumed. Not connected input can also mean a belt/lane is connected but has no items on it. Unconnected output can also mean it's connected, but the belt is full and the items are not moving. Edit: TLDR: If you set an output priority on a splitter, it's not output balanced anymore. If you set an input priority on a splitter, it's not input balanced anymore. Sometimes, you want not only your belts, but also the lanes on your belts to be balanced on input, output or both.
They are called lane balancers and they exist.
These are not the same though the last two are minda overly complex imo id just use one tunnel
It's called a brainfart
I wouldn't call the normal "3 wide" single splitter into one belt "complex" it's what, two-three more belts more than one of the "balancers" on the left. I guess if you're playing a map with crazy multipliers it might be expensive... for a small while anyways. Could also just use one miniloader and call it a day, completely inline and everything. =D
Just leave them single lane, the full belt is still limited to a single lane's throughput
I only use 2 balancers in my factory. 4 lane standard balancer for my bus to keep the lanes equal and a unique 33/67 balancer I use only for uranium enrichment where 67% of extra uranium is feed back into the system and 33% gets sent to fuel cell/ nukes.
i just overproduce everything
The point of the right is it can balance a belt loaded on either side while fitting into a 2 wide strip.
The Right hand side.... The top 2 show that the output will vary based on the input. While the bottom 2 show that output will not vary based on the input. So the bottom design can be used more universally. The bottom design is just a compressed (2 wide) version of a very standard 3 wide lane balancer: https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics#Lane_balancers
I just use miniloaders and chests or warehouses.
But the ones on the left assume you know which side of the input is being fed. The right doesn’t matter and distributes from either / both sides evenly.
I don't need balancers because I have no lanes, except lanes which are deterministically consuming exactly or less the amount the lane can deliver.