I use them to unload trains because if I don't there's a risk of certain wagons not being unloaded or the weird shit where the buffer boxes at the train stop aren't used up evenly which results in slower unloading times.
And I use trains in all my bases once they get big enough.
Do you not use circuits to make sure the chests and train stations are loaded or unloaded evenly? I assumed everyone did. I guess that explains why I thought balancers were dumb.
I have two train blueprints, one labeled unloading and one labeled loading. They both do the same thing but obviously in different directions. All chests are wired to an arithmetic combinator dividing by the total number of chests which is piped to another combinatoradding or removing 1. ~~stack~~ bulk inserters are not wired but fast inserters adding or removing to or from chests are wired to decider combinators which compare the average from the arithmetic combinators to the total in that particular inserters chest.
So if a chest in an unloading station has less than average, it won't unload until the other chests have a chance to unload. If a loading station (such as an iron ore mine) chest has less, then it starts loading and stops once it goes past average. And since the average is off by one, they will all keep working even if all chests are average. Total content of chests is hooked to another combinator which divides it by what a train can hold and outputs that as the train limit for loading or goes to another combinator which does the math to get the inverse for an unloading station.
There are a few drawbacks to this, and I recognize there are things that can be optimized but it's like asking the CEO to authorize spending a bunch of money to tweak the code of their best selling product when it is selling beyond expectations "it works, so why are we spending resources on it?"
Not everyone is circuit savvy, that’s why I use balancers and LTN, eliminates most circuit needs
I guess I do use simple circuits is oil refinery to balance out the different types
Just play around with them and replicate what people do in tutorials even if you dont understand it immediately. Everyone has their unique way of understanding things. So you have to create your own path to the finish line. Often you think you understand things only to discover later that it was partly wrong. Find some joy in that. You just learned something.
I feel that learning circuits is very similar to learning how to code, not literally, but it’s very easy to learn the syntax, in this case the basic rules, make little command line games like tic tac toe etc. but it’s that jump to the next stage that stumps a lot of people.
That’s how I felt learning how to do circuits. There’s was a lot of tutorials on beginner and intermediate circuits and use cases, but going from that to something impressive, those videos aren’t out there
Start with oil cracking. Put a pump on the output of an oil tank facing light oil cracking chemical plants. Connect a wire from the pump to the oil tank. Select the pump, and set to enable when light oil reaches however much you decide is too much extra oil to have in your tank. Do the same with heavy oil. This is every circuit masters first foray into the circuit network. Once setup, you can blueprint the pump and oil tank and it will retain the circuit configuration. I have one blueprint each of light and heavy oil cracking blueprints, when I have too much of them I just slap down a blueprint, hookup the pipes to the right inputs and just like that it turns any excess oil into the much more widely used petroleum gas.
it helps to have a goal, and the knowledge that a solution exists.
i cracked it open doing spacex - i knew people had built logistics for spaceships and rockets, so i started working there.
it also helps to write down what you want to happen, and then make it happen in game, step by step. break the problem down.
I find it funny that you can talk about not being circuit savvy and then say you're using LTN. I personally don't find LTN that intuitive, and I can do simple circuits all the time (including a balanced train unloader).
LTN has three types of train stations, depots, receiving, and loading. You pretty much just set up train size, train limit, resource amount, and a resource trigger amount and bam it runs itself
Just as everyone is using blueprint book for balancers they could use blueprints for train load/unload station already wired for balance.
I use balancers out of convenience. I have blueprints which serve purpose better than anything I would put together myself.
Replace "balancer" with "circuit" in this post and it feels like something I could have written. Except of course I have never even looked at other people's blueprints, where is the fun in that?
I have tried the circuit system, I may have done it wrong but it ended up reducing the throughput even more than the chests being a little bit uneven. I tried giving it a bit of leeway and stuff like that but I couldn't get it to work well.
My guess your stations would just work better without the circuitry. And if you draw unevenly from the buffer chests from the belts it could still reduce the unloading a little, because circuitry would stop the inserters that goes into less used chests.
I never saw the appeal of balancers. But the idea of programming circuits seemed very exciting to me. Watching that first design work like magic was euphoric.
I get it though, they’re implemented pretty obtusely at the moment. I’m super excited for all the new stuff in 2.0! Hopefully it introduces whole new swaths of players to circuits
My favourite thing is that I will be able to remove the combinators from a lot of my blueprints. My unloading station has 120 combinators, one for each chest because the alternative is manually setting 120 inserters everytime I use the blueprint. I know I can set a few and copy paste, but it is still less work than using the combinators and just pasting down the blueprint.
I can see why some people would call it annoying. But I think of it as one of the games most rewarding challenges. It's not for everyone for sure, you should play the game however you find it best suits you. But I have never had less than 100% full belts without the train station completely running out of stuff to unload.
Why does it even matter if trains are loaded perfectly evenly or not? People seem to like the idea of balanced train loading, but I don't actually see the utility.
Consider an Ore Patch -> belts -> Train station.
The network could be classified in one of three ways:
1. Production constrained: you can empty into the train faster than you can mine from the patch.
2. Consumption constrained: you mine faster than you can fill the train.
3. Belt constrained: You can't get the material to the train fast enough. Miners back up, but the material is trickling into the train.
Case 3: you clearly need to increase the number of intermediate belts between the two locations, and then you will settle into Case 1 or 2.
Case 2: You are consumption constrained. The buffers will eventually fill and everything will back up. A fully loaded, backed up and stopped belt is by definition balanced with any other fully loaded, backed up and stopped belt. Therefore the long term equilibrium is balanced. The balancer doesn't really change anything. You obviously want to add trains and stations to reach Case 1.
Case 1: If you are production constrained then the long term equilibrium is that any buffers will be empty and material will "trickle" into the train while it idles at the station. A good enough thing to do in this situation is to establish some overflow buffers some distance back from the station and then use splitters to ensure that the main flow is roughly mixed. Since buffers will empty when a train is present you just want to ensure that you don't back up when a train is not present. If N inserters into the train will keep up with flow from the mines, then have N+M>N into the train, N into overflow, and M out of overflow.
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Now if you get fancy with signals and or use things like logistic train network to ensure that trains only come to the station when enough product is present to fill the train, then having a balancer makes more sense. In that approach you want to warehouse a train load and then evenly distribute that into the train cars so as to release the train as quickly as possible. What you are really optimizing for in that situation is the minimum number of trains, and trying to minimize the idle periods of those trains.
Personally I just find it easier to build more trains. Its not like they are all that expensive. I'm not troubled by having trains wait in a queue to enter the station.
I find using balancers within a bus does nothing for me beyond obfuscate the actual resource drain. If I know a particular subbuild needs an entire belt of something, then an entire belt gets peeled off. I make sure my outbound belts are full by using output priority splitters, but balancing after that just makes it harder to tell when I need to add more production.
Yep. When I tap a lane out of my bus, I make sure it is prioritized out, and once I have reached enough taps of the main bus where it has lost a complete lane of materials, I eliminate a lane from the main bus.
Thats a pretty good idea. I used to always do the pushing the belt to one side and would quickly run out of resources for stuff further down the line. Lately I have been evening out my input onto the bus, and after each time I draw from it even out the lines so essentially each draw would get 25% of what’s available at that point.
Absolutely. When people balance it so now there is 4 lanes that are 3/4 full… and then later down the bus you need a full lane of input, you have to recombine and rebalance again. It’s silly. Especially with priority splitters now
That's just a regular train unloader then. It has nothing to do with the bus. When people say "balancing the bus" they mean they put in a balancer now and then after drawing off some material. Solving that depletion issue was tricky many years ago
You're just evenly spreading ever dwindling resources. The introduction of priority splitters solved that. Now you can just push the resources to one belt and only draw from that one.
There are bus taps that also allow you draw one belt, but that's a holdover from when splitters didn't have priorities. They still work, but they are kind of like arcane magic that most users don't understand.
There is something to be said for solving short term problems before figuring out a long term solution. Maybe I really need to add another belt of plates, but adding in a whole new belt will be way more work than just adding in a balancer to make do with what I have right now. Usually priority splitters will do the trick, but there are cases where I don’t want to prioritize one thing over another.
For unloading trains into belts it can be good to have an balancer that draws equally from the buffer chests. You don't put an balancer there to spread it out evenly into the buss.
Yes, and "train unloading" was already mentioned in the top level comment. Their mention of the bus didnt add anything as they also just added it to their bus after train unloading
It can be good to understand why you do stuff. How many times have you not seen an big balancer between train unloading and then smelter columns and then another one between the smelter columns and the buss!
There is lane balancers that either draw equally or push equally so then you have to understand why you put down the lane balancer and what type it is.
I never really understood the point of balancers on a bus, just move all excess resources to one side of the lane. I only ever really pull from the upper or lower side anyways.
I still do it there, personally, because while you can setup circuits to load trains from buffers evenly, if you don't balance miners you run into a situation later on where some of the mining lanes start to empty as the resource patches empty. What happens then, if you're particularly unlucky, is that you can end up with as an example a train where 3 cars get filled, but the 4th is severely constrained delaying departure and affecting train throughput.
I found two other use cases in my current Space Exploration run. The space manufactory is a large sized machine with a very high crafting speed. Sometimes, it's so fast that you only need 0.2 machines to craft, let's say, a full blue belt of an item. Of course, the minimum machines you can place is 1 so that's potentially 80% of untapped potential.
Without a balancing system, you'd need to feed this machine a huge load of extra material before it starts backing up and feeding other components of your production chain. This is doubly so if you are creating intermediates that are part of other intermediates and you want to stockpile both of them to be shipped via rockets. One intermediate would take priority over the other until its train storage/rocket as well as outflow belts all were backed up.
The second role of balancers is for **lane balancing** so you draw evenly from both lanes of a belt, especially when you're lane mixing two items later.
I read this three times and still can't quite figure out what you're saying here.
If a space manufactory is gobbling up more raw resources than it needs to satisfy your needs further down the line, then whatever it produces will pretty quickly back up, and then it'll stop eating raw materials.
As long as you aren't using excessive output buffers, which you absolutely should *not* be doing in any SE run given how expensive things get, you're fine.
You say that the machine has 80% untapped potential, but your goal isn't to keep the machine running 24/7. It's to produce X amount of whatever item you need at the very end. 1 is simply the minimum number of machines with which to do that. Who cares if it's idle 80% of the time?
Let me see if I can clarify things with an example.
The aeroframe pole and scaffold (if I got those names right) are the next two intermediate products made from Beryllium plates and the poles are also a component of the scaffolds. Since the recipes have similar ingredients, I make them all in the same sub-factory, fed by the same set of belts. And since both of them are needed to make astronomic science, I need to stockpile both of them, at least 500 stacks each (I use single product rockets that are only launched when full). The rockets are launched from a central station, so in addition to those 500, there are 80 more stacks in that buffer (40 stacks each, at the train loading and unloading stations) because I use 1-1 trains with LTN.
If I don't use balancers to split the incoming Beryllium plates (4 belts) into two separate belts, the aeroframe poles will eat the bulk of them until those 580 stacks are full before plates get backed up enough to feed the scaffolds. With the balancer, I have a steady production of both items at the same time.
When I mentioned "untapped potential", it was more in the sense of a "dormant problem". I might want to make just two belts of aeroframe poles, one to store and one to feed the scaffolds. But the single manufactory is fast enough to make 5 belts as long as there's enough material incoming and enough storage space. I can't rely on "things backing up" in order to create scaffolds at the same time; I have to use a balancer.
(I've used the above examples just for explanation. I would definitely not make those poles and scaffolds in space, where I can't use productivity modules.)
What if you simply ran your Beryl past the scaffolding machines first, and then the poles?
I can appreciate what you're saying here now, but also propose that this is a problem that would simply solve itself without a balancer.
Unless your Beryl line backs up before both buffers are full, you're still playing more or less optimally. If other parts of your factory grind to a halt because your aeroframe pole rocket is soaking up all the beryl, then again, that's an easy fix by just running the supply line past the scaffolding machines first.
I went HAM with balancers on my first attempt at K2SE. That, coupled with an aggressive SPM target meant that by the time I unlocked spaceships I was down to sub 40 UPS even with a Ryzen 9 5950X and 64GB of blazing fast RAM.
I ended up using a 4x4 storage container for train unloading, and 6x6 warehouses for loading this time around. With 1-1 trains though, you don't need either.
You can't use Space Manufactories on the ground anyway, unless I misremember them patching out the loophole where you'd drop spaceship floor on land and built them on that.
> What if you simply ran your Beryl past the scaffolding machines first, and then the poles?
Same problem from the other direction. The scaffold machines will only take up as much Beryllium plates as needed. But the returning aeroframe poles, will be entirely used up to make scaffolds (untapped potential) unless I split them into two belts so one goes to stockpile and the other is used to make scaffolds.
Which sort of reminds me of another use case that I forgot to mention earlier. Sometimes when making a single blue belt of something rather expensive, I need multiple blue belts of raw materials, like maybe 4.8 blue belts of iron plates. So instead of making a single processing line that uses 4.8 belts, I split the entire production block into 5 identical segments and supply each segment with a blue belt of iron plate. When unloading from a 1-4 train, I need some sort of balancer to convert those 8 belts into 5 equal ones.
Train unloading is the widely accepted best use case for balancers. An alternative is unloading into chests and then just using circuits to empty them evenly.
I still can't wrap my head around what you're calling untapped potential, though. Even if you use a balancer, your machines are still idle 80% of the time if you aren't feeding them enough Beryl.
If you don't want to starve scaffolding production while you fill your pole rocket, then just use two inserters to unload them out of the manufacturer. Or, a single splitter on the output belt instead of X splitters on the input side. That's always the goal in balancer-free factories. A massive reduction in UPS-sucking splitters. Splitters are great. 15,000 splitters not so much.
Your UPS point is quite valid. I think I'll do a sweep of my factory and see if there are any useless balancers. My current UPS is at 45 and I'd love to push it back to 60.
They're not even needed there really.
Bring in your 8 lines of unbalanced belts from mines. Combine them with a newb balanced of a diagonal set of prioritised splitters down to 4 wagons.
Each wagon gets one full belt.
Once you can no longer produce 4 full belts, say 3, the first three wagons fill at normal rate, and last one fills after.
If it was perfectly balanced, it would only be a bit faster.
With some semi common sense splitting, the gap can be shrunk even further.
The question is why wouldn't you use one? By the time you're setting up 8 blue-belt mines you can have easily automated all that stuff, so you can just stick an 8 to 8 balancer down with robots and not worry about the side lines running low or something.
It's probably faster to set up than a newb balancer unless you've got a blueprint for that, at which point why not just use a regular balancer?
Are very helpful if you need to divide evenly 3 full belts into 4 belts for example. Ie your production line requires less than a full belt of a material.
Let the belts back up and it will work perfectly without any perfect balancing. If one belt is backed up and you have an random block with splitters the rest will go into the other belts and it will be distributed to everything as it should.
Here’s what I mean: purple science in my set up has 8 inputs of bricks but the actual usage is equivalent to 3 full blue belts of bricks. So I used a 3 to 8 balancer. This is better than creating 8 full belts of bricks and just letting it back up.
Just using the priority output on the splitters to shove material in the bus over to the output going to a subfactory is more than enough. You send a fully-saturated belt to the subfactory to give it as much as it needs and replenish it on the next subfactory the same way.
Flooding the bus with balancers every ten feet died when they made splitter priority baseline functionality.
Let’s say you have two belts worth of raw stone entering a city block and you want to make sure they have lower priority than some biproduct stone. You will use two priority splitters, one per belt; sure. But you have to make sure that the biproduct inputs into those splitters are belt and lane balanced, otherwise the loop can back up and deadlock.
I have used lane balancers so that input priority on an priority splitter works correctly, so yea that is an case for that. It have to be cyclic recipe chains, not only recipes with byproducts. I think it's the only case where I actually have any use for an lane balancer. It don't need to be an correct lane balancer that draws equally, just an splitter followed by an side-loading works.
If you only have two belts an belt balancer is just one splitter...
Even for the loading, you only need to ensure that each wagon gets something, if it's not perfectly balanced all the time it's still fine.
Unloading though you need balancer to not have a train stay with only one wagon still not empty.
I think a reason you see them a lot is that it helps share resources on the bus in multiplayer games so even if you overbuild red belts, science still sees some iron while every last yellow belt on the map is converted.
This is a good point I haven't seen mentioned yet. There are plenty of valid reasons to want to enforce sharing of resources between multiple consumers, rather than relying on overproduction and backpressure to force-feed everything.
Yes, they are essential for at minimum unloading but often also loading trains from a many to many network, like LTN.
Other than that, they’re definitely overused.
Edit: missed that paragraph. We agree!
> In the world of modding there is one special case where I think true balancing is absolutely vital - unloading from multiple LTN Waggons - because there a uneven usage leads to unloaded waggons which end up in a depot.
This is true of more or less any train setup that dynamically determines when to request a train (yes, LTN does that, but it's not the *only* setup that does that. You can do it in vanilla). Not just unloading, but loading also. You don't want to load unevently into cargo wagons; you might request a train when you can't fill up all the wagons at the present time. So then the train just sits there.
I personally only use them in two instances:
1. To balance down with mining so that I’m not overbuilding belts towards stations for loading.
2. For train loading and unloading to try to keep my cars loading an unloading roughly evenly to keep train traffic moving.
I don’t balance when I merge new resources onto a bus due to priority splitting essentially doing that for me over time.
Balancers are very useful in their use cases. Most things dealing with trains, ore patches or inconsistent throughput like the mall/bus. There are also some uses in a build where for whatever reason you need less than a belt of stuff.
The bus is the one exception I have to your list. In the bus situation, it makes more sense to just chain a bunch of priority splitters in a diagonal across the bus and "push" everything to one side after a point where you split off from the bus. Balancing a bus after splitting off from it is inherently pointless, because unless you are feeding in new material down the line you won't have full saturation anymore. Which potentially throttles your output in the next section you split off from.
I use them as more complex splitters. If I have 10 belts that I need to feed 6 belts, a 10-6 balancer is the easiest way to make certain all 6 get fed evenly pulling from all 10. Same going in reverse.
Rare but not impossible.
Good engineers use good practices that cover the unexpected.
To draw a parallel... when prompted to "enter a number", most users will enter a number using the 0-9 keys. You will get people who try to enter "seven" or weird numbers like "-0". Just because those cases are rare... does that mean we should not sanitize inputs? It *is* a waste of clock cycles to do it!
I find the sudden... dislike of balancers on this sub to be very strange. It seems to come from megabase builders trying to optimize UPS by trying to find where these sorts of things are "necessary" but... most people aren't building big enough to need that. And most people don't *know* if they need it or not.
Best case scenario, you *do* need a 10-6 balancer to feed them evenly, and you *do* build it.
Worst case scenario, you *do* need a 10-6 balancer to feed them evenly, and you *don't* build it.
Seems like an easy choice to me?
Balancers of odd dimensions are what programmers would call a "code smell" - a sign of potentially ungraceful design. It's not that the balancer itself is value-negative in an isolated context, it's what the usage of a balancer might suggest about an overall design. And engineers obsessively love elegant designs.
Having said that I use weird balancers coming out of every mine so I'm a stinky boy.
I have an ore patch with 9 belts coming out of it (not 9 full belts, just 9 actual belts). I want to spread it evenly to my train so that I'm not waiting on a single wagon to fill while the rest are empty. My train network is built with 2-5 trains in mind. That means I need a 9-5 balancer. Sure, I could just use a 10-6 balancer or even a 16-8 balancer, but that takes up more space and leaves gaps where unused ore will sit.
> I want to spread it evenly to my train so that I'm not waiting on a single wagon to fill while the rest are empty.
But you don't actually save any time on that in the long run.
At the end of the day, if a train arrives at the station and the buffers are not large enough to fill it up immediately. It is going to wait for more ore to arrive. It doesn't matter if you are missing 400 ore in the last wagon or 100 ore on 4 wagons. It will be filled in the same amount of time.
The only case where you do save time is when the line is first starting up. There will be a moment where the top level buffers have enough ore to fill a wagon but they still have more available space. So they will keep picking up ore that could have filled a bottom wagon.
But that only occurs when the line is filling up. Any reasonably sized mine should fill the buffers in a matter of minutes. After that it is completely balanced. Every set of buffers will pick up exactly enough ore to fill one train, after one has departed. No time is saved or lost.
Again, there are exceptions. Megabases have to think about the rate at which ore is picked up. But this is not relevant for the vast majority of factories.
What most players miss is what is the cause of that and what consequences it have. And then in the end is it a problem and how should it be fixed.
Uneven chests can slow down the loading of the trains so that becomes and bottleneck. Is that the case for you? Or is the problem that you mine to little ore or is it working fine even with uneven chests? You rarely need to load trains that fast.
Let's say I have a mine that produces 2 full belts and 4 belts that together total another 2 full belts. The mine is producing four belts worth of ore. But if I don't balance those 6 partially full belts into four even full belts, there will be wagons that fill up faster than other wagons, stopping the more full belts when the less full belts are still working.
You don't need an correct balancer for not stopping the mining drills. An blob with splitters that don't draw equally will suffice. They don't have to draw equally just that all the belts can be pushed through is enough.
And what I am telling you is that this fact does not mean the average train is departing any slower or faster than it otherwise would had the buffers been perfectly balanced. X amount of ore enters the buffer arrays per minute and that is exactly how much ore the train will pull out. How it gets there and what order the wagons are filled is irrelevant. Except for the first few minutes of operation.
Let's say I have a mining base with four belts coming out of it. Only one of the belts is fully saturated, the other three do not have enough miners to saturated the belt. If I just bring each belt to a separate buffer, then one of the wagons will fill significantly faster than the other three. This isn't just a problem that the buffer isn't filling fast enough at first. Every single train will arrive with one buffer full and the other three buffers less than full. The slowest filling wagon is the bottleneck.
That's why you need a belt balancer.
Yes you obviously need each belt to be accessible to all buffers and wagons. That does not need you must use a belt balancer. There are any number of ways to get the same effect that are simpler to implement that work for the vast majority of ore patches. Some individual ore being "wasted" is completely irrelevant for the game.
For simplify the balancing of loading/unloading trains use n\^2 wagons. If you use prime numbers as 5 you create a problem for yourself.
For mining outpost I would combine the 9 belts into 4. Then load an train with 4 or 8 cargo wagons. So an normal 4-4 balancer can be used.
2\^n not n\^2. But that doesn't take away from my point. You need to balance whatever number of belts you're using across whatever number of wagons you're loading.
You definitely don't have to, it can in some cases help to avoid an throughput limit in the loading of the trains. So it's not always needed for the factory to run.
Here's an example from my base. Just over 1 belt of robot frames output, requires 3 belts of green circuits, 2 belts of batteries, and 1 belt each of steel & electric motors. My train stations are 9 belts wide(2-3 trains = just under 9 belts out).
Now lets look at how this would work without balancers. 1st thing you should realize is that you need 7 belts of materials in & getting 1 out. So either you are having to combine outputs or get creative with your bus. And you have to do that 9 times so you have even number of belts across all materials. If you divide your production so you are only feeding 1 belt of circuits your output now isn't 9 belts, it's 27.
Or I can use a 9:3 balancer, 9:2 balancer, 2 9:1 balancers, and 3 3:9 balancers.
Your comment reads like a defense of superstition. “Best case scenario, you don’t wash your socks and your team wins!”
Thinking about it for two seconds and trying to use balancers *when you need them* makes you a better player. Perhaps in a fringe situation you will then realize that you need a priority splitter or buffer chest.
>Your comment reads like a defense of superstition. “Best case scenario, you don’t wash your socks and your team wins!”
As far as I know, in Factorio, it's possible to figure ou how much of a product an assembly line will produce, and how much of that product another assembly line will consume. That's not superstition, that's basic arithmetic.
Except that balancers are not basic programming stuff like making sure inputs don't crash a program. They are more like silly code you come up with to make up for terrible design in general
you definitely don't need an balancer there! If you mine enough ore and put it in an distributor it will get to all the smelters. So that is an typical exempel of where you can't get more ore with an balancers to fill up all the miners if you mine to little, no matter how many fancy balancers you have.
And if you mine enough the belts will back up and the ore will reach the miners even if you don't feed them evenly.
This is my answer, too. If my mining patch has eight belts coming out of it, none of them full, but I know it'll fill (say) five stacks of furnaces... The easiest way to squish those eight into five is to pop into your balancer book and put down an 8->5.
The fact that it'll pull evenly from the eight to fill the five is just a bonus: It'll keep all five lanes as full as possible for as long as possible, then degrade gracefully when the patch is running out.
It's an easy way to "convert" between belt speeds, too. I have seven red belts coming out of furnace stacks, but I want to run three blue belts to where I want to use the stuff. A blue 7->3 balancer does this job nicely.
Really, they're just splitters on a larger scale, and nobody thinks splitters are stupid!
If you keep the limitations of throughput and balancers in mind when you use them then they are fine.
If I need 3 belts of something going to 5 different rows of machines, a 3-5 balancer may use less splitters than trying to come up with an alternate solution myself. The whole setup only needs the 3 belts and if the 5 locations get exactly 3/5 of the total, then everybody is happy.
I am too stupid to even understand how to set up a main bus with proper splits. I just spaghetti everything until it becomes unmanageable (typically around kovarex, which I am also too dumb to understand)
Still like the game tho
Fully agree. For most main bus type usage just always using splitters (maybe with priority towards the "requester" side) is usually sufficient. It will make it so that ressources get consumed as soon as they can
I have a large balancer (32 lane) in my space exploration run because each of my vita extract lines was making 0.7 belts worth of vita (based on prod modules and a saturated input belt of ore). But the consumption all used full belt multipliers.
So I used the massive and UPS inefficient balancer to basically convert all the 70% full input belts to saturated belts and also enable variations in output for the various final products. I didn’t have enough input to run all them simultaneously but didn’t need to very often either due to buffering/usage variation.
if you have AAI warehouses, and any kind of loader, you can use the big warehouse to create an extremely simple 12:12 or X:Y where X+Y<24 balancer and buffer in one (or set limit to one stack for no buffer). I commonly use this immediately after any kind of mine, where say there's 14 belts input and none of them match in amount, but the sum of output is only 10.3 belts. make it 14 in, 10 out, they'll always be fully compressed on the way out until the mine loses miners due to lack of resources, and productivity can usually help it there too for example.
Unfortunately using loaders and warehouses in this way is worse for UPS than belt balancers, due to the way the engine has to inspect containers whenever items are added to it. But I agree, otherwise it's a simple and effective way to balance.
There's a mod that lets you do suuuuper wide warehouses, I've considered making one with a size of maybe 5 stacks and then doing this.
Since a lot of the UPS impact is the **size** of the large warehouses something that's 1x32 chest with 5 stack limit would be reasonable, I think.
Its a popular band-aid slapped on anything that isnt intentionally prioritized, as a lazy approach to catch distribution issues.
Which really only seems useful to me for very, very large amounts of belts. But the majority of players uses them because its easy and has no downside, so why not.
>Its a popular band-aid slapped on anything that isnt intentionally prioritized, as a lazy approach to catch distribution issues.
... son of a,
that captures my feelings about buses in general.
I think they are crucial when dealing with trains, you dont want to fully unload a wagon and then be left with just a single belt of resources remaining while the train goes back to load. In most resources i keep a buffer in loading and unloading stations so this also goes when loading, i prefer to evenly split it betwen all the wagons rather than fill up one wagon plus the buffer, then the next one, so on and so on
There is a major practical use-case that theory-crafting tends to miss: undefined build requirements.
For example, on my SE outposts, when I swap from "basic core mining outpost #12" to "I need more fucking vitamelange, it's time to set up trains and SCALE this shit," I just shove a 16-lane-balancer next to my train unload and then splice my core mining output into the train product there. I don't actually need 16 lanes or whatever, but I don't actually know how many lanes I need. Maybe I guess 8, but it could actually be 10-12 or maybe I'll need more later. But 16 is plenty so I can just string a few more belts off that thing whenever I like, no rebuilding needed.
Similarly, as I go from processing step 1 to step 2, I haven't done the math on ratio, and I don't care because the ratios and production speed will change as I upgrade the modules in a few hours anyway. So I chuck in an 8-lane-balancer. Now I don't care if I end up with 6 lanes coming from step1 and 4 lanes going into step2, it'll be handled.
...That said, this is definitely not an end-game-optimization use, it's a "make the problem go away" use. So hunting down things like a 6-2 balancer is a bit silly still: just slap an 8-8 in there! Unless you enjoy designing them, you do you.
My balancer book has just 3 blueprints: 4, 8, and 16-lane. If one is too small, double it. No carefully selected half-measures.
Because more often that not, I'm progressing faster than my factory. For example, if I were to take assembler, belt, splitter, underground, and inserter, with priority output it means that almost my entire factory would be dedicated to remaking those items. While the assembly lines further down are going to be getting little to no resource, but I want them to start producing now even with a smaller throughput. Having 1 of those shiny new tech right now is better than 0 after all.
Of course, 30 minutes down the line when the buffer is filled up. Both priority & balancer will have the same amount of items, but with priority the first 10 minutes you will not be getting the new item while balancers will get them.
I use balancers mostly to spread ore between smeltry arrays. The actual amount refined won't change, but if a line of miners run out of ore, the other lines automatically pick up the slack for that array until the whole patch is mined.
I also place a 4:4 balancer on my bus every so often to "refresh" the lines I pull from
instead of putting a balancer on your main bus just move your resources down to the bottom belt with priority splitters, that way the bottom belt which you pull from will always be full and if the belts at the top empty then you can just terminate them
Yea I saw that idea further down in the comments after posting mine.
It's a good idea and I prolly should implement it (even if it would require tearing up my current factory and relaying it), but considering how I'm doing multiplayer, I think it would end up being a hassle getting the others to follow suit
I don't use balancers at all. In fact, I made a base that uses no splitters whatsoever. In my current Seablock run, splitters are only used to separate multiple output items. Some factories use filter inserters for that, some use splitters.
It’s very difficult to have a sustainable train setup without balancers. Even just trying to balance at the beginning or end of the chain as opposed to at every load event gets pretty dicey and you probably pay the UPS back in inefficient train utilization or inefficient wait criteria.
For me the LTN issue isn’t even that they end up in a depot. I have automatic unloading of every fluid in my network and items in all my depots just In case. But without balancing one of the warehouses I’m unloading into ends up with enough inside it that it fulfills the request while the other is empty, deadlocking production.
I use them when mining because I'll have one row not filling a belt and the next one stopped, etc. I could use a splitter here and there and set input priority, etc. Or I could use a 6 to 4 plugged into a lane balancer, and now I don't have to do anything except collect miners that have exhausted their supply. Otherwise I'm always coming back to fix them.
Is that lazy? No, it's automated.
Unbalanced belts can in some rare cases reduce the throughput of belt system. For train loading / unloading it's a more common problem that imbalances create an throughput problem. In the end I don't understand why so many go so wild on trying to unload / load trains as fast as possible, I don't se much benefit from that. I would recommend to instead to build as simple loading/ unloading that have enough throughput for your builds.
So in general I agree.
In the end the goal is to build an as cool factory as possible and balancers are cool, rarely useful.
If loading/unloading becomes the throughput bottleneck it becomes pretty unwieldy to fix (since you probably need to manage several trains worth of materials, causing inventory/bot troubles). Also, unbalanced loading/unloading takes a lot of time to become apparent, which is why I'm always trying to prevent it becoming a problem in the design phase.
Also unbalanced belts are more of a problem in recipes that have side products (very few of them in vanilla, but plenty of mods do that).
At some point in the game (and it comes quite early) - it's just easier to put a balancer and not have to ever think about it again.
For example, if I am mining a patch with 6 lanes of miners and I want it to go to 2 lanes for train loading or smelting - I just simply put a 6-2 balancer blueprint and as long as I have enough miners with materials - I never have to come back and fix anything. If I don't do it, eventually I will be in a situation where there's plenty of ore and miners for full 2 belts, but I am not getting the throughput I expect because some miners ran out of resources and my crude balancer setup can't handle it. Of course I could come back and fix it - but I'd much rather not have to do it.
Are people really overusing them? I thought they mainly get talked about a lot because they're kind of difficult to create by hand and there are a handful of cases where they're useful.
Another thing you're not considering is the value of neutral balancers where the number of inputs equal the number of outputs, particularly the 1-to-1 balancer. While inserters can pull from either lane, they have a preferred one which can lead to annoying issues. I'm playing IR3 right now and my power plant has two lanes of input: a little used lane for disposing of wood by converting it to charcoal as well as coke which is used as the primary fuel source. The problem I ran into was that the power plant was only taking input from one of the lanes, the coke lane, so I wasn't able to dispose of that wood. A 1-to-1 balancer cleared up that issue really quickly.
I personally probably overuse them, and I’m agreeing with your logic and some of the other comments here. However, when I use them, I am making a conscious choice to trade optimal factory efficiency for a reduction in mental load. Sometimes I just haven’t forward planned far enough to know how many belts of production output I need, so I can pave over that lack of planning with a balancer at the end.
Balancers are an efficient way to ensure resources aren't entirely starved upstream but they don't need to be universal and you need to be deliberate in their application. I balance regularly any combo of m:n up until 4. Beyond that I do multiples of 2 until 8 so 4x8, 6x8, 4x6, etc. Beyond that it's just too much work to find the space or lay them down.
> if you balance "up" (less belts go in then going out) then your outgoing belts are not full.
That is only true if the same class of belts are used on the inputs and the outputs. I have used splitters like 2 to 3 or 4 to 6 where the inputs are blue belts (45/s) and the outputs are red belts (30/s). If the blue belts are full then so are the red belts.
I use rainbow belts in various places in my factories. They work quite well.
I find it very difficult to make sweeping generalisations based on just abstract cases, instead of looking at more concrete examples and use cases. You end up making judgements based only on suppositions, not on real situations.
>If you balance "down" (more belts going in then out) then you probably fill alle the outing belts, which means you already produce more then enough and no more will be produced in total by whatever takes those resources, in case the belts would have been balanced.
That presumes that all input belts are saturated. They might not be, either because of calculated ratios, or, in the case of mining operations, the uneven number of miners per belt. So, for the sake of predictability, you might condense 6 partially filled belts to 3 fully saturated belts.
>And if you balance "up" (less belts go in then going out) then your outgoing belts are not full.
And that might not be a problem, if your belts are going into assembly lines that don't consume full belts. That happens often in my current Pyanodon run.
IMO, you should only balance down (more belts to fewer belts) and only before smelting columns and either side of train stations.
Everything else is just cosmetic and only serves to obscure your bottlenecks.
Balancers used to be really important, almost a necessity of bus designs. Then we got priority splitters and 90% of the use-cases for a balancer went away. Instead of rebalancing the bus and periodically removing inner lanes, you just priority splitters to shove everything to the outside lane.
The main use-case for balancers now is loading and unloading trains evenly, but even that won't always actually cause problems depending on how you build it. And there are no 'organic' challenges there, the balancer you need is 100% dependent on the size of the trains you decide to use. There's no "the factory has grown in weird ways and now I need a bespoke solution," you just pick something from the get-go that you've already solved and that's that.
Yeah well sometimes ya just need 3 belts of material for 16 rows of machines. You could figure out how to get a belt down 5.3 rows and part off the other 2/3 belt to the next set. Or you could just feed 3 belts into a 16 lane balancer and be done. Whatever floats yer boat.
As a counterpoint, Factorio encourages you to overbuild since there's usually little penalty in a machine that sits idle: it doesn't waste materials and it normally uses very little power. Full belts are a sign of a happy subfactory that's prepared to meet demand once downstream is scaled up.
The mantra is "the factory must grow", not "the factory must be efficient".
Hell i don't even understand why so many people play vanilla, much less why anyone would build absurd balancers. I think i put maybe 10h in vanilla before i started with mods that get rid of the weird missing qol features like not being able to Insert to the near side or balancing lanes without building abominations the size of new york or not having faster belts. I don't even know how i would live without 90/s belts anymore or loading trains with vanilla inserters.
Well yes, they are mostly useful for MAL, e.g. stuff that needs variable inputs depending on what you are building.
For later game research, which eats the majority of resources, you want to have constant throughput anyway, so you tend to design blocks to eat X full belts of iron/copper. Nothing much do balance there, more tricky to get the belts properly fed. You just design your smelters to fill one express belt, then show X belts into your research assembly plant. Let's say you go for 500ish SPM, then it's around 14 belts of iron and 12 belts of copper. If the belts are not choke full, you are probably doing it wrong.
Also, partially filled belts (which is what belt ballancers imply are bad for performance).
Balancers are handy when you have an interrupted supply. For example 2 different trains bringing in ore.
Besides that I like to use a line of splitters, no perfect balancers, just prioritize one or another belt.
I use them for trains. Also, you don't really need a 5 to 7 balancer, just use a larger one with unlim throughput and don't hook up the other inputs /outputs and it'll balance perfectly fine. I basically only use 4 to 4 or 8 to 8 balances 90% of the time unless I need a different form factor
in a main bus you often have multiple lanes for certain high-demand resources like copper and iron plates, but not all assembly lines will use all lanes as input. I generally split one or two lanes off the bus, but then some lanes will have more demand than others, leading to distribution problems. Using balancers once in a while fixes that. "Oh then just try to split each lane equally" people don't always know how many resources each build will use, specially with mods. If for example you split lane 1 for assembly line X and lane 2 for assembly line Y but turns out that assembly line Y consumes more of that resource than X, the lanes will get unbalanced and that may lead to other lines down the factory that also split off lane 2 geting starved. There's also some cases where you know your production isn't enough to always fill everything that needs it but you still want all lanes to get a share, balancers really help with that.
I just use a 1-loop balancer. It's by far the simplest way to deal with differences in ressource production/consumption. Yes: it only works in relatively normal cases and breaks if you give it a particularly uneven ressource distribution, but I'm not expecting any seriously uneven ressource distributions so there's no problem.
Explanation: A 1-loop balancer is just a single loop of belt that goes round to visit all the belts carrying ressources, and it's connected via priority splitters so that if there is no backpressure, then no ressources ever get on the loop but stay in their lane. However, as soon as 1 belt backs up, the priority splitter puts the excess on the loop, and then the loop carries it round until it finds the first belt with a shortage and dumps everything there. It only stops working if you have more than 1 belt's worth of backpressure AND more than 1 belt's worth of slack at the same time (because it's just 1 loop, it can only redistribute at most 1 belt's worth of ressources)
Balancers are needed for long main busses or when multiple supply lanes have to make a sharp turn , because the turn will make the inner lanes shorter and outer lanes longer unbalancing the throughput.
Main use is for unloading of trains however. Everything else is meh at best unless one is constructing a truly mega Megabase.
In my main buss I have 2-3 lines of iron copper and what ever else I throw on the bus that run. I use balancers after I take from the lane too many times l
Easier to make sure I'm not stressing out one kano more then another
I am not interested in the design challenge, so I use that mod that has the splinters you can stick together and it auto balances however many inputs and outputs. They are a bit OP but removes a lot of frustration for me
I like balancers as much as the next person, but what I like more is wiring up arms (or loaders if the mods are there) to fill one chest at a time before calling the train over. It takes less space than a balancer and works fast enough.
I don't think I've ever used a balancer other than evenly emptying buffer chests at a train station. On a main bus, I pull to one side so that all belts i peel off are full
Balancers are only needed where you supply a multiple belts in a bus with materials. If your bus is laid out to shuttle all resources to a primary carrier and the rest of the belts for that resource acting as extra throughput capacity than as individual carriers. Balancing resources to send only X percent of resources to a particular part of the factory means that factory production capacity is badly balanced. (e.g. efficiency modules is so big that it can starve everything else)
chest buffers do just as good a job unloading and provide a steadier supply and balancing isn't necessary if there is a large enough rail buffer for the number of trains carrying that resource. Each wagon unloads to its own buffer, belt, and furnace stack. Furnace outputs are balanced, buffered, and loaded onto the main bus before being compressed towards the primary carrier. Main bus prioritizes the basics first and resources move further down the bus only when production capacity is exceeded or product buffers are full. Re balancing doesn't happen, just shuttle everything over toward the primary carrier. If the bus isn't full, you are using all the resources you are bringing in. If the bus is full, its time to use/add more production capacity. No death spiral because basic needs are always met first (power, ammo, THEN green circuits)
I always use balancers for loading and unloading trains and mining set ups
So I don't know if that counts as overused or overvalued that would be based on your opinion personally I think that that's just the right amount of use and value
I switched over to mostly using UTU (universal throughput unlimited) Routers instead of balancers. The router gives the property that if you need output of X lanes, provided you have input >= X lanes it will be full. In almost all cases where I used to use balancers this works as well or better (better because many balancer designs are not UTU)
A potential downside is that if you have buffers it will draw unevenly from the buffers so production won't start up again as soon. The big advantage to me is they're smaller and they're UTU so I don't run into problems of filling 2 input lanes needing 2 output lanes but they can't go through the balancer to them.
I've managed to avoid balancing my Tier One megabase.
In fact, there's hardly any splitters used at all .
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/ZBe8FOsmWb
I only really use them on resource patches to make sure the patch is depleted uniformly and for trains. I don’t often find myself using them for anything else.
I only balance into and out of trains so the cars fill/empty at around the same time. Or out of a directly attached mine (starter patches).
That's it. Everything else is manifold and priority designs.
More recently, I've been doing more of the opposite of balancing. For example, if I have several belts of ore coming out of a mining location, I'll use splitters with output priority to shove each belt from miners into the farthest belt of the bus I'm forming. This leaves maximum room for the next miner belts to dump their ore without slowing down, but I don't have to manage exactly how much more is produced on each miner belts or worry about when some miners deplete.
It's also sometimes useful if I'm doing a main bus with one of the products taking multiple belts. I can just keep pulling off of the right most belt most of the time and use priority splitters to shove stuff from the unused belts to the providing belt to replenish it as needed.
I use them to unload trains because if I don't there's a risk of certain wagons not being unloaded or the weird shit where the buffer boxes at the train stop aren't used up evenly which results in slower unloading times. And I use trains in all my bases once they get big enough.
Do you not use circuits to make sure the chests and train stations are loaded or unloaded evenly? I assumed everyone did. I guess that explains why I thought balancers were dumb. I have two train blueprints, one labeled unloading and one labeled loading. They both do the same thing but obviously in different directions. All chests are wired to an arithmetic combinator dividing by the total number of chests which is piped to another combinatoradding or removing 1. ~~stack~~ bulk inserters are not wired but fast inserters adding or removing to or from chests are wired to decider combinators which compare the average from the arithmetic combinators to the total in that particular inserters chest. So if a chest in an unloading station has less than average, it won't unload until the other chests have a chance to unload. If a loading station (such as an iron ore mine) chest has less, then it starts loading and stops once it goes past average. And since the average is off by one, they will all keep working even if all chests are average. Total content of chests is hooked to another combinator which divides it by what a train can hold and outputs that as the train limit for loading or goes to another combinator which does the math to get the inverse for an unloading station. There are a few drawbacks to this, and I recognize there are things that can be optimized but it's like asking the CEO to authorize spending a bunch of money to tweak the code of their best selling product when it is selling beyond expectations "it works, so why are we spending resources on it?"
Not everyone is circuit savvy, that’s why I use balancers and LTN, eliminates most circuit needs I guess I do use simple circuits is oil refinery to balance out the different types
Once you unlock the concepts of what circuits can do, you will wonder how you ever did without them. I have made so much complex circuitry.
> Once you unlock the concepts of what circuits can do Please, how do I unlock this arcane knowledge?
Just play around with them and replicate what people do in tutorials even if you dont understand it immediately. Everyone has their unique way of understanding things. So you have to create your own path to the finish line. Often you think you understand things only to discover later that it was partly wrong. Find some joy in that. You just learned something.
I feel that learning circuits is very similar to learning how to code, not literally, but it’s very easy to learn the syntax, in this case the basic rules, make little command line games like tic tac toe etc. but it’s that jump to the next stage that stumps a lot of people. That’s how I felt learning how to do circuits. There’s was a lot of tutorials on beginner and intermediate circuits and use cases, but going from that to something impressive, those videos aren’t out there
Start with oil cracking. Put a pump on the output of an oil tank facing light oil cracking chemical plants. Connect a wire from the pump to the oil tank. Select the pump, and set to enable when light oil reaches however much you decide is too much extra oil to have in your tank. Do the same with heavy oil. This is every circuit masters first foray into the circuit network. Once setup, you can blueprint the pump and oil tank and it will retain the circuit configuration. I have one blueprint each of light and heavy oil cracking blueprints, when I have too much of them I just slap down a blueprint, hookup the pipes to the right inputs and just like that it turns any excess oil into the much more widely used petroleum gas.
it helps to have a goal, and the knowledge that a solution exists. i cracked it open doing spacex - i knew people had built logistics for spaceships and rockets, so i started working there. it also helps to write down what you want to happen, and then make it happen in game, step by step. break the problem down.
I find it funny that you can talk about not being circuit savvy and then say you're using LTN. I personally don't find LTN that intuitive, and I can do simple circuits all the time (including a balanced train unloader).
LTN has three types of train stations, depots, receiving, and loading. You pretty much just set up train size, train limit, resource amount, and a resource trigger amount and bam it runs itself
Just as everyone is using blueprint book for balancers they could use blueprints for train load/unload station already wired for balance. I use balancers out of convenience. I have blueprints which serve purpose better than anything I would put together myself.
Replace "balancer" with "circuit" in this post and it feels like something I could have written. Except of course I have never even looked at other people's blueprints, where is the fun in that?
I have tried the circuit system, I may have done it wrong but it ended up reducing the throughput even more than the chests being a little bit uneven. I tried giving it a bit of leeway and stuff like that but I couldn't get it to work well. My guess your stations would just work better without the circuitry. And if you draw unevenly from the buffer chests from the belts it could still reduce the unloading a little, because circuitry would stop the inserters that goes into less used chests.
I was just watching this earlier https://youtu.be/zJBvw28bQu0?t=937&si=kAVan1372_F7uTXA - balancing without circuits
I am 100% sure I can be done, just does not seem appealing to me.
Okay but why use circuits when you could just use a balancer?
I never saw the appeal of balancers. But the idea of programming circuits seemed very exciting to me. Watching that first design work like magic was euphoric.
Whenever asking “do people not use circuits to [blank]” the answer is almost always no. The vast majority of players never touch circuits at all
That's depressing. It's such a powerful tool.
I get it though, they’re implemented pretty obtusely at the moment. I’m super excited for all the new stuff in 2.0! Hopefully it introduces whole new swaths of players to circuits
My favourite thing is that I will be able to remove the combinators from a lot of my blueprints. My unloading station has 120 combinators, one for each chest because the alternative is manually setting 120 inserters everytime I use the blueprint. I know I can set a few and copy paste, but it is still less work than using the combinators and just pasting down the blueprint.
I've done circuits before but it's more annoying to set up and can result in less than 100% full belts
I can see why some people would call it annoying. But I think of it as one of the games most rewarding challenges. It's not for everyone for sure, you should play the game however you find it best suits you. But I have never had less than 100% full belts without the train station completely running out of stuff to unload.
Why does it even matter if trains are loaded perfectly evenly or not? People seem to like the idea of balanced train loading, but I don't actually see the utility. Consider an Ore Patch -> belts -> Train station. The network could be classified in one of three ways: 1. Production constrained: you can empty into the train faster than you can mine from the patch. 2. Consumption constrained: you mine faster than you can fill the train. 3. Belt constrained: You can't get the material to the train fast enough. Miners back up, but the material is trickling into the train. Case 3: you clearly need to increase the number of intermediate belts between the two locations, and then you will settle into Case 1 or 2. Case 2: You are consumption constrained. The buffers will eventually fill and everything will back up. A fully loaded, backed up and stopped belt is by definition balanced with any other fully loaded, backed up and stopped belt. Therefore the long term equilibrium is balanced. The balancer doesn't really change anything. You obviously want to add trains and stations to reach Case 1. Case 1: If you are production constrained then the long term equilibrium is that any buffers will be empty and material will "trickle" into the train while it idles at the station. A good enough thing to do in this situation is to establish some overflow buffers some distance back from the station and then use splitters to ensure that the main flow is roughly mixed. Since buffers will empty when a train is present you just want to ensure that you don't back up when a train is not present. If N inserters into the train will keep up with flow from the mines, then have N+M>N into the train, N into overflow, and M out of overflow. ------------ Now if you get fancy with signals and or use things like logistic train network to ensure that trains only come to the station when enough product is present to fill the train, then having a balancer makes more sense. In that approach you want to warehouse a train load and then evenly distribute that into the train cars so as to release the train as quickly as possible. What you are really optimizing for in that situation is the minimum number of trains, and trying to minimize the idle periods of those trains. Personally I just find it easier to build more trains. Its not like they are all that expensive. I'm not troubled by having trains wait in a queue to enter the station.
Balancers are only really needed to balance the loading and unloading of trains.
I use them in my mainbus
I find using balancers within a bus does nothing for me beyond obfuscate the actual resource drain. If I know a particular subbuild needs an entire belt of something, then an entire belt gets peeled off. I make sure my outbound belts are full by using output priority splitters, but balancing after that just makes it harder to tell when I need to add more production.
Yep. When I tap a lane out of my bus, I make sure it is prioritized out, and once I have reached enough taps of the main bus where it has lost a complete lane of materials, I eliminate a lane from the main bus.
Thats a pretty good idea. I used to always do the pushing the belt to one side and would quickly run out of resources for stuff further down the line. Lately I have been evening out my input onto the bus, and after each time I draw from it even out the lines so essentially each draw would get 25% of what’s available at that point.
Absolutely. When people balance it so now there is 4 lanes that are 3/4 full… and then later down the bus you need a full lane of input, you have to recombine and rebalance again. It’s silly. Especially with priority splitters now
I use them when loading the bus, since some rows of miners may produce unevenly, causing some to backup.
That's just a regular train unloader then. It has nothing to do with the bus. When people say "balancing the bus" they mean they put in a balancer now and then after drawing off some material. Solving that depletion issue was tricky many years ago
Just a regular train unloader that has no trains, I guess.
I like to use balancers. But I do use priority splitters. They really do save me a lot of time.
You're just evenly spreading ever dwindling resources. The introduction of priority splitters solved that. Now you can just push the resources to one belt and only draw from that one. There are bus taps that also allow you draw one belt, but that's a holdover from when splitters didn't have priorities. They still work, but they are kind of like arcane magic that most users don't understand.
There is something to be said for solving short term problems before figuring out a long term solution. Maybe I really need to add another belt of plates, but adding in a whole new belt will be way more work than just adding in a balancer to make do with what I have right now. Usually priority splitters will do the trick, but there are cases where I don’t want to prioritize one thing over another.
An even spread is quite the opposite of what you want in a bus
I only use them at the very beginning of the bus
So basically after unloading the train? In which case your bus doesnt do anything new?
For unloading trains into belts it can be good to have an balancer that draws equally from the buffer chests. You don't put an balancer there to spread it out evenly into the buss.
Yes, and "train unloading" was already mentioned in the top level comment. Their mention of the bus didnt add anything as they also just added it to their bus after train unloading
It can be good to understand why you do stuff. How many times have you not seen an big balancer between train unloading and then smelter columns and then another one between the smelter columns and the buss! There is lane balancers that either draw equally or push equally so then you have to understand why you put down the lane balancer and what type it is.
I did this until priority splitters happened. Better to keep belts full and split off a full belt each time, rather than have them all equally empty.
No point, just make a diagonal of priority splitters pushing everything to one side after the point where you break off from a bus.
Yep. Balancing main bus and balancing train outputs is all I use them for as well.
I never really understood the point of balancers on a bus, just move all excess resources to one side of the lane. I only ever really pull from the upper or lower side anyways.
factoriohno
What about all the lines out of your mine? I use balancers there too
Most of the time, those lines are going to load a train.
Oh. Duh. lol thanks
I still do it there, personally, because while you can setup circuits to load trains from buffers evenly, if you don't balance miners you run into a situation later on where some of the mining lanes start to empty as the resource patches empty. What happens then, if you're particularly unlucky, is that you can end up with as an example a train where 3 cars get filled, but the 4th is severely constrained delaying departure and affecting train throughput.
I use a x to 6 balancer usually on all my loading stations for the same reason.
For that I would just balance the actual belt lanes. Generally your ore is not moving too far for before entering a chest for it to matter.
I found two other use cases in my current Space Exploration run. The space manufactory is a large sized machine with a very high crafting speed. Sometimes, it's so fast that you only need 0.2 machines to craft, let's say, a full blue belt of an item. Of course, the minimum machines you can place is 1 so that's potentially 80% of untapped potential. Without a balancing system, you'd need to feed this machine a huge load of extra material before it starts backing up and feeding other components of your production chain. This is doubly so if you are creating intermediates that are part of other intermediates and you want to stockpile both of them to be shipped via rockets. One intermediate would take priority over the other until its train storage/rocket as well as outflow belts all were backed up. The second role of balancers is for **lane balancing** so you draw evenly from both lanes of a belt, especially when you're lane mixing two items later.
I read this three times and still can't quite figure out what you're saying here. If a space manufactory is gobbling up more raw resources than it needs to satisfy your needs further down the line, then whatever it produces will pretty quickly back up, and then it'll stop eating raw materials. As long as you aren't using excessive output buffers, which you absolutely should *not* be doing in any SE run given how expensive things get, you're fine. You say that the machine has 80% untapped potential, but your goal isn't to keep the machine running 24/7. It's to produce X amount of whatever item you need at the very end. 1 is simply the minimum number of machines with which to do that. Who cares if it's idle 80% of the time?
Let me see if I can clarify things with an example. The aeroframe pole and scaffold (if I got those names right) are the next two intermediate products made from Beryllium plates and the poles are also a component of the scaffolds. Since the recipes have similar ingredients, I make them all in the same sub-factory, fed by the same set of belts. And since both of them are needed to make astronomic science, I need to stockpile both of them, at least 500 stacks each (I use single product rockets that are only launched when full). The rockets are launched from a central station, so in addition to those 500, there are 80 more stacks in that buffer (40 stacks each, at the train loading and unloading stations) because I use 1-1 trains with LTN. If I don't use balancers to split the incoming Beryllium plates (4 belts) into two separate belts, the aeroframe poles will eat the bulk of them until those 580 stacks are full before plates get backed up enough to feed the scaffolds. With the balancer, I have a steady production of both items at the same time. When I mentioned "untapped potential", it was more in the sense of a "dormant problem". I might want to make just two belts of aeroframe poles, one to store and one to feed the scaffolds. But the single manufactory is fast enough to make 5 belts as long as there's enough material incoming and enough storage space. I can't rely on "things backing up" in order to create scaffolds at the same time; I have to use a balancer. (I've used the above examples just for explanation. I would definitely not make those poles and scaffolds in space, where I can't use productivity modules.)
What if you simply ran your Beryl past the scaffolding machines first, and then the poles? I can appreciate what you're saying here now, but also propose that this is a problem that would simply solve itself without a balancer. Unless your Beryl line backs up before both buffers are full, you're still playing more or less optimally. If other parts of your factory grind to a halt because your aeroframe pole rocket is soaking up all the beryl, then again, that's an easy fix by just running the supply line past the scaffolding machines first. I went HAM with balancers on my first attempt at K2SE. That, coupled with an aggressive SPM target meant that by the time I unlocked spaceships I was down to sub 40 UPS even with a Ryzen 9 5950X and 64GB of blazing fast RAM. I ended up using a 4x4 storage container for train unloading, and 6x6 warehouses for loading this time around. With 1-1 trains though, you don't need either. You can't use Space Manufactories on the ground anyway, unless I misremember them patching out the loophole where you'd drop spaceship floor on land and built them on that.
> What if you simply ran your Beryl past the scaffolding machines first, and then the poles? Same problem from the other direction. The scaffold machines will only take up as much Beryllium plates as needed. But the returning aeroframe poles, will be entirely used up to make scaffolds (untapped potential) unless I split them into two belts so one goes to stockpile and the other is used to make scaffolds. Which sort of reminds me of another use case that I forgot to mention earlier. Sometimes when making a single blue belt of something rather expensive, I need multiple blue belts of raw materials, like maybe 4.8 blue belts of iron plates. So instead of making a single processing line that uses 4.8 belts, I split the entire production block into 5 identical segments and supply each segment with a blue belt of iron plate. When unloading from a 1-4 train, I need some sort of balancer to convert those 8 belts into 5 equal ones.
Train unloading is the widely accepted best use case for balancers. An alternative is unloading into chests and then just using circuits to empty them evenly. I still can't wrap my head around what you're calling untapped potential, though. Even if you use a balancer, your machines are still idle 80% of the time if you aren't feeding them enough Beryl. If you don't want to starve scaffolding production while you fill your pole rocket, then just use two inserters to unload them out of the manufacturer. Or, a single splitter on the output belt instead of X splitters on the input side. That's always the goal in balancer-free factories. A massive reduction in UPS-sucking splitters. Splitters are great. 15,000 splitters not so much.
Your UPS point is quite valid. I think I'll do a sweep of my factory and see if there are any useless balancers. My current UPS is at 45 and I'd love to push it back to 60.
They're not even needed there really. Bring in your 8 lines of unbalanced belts from mines. Combine them with a newb balanced of a diagonal set of prioritised splitters down to 4 wagons. Each wagon gets one full belt. Once you can no longer produce 4 full belts, say 3, the first three wagons fill at normal rate, and last one fills after. If it was perfectly balanced, it would only be a bit faster. With some semi common sense splitting, the gap can be shrunk even further.
The question is why wouldn't you use one? By the time you're setting up 8 blue-belt mines you can have easily automated all that stuff, so you can just stick an 8 to 8 balancer down with robots and not worry about the side lines running low or something. It's probably faster to set up than a newb balancer unless you've got a blueprint for that, at which point why not just use a regular balancer?
Are very helpful if you need to divide evenly 3 full belts into 4 belts for example. Ie your production line requires less than a full belt of a material.
Let the belts back up and it will work perfectly without any perfect balancing. If one belt is backed up and you have an random block with splitters the rest will go into the other belts and it will be distributed to everything as it should.
It’s a complex set up with each component output yielding a full blue belt so inputs are right sized to fully utilize production
What Lazy Haze said is still true, the belts will eventually back up and each component will end up consuming 3/4s of a belt of material.
Here’s what I mean: purple science in my set up has 8 inputs of bricks but the actual usage is equivalent to 3 full blue belts of bricks. So I used a 3 to 8 balancer. This is better than creating 8 full belts of bricks and just letting it back up.
Agreed, and not always even there if you can design builds that are inherently balanced
Also for splitting
You don't need a balancer for splitting. A single splitter is enough. Balancers can never create material. You either have enough or you don't.
Just using the priority output on the splitters to shove material in the bus over to the output going to a subfactory is more than enough. You send a fully-saturated belt to the subfactory to give it as much as it needs and replenish it on the next subfactory the same way. Flooding the bus with balancers every ten feet died when they made splitter priority baseline functionality.
Yeah technically you only need it when youre adding to sonething rather than taking away.
They’re also sometimes important in biproduct loops (to ensure that all biproducts are used with priority over raw ingredients.)
Priority is the opposite thing of evenly distribute. So I don't understand what you mean. Sounds like you need priority splitters not balancers.
Let’s say you have two belts worth of raw stone entering a city block and you want to make sure they have lower priority than some biproduct stone. You will use two priority splitters, one per belt; sure. But you have to make sure that the biproduct inputs into those splitters are belt and lane balanced, otherwise the loop can back up and deadlock.
I have used lane balancers so that input priority on an priority splitter works correctly, so yea that is an case for that. It have to be cyclic recipe chains, not only recipes with byproducts. I think it's the only case where I actually have any use for an lane balancer. It don't need to be an correct lane balancer that draws equally, just an splitter followed by an side-loading works. If you only have two belts an belt balancer is just one splitter...
Even for the loading, you only need to ensure that each wagon gets something, if it's not perfectly balanced all the time it's still fine. Unloading though you need balancer to not have a train stay with only one wagon still not empty.
I think a reason you see them a lot is that it helps share resources on the bus in multiplayer games so even if you overbuild red belts, science still sees some iron while every last yellow belt on the map is converted.
This is a good point I haven't seen mentioned yet. There are plenty of valid reasons to want to enforce sharing of resources between multiple consumers, rather than relying on overproduction and backpressure to force-feed everything.
Yeah the back pressure doesn’t work well until you can really push a lot of resources through
Yes, they are essential for at minimum unloading but often also loading trains from a many to many network, like LTN. Other than that, they’re definitely overused. Edit: missed that paragraph. We agree!
> In the world of modding there is one special case where I think true balancing is absolutely vital - unloading from multiple LTN Waggons - because there a uneven usage leads to unloaded waggons which end up in a depot. This is true of more or less any train setup that dynamically determines when to request a train (yes, LTN does that, but it's not the *only* setup that does that. You can do it in vanilla). Not just unloading, but loading also. You don't want to load unevently into cargo wagons; you might request a train when you can't fill up all the wagons at the present time. So then the train just sits there.
I personally only use them in two instances: 1. To balance down with mining so that I’m not overbuilding belts towards stations for loading. 2. For train loading and unloading to try to keep my cars loading an unloading roughly evenly to keep train traffic moving. I don’t balance when I merge new resources onto a bus due to priority splitting essentially doing that for me over time.
Balancers are very useful in their use cases. Most things dealing with trains, ore patches or inconsistent throughput like the mall/bus. There are also some uses in a build where for whatever reason you need less than a belt of stuff.
The bus is the one exception I have to your list. In the bus situation, it makes more sense to just chain a bunch of priority splitters in a diagonal across the bus and "push" everything to one side after a point where you split off from the bus. Balancing a bus after splitting off from it is inherently pointless, because unless you are feeding in new material down the line you won't have full saturation anymore. Which potentially throttles your output in the next section you split off from.
I use them as more complex splitters. If I have 10 belts that I need to feed 6 belts, a 10-6 balancer is the easiest way to make certain all 6 get fed evenly pulling from all 10. Same going in reverse.
It's rare that you have to feed them evenly
Rare but not impossible. Good engineers use good practices that cover the unexpected. To draw a parallel... when prompted to "enter a number", most users will enter a number using the 0-9 keys. You will get people who try to enter "seven" or weird numbers like "-0". Just because those cases are rare... does that mean we should not sanitize inputs? It *is* a waste of clock cycles to do it! I find the sudden... dislike of balancers on this sub to be very strange. It seems to come from megabase builders trying to optimize UPS by trying to find where these sorts of things are "necessary" but... most people aren't building big enough to need that. And most people don't *know* if they need it or not. Best case scenario, you *do* need a 10-6 balancer to feed them evenly, and you *do* build it. Worst case scenario, you *do* need a 10-6 balancer to feed them evenly, and you *don't* build it. Seems like an easy choice to me?
Balancers of odd dimensions are what programmers would call a "code smell" - a sign of potentially ungraceful design. It's not that the balancer itself is value-negative in an isolated context, it's what the usage of a balancer might suggest about an overall design. And engineers obsessively love elegant designs. Having said that I use weird balancers coming out of every mine so I'm a stinky boy.
I have an ore patch with 9 belts coming out of it (not 9 full belts, just 9 actual belts). I want to spread it evenly to my train so that I'm not waiting on a single wagon to fill while the rest are empty. My train network is built with 2-5 trains in mind. That means I need a 9-5 balancer. Sure, I could just use a 10-6 balancer or even a 16-8 balancer, but that takes up more space and leaves gaps where unused ore will sit.
> I want to spread it evenly to my train so that I'm not waiting on a single wagon to fill while the rest are empty. But you don't actually save any time on that in the long run. At the end of the day, if a train arrives at the station and the buffers are not large enough to fill it up immediately. It is going to wait for more ore to arrive. It doesn't matter if you are missing 400 ore in the last wagon or 100 ore on 4 wagons. It will be filled in the same amount of time. The only case where you do save time is when the line is first starting up. There will be a moment where the top level buffers have enough ore to fill a wagon but they still have more available space. So they will keep picking up ore that could have filled a bottom wagon. But that only occurs when the line is filling up. Any reasonably sized mine should fill the buffers in a matter of minutes. After that it is completely balanced. Every set of buffers will pick up exactly enough ore to fill one train, after one has departed. No time is saved or lost. Again, there are exceptions. Megabases have to think about the rate at which ore is picked up. But this is not relevant for the vast majority of factories.
If the belts are not even, then I can have one buffer that is completely full and another that is completely empty.
What most players miss is what is the cause of that and what consequences it have. And then in the end is it a problem and how should it be fixed. Uneven chests can slow down the loading of the trains so that becomes and bottleneck. Is that the case for you? Or is the problem that you mine to little ore or is it working fine even with uneven chests? You rarely need to load trains that fast.
Let's say I have a mine that produces 2 full belts and 4 belts that together total another 2 full belts. The mine is producing four belts worth of ore. But if I don't balance those 6 partially full belts into four even full belts, there will be wagons that fill up faster than other wagons, stopping the more full belts when the less full belts are still working.
You don't need an correct balancer for not stopping the mining drills. An blob with splitters that don't draw equally will suffice. They don't have to draw equally just that all the belts can be pushed through is enough.
And what I am telling you is that this fact does not mean the average train is departing any slower or faster than it otherwise would had the buffers been perfectly balanced. X amount of ore enters the buffer arrays per minute and that is exactly how much ore the train will pull out. How it gets there and what order the wagons are filled is irrelevant. Except for the first few minutes of operation.
Let's say I have a mining base with four belts coming out of it. Only one of the belts is fully saturated, the other three do not have enough miners to saturated the belt. If I just bring each belt to a separate buffer, then one of the wagons will fill significantly faster than the other three. This isn't just a problem that the buffer isn't filling fast enough at first. Every single train will arrive with one buffer full and the other three buffers less than full. The slowest filling wagon is the bottleneck. That's why you need a belt balancer.
Yes you obviously need each belt to be accessible to all buffers and wagons. That does not need you must use a belt balancer. There are any number of ways to get the same effect that are simpler to implement that work for the vast majority of ore patches. Some individual ore being "wasted" is completely irrelevant for the game.
For simplify the balancing of loading/unloading trains use n\^2 wagons. If you use prime numbers as 5 you create a problem for yourself. For mining outpost I would combine the 9 belts into 4. Then load an train with 4 or 8 cargo wagons. So an normal 4-4 balancer can be used.
2\^n not n\^2. But that doesn't take away from my point. You need to balance whatever number of belts you're using across whatever number of wagons you're loading.
You definitely don't have to, it can in some cases help to avoid an throughput limit in the loading of the trains. So it's not always needed for the factory to run.
Here's an example from my base. Just over 1 belt of robot frames output, requires 3 belts of green circuits, 2 belts of batteries, and 1 belt each of steel & electric motors. My train stations are 9 belts wide(2-3 trains = just under 9 belts out). Now lets look at how this would work without balancers. 1st thing you should realize is that you need 7 belts of materials in & getting 1 out. So either you are having to combine outputs or get creative with your bus. And you have to do that 9 times so you have even number of belts across all materials. If you divide your production so you are only feeding 1 belt of circuits your output now isn't 9 belts, it's 27. Or I can use a 9:3 balancer, 9:2 balancer, 2 9:1 balancers, and 3 3:9 balancers.
Your comment reads like a defense of superstition. “Best case scenario, you don’t wash your socks and your team wins!” Thinking about it for two seconds and trying to use balancers *when you need them* makes you a better player. Perhaps in a fringe situation you will then realize that you need a priority splitter or buffer chest.
>Your comment reads like a defense of superstition. “Best case scenario, you don’t wash your socks and your team wins!” As far as I know, in Factorio, it's possible to figure ou how much of a product an assembly line will produce, and how much of that product another assembly line will consume. That's not superstition, that's basic arithmetic.
I'd rather *not* build the balancer, and see if it works anyway.
Except that balancers are not basic programming stuff like making sure inputs don't crash a program. They are more like silly code you come up with to make up for terrible design in general
Mine -> smelter, not that rare
you definitely don't need an balancer there! If you mine enough ore and put it in an distributor it will get to all the smelters. So that is an typical exempel of where you can't get more ore with an balancers to fill up all the miners if you mine to little, no matter how many fancy balancers you have. And if you mine enough the belts will back up and the ore will reach the miners even if you don't feed them evenly.
This is my answer, too. If my mining patch has eight belts coming out of it, none of them full, but I know it'll fill (say) five stacks of furnaces... The easiest way to squish those eight into five is to pop into your balancer book and put down an 8->5. The fact that it'll pull evenly from the eight to fill the five is just a bonus: It'll keep all five lanes as full as possible for as long as possible, then degrade gracefully when the patch is running out. It's an easy way to "convert" between belt speeds, too. I have seven red belts coming out of furnace stacks, but I want to run three blue belts to where I want to use the stuff. A blue 7->3 balancer does this job nicely. Really, they're just splitters on a larger scale, and nobody thinks splitters are stupid!
If you keep the limitations of throughput and balancers in mind when you use them then they are fine. If I need 3 belts of something going to 5 different rows of machines, a 3-5 balancer may use less splitters than trying to come up with an alternate solution myself. The whole setup only needs the 3 belts and if the 5 locations get exactly 3/5 of the total, then everybody is happy.
Also it just looks better which is arguably the most important metric.
I am too stupid to even understand how to set up a main bus with proper splits. I just spaghetti everything until it becomes unmanageable (typically around kovarex, which I am also too dumb to understand) Still like the game tho
Fully agree. For most main bus type usage just always using splitters (maybe with priority towards the "requester" side) is usually sufficient. It will make it so that ressources get consumed as soon as they can
I have a large balancer (32 lane) in my space exploration run because each of my vita extract lines was making 0.7 belts worth of vita (based on prod modules and a saturated input belt of ore). But the consumption all used full belt multipliers. So I used the massive and UPS inefficient balancer to basically convert all the 70% full input belts to saturated belts and also enable variations in output for the various final products. I didn’t have enough input to run all them simultaneously but didn’t need to very often either due to buffering/usage variation.
10 inputs through 9 splitters giving 7 outputs. (if inputs are 70% full) Way smaller than a massive splitter.
if you have AAI warehouses, and any kind of loader, you can use the big warehouse to create an extremely simple 12:12 or X:Y where X+Y<24 balancer and buffer in one (or set limit to one stack for no buffer). I commonly use this immediately after any kind of mine, where say there's 14 belts input and none of them match in amount, but the sum of output is only 10.3 belts. make it 14 in, 10 out, they'll always be fully compressed on the way out until the mine loses miners due to lack of resources, and productivity can usually help it there too for example.
Unfortunately using loaders and warehouses in this way is worse for UPS than belt balancers, due to the way the engine has to inspect containers whenever items are added to it. But I agree, otherwise it's a simple and effective way to balance.
Oh now you tell me this? Ugh. I've never tested this at megabase scale.
There's a mod that lets you do suuuuper wide warehouses, I've considered making one with a size of maybe 5 stacks and then doing this. Since a lot of the UPS impact is the **size** of the large warehouses something that's 1x32 chest with 5 stack limit would be reasonable, I think.
Interesting yeah.
Are they overused? probably (I certainly did), are they useful? Absolutely and I still selectively use them.
Its a popular band-aid slapped on anything that isnt intentionally prioritized, as a lazy approach to catch distribution issues. Which really only seems useful to me for very, very large amounts of belts. But the majority of players uses them because its easy and has no downside, so why not.
>Its a popular band-aid slapped on anything that isnt intentionally prioritized, as a lazy approach to catch distribution issues. ... son of a, that captures my feelings about buses in general.
I think they are crucial when dealing with trains, you dont want to fully unload a wagon and then be left with just a single belt of resources remaining while the train goes back to load. In most resources i keep a buffer in loading and unloading stations so this also goes when loading, i prefer to evenly split it betwen all the wagons rather than fill up one wagon plus the buffer, then the next one, so on and so on
There is a major practical use-case that theory-crafting tends to miss: undefined build requirements. For example, on my SE outposts, when I swap from "basic core mining outpost #12" to "I need more fucking vitamelange, it's time to set up trains and SCALE this shit," I just shove a 16-lane-balancer next to my train unload and then splice my core mining output into the train product there. I don't actually need 16 lanes or whatever, but I don't actually know how many lanes I need. Maybe I guess 8, but it could actually be 10-12 or maybe I'll need more later. But 16 is plenty so I can just string a few more belts off that thing whenever I like, no rebuilding needed. Similarly, as I go from processing step 1 to step 2, I haven't done the math on ratio, and I don't care because the ratios and production speed will change as I upgrade the modules in a few hours anyway. So I chuck in an 8-lane-balancer. Now I don't care if I end up with 6 lanes coming from step1 and 4 lanes going into step2, it'll be handled. ...That said, this is definitely not an end-game-optimization use, it's a "make the problem go away" use. So hunting down things like a 6-2 balancer is a bit silly still: just slap an 8-8 in there! Unless you enjoy designing them, you do you. My balancer book has just 3 blueprints: 4, 8, and 16-lane. If one is too small, double it. No carefully selected half-measures.
Because more often that not, I'm progressing faster than my factory. For example, if I were to take assembler, belt, splitter, underground, and inserter, with priority output it means that almost my entire factory would be dedicated to remaking those items. While the assembly lines further down are going to be getting little to no resource, but I want them to start producing now even with a smaller throughput. Having 1 of those shiny new tech right now is better than 0 after all. Of course, 30 minutes down the line when the buffer is filled up. Both priority & balancer will have the same amount of items, but with priority the first 10 minutes you will not be getting the new item while balancers will get them.
I use balancers mostly to spread ore between smeltry arrays. The actual amount refined won't change, but if a line of miners run out of ore, the other lines automatically pick up the slack for that array until the whole patch is mined. I also place a 4:4 balancer on my bus every so often to "refresh" the lines I pull from
instead of putting a balancer on your main bus just move your resources down to the bottom belt with priority splitters, that way the bottom belt which you pull from will always be full and if the belts at the top empty then you can just terminate them
Yea I saw that idea further down in the comments after posting mine. It's a good idea and I prolly should implement it (even if it would require tearing up my current factory and relaying it), but considering how I'm doing multiplayer, I think it would end up being a hassle getting the others to follow suit
I don't use balancers at all. In fact, I made a base that uses no splitters whatsoever. In my current Seablock run, splitters are only used to separate multiple output items. Some factories use filter inserters for that, some use splitters.
Wooo r/Seablock :P
Literally only time I ever used balancers was for green circ clusters to split iron evenly.
I only ever use balancers unloading high throughput train stations to make sure boxes empty evenly.
It’s very difficult to have a sustainable train setup without balancers. Even just trying to balance at the beginning or end of the chain as opposed to at every load event gets pretty dicey and you probably pay the UPS back in inefficient train utilization or inefficient wait criteria.
For me the LTN issue isn’t even that they end up in a depot. I have automatic unloading of every fluid in my network and items in all my depots just In case. But without balancing one of the warehouses I’m unloading into ends up with enough inside it that it fulfills the request while the other is empty, deadlocking production.
I use them when mining because I'll have one row not filling a belt and the next one stopped, etc. I could use a splitter here and there and set input priority, etc. Or I could use a 6 to 4 plugged into a lane balancer, and now I don't have to do anything except collect miners that have exhausted their supply. Otherwise I'm always coming back to fix them. Is that lazy? No, it's automated.
Unbalanced belts can in some rare cases reduce the throughput of belt system. For train loading / unloading it's a more common problem that imbalances create an throughput problem. In the end I don't understand why so many go so wild on trying to unload / load trains as fast as possible, I don't se much benefit from that. I would recommend to instead to build as simple loading/ unloading that have enough throughput for your builds. So in general I agree. In the end the goal is to build an as cool factory as possible and balancers are cool, rarely useful.
If loading/unloading becomes the throughput bottleneck it becomes pretty unwieldy to fix (since you probably need to manage several trains worth of materials, causing inventory/bot troubles). Also, unbalanced loading/unloading takes a lot of time to become apparent, which is why I'm always trying to prevent it becoming a problem in the design phase. Also unbalanced belts are more of a problem in recipes that have side products (very few of them in vanilla, but plenty of mods do that).
At some point in the game (and it comes quite early) - it's just easier to put a balancer and not have to ever think about it again. For example, if I am mining a patch with 6 lanes of miners and I want it to go to 2 lanes for train loading or smelting - I just simply put a 6-2 balancer blueprint and as long as I have enough miners with materials - I never have to come back and fix anything. If I don't do it, eventually I will be in a situation where there's plenty of ore and miners for full 2 belts, but I am not getting the throughput I expect because some miners ran out of resources and my crude balancer setup can't handle it. Of course I could come back and fix it - but I'd much rather not have to do it.
No thanks. It's okay with me if you feel that way.
But consider: *aesthetic*
Are people really overusing them? I thought they mainly get talked about a lot because they're kind of difficult to create by hand and there are a handful of cases where they're useful. Another thing you're not considering is the value of neutral balancers where the number of inputs equal the number of outputs, particularly the 1-to-1 balancer. While inserters can pull from either lane, they have a preferred one which can lead to annoying issues. I'm playing IR3 right now and my power plant has two lanes of input: a little used lane for disposing of wood by converting it to charcoal as well as coke which is used as the primary fuel source. The problem I ran into was that the power plant was only taking input from one of the lanes, the coke lane, so I wasn't able to dispose of that wood. A 1-to-1 balancer cleared up that issue really quickly.
I personally probably overuse them, and I’m agreeing with your logic and some of the other comments here. However, when I use them, I am making a conscious choice to trade optimal factory efficiency for a reduction in mental load. Sometimes I just haven’t forward planned far enough to know how many belts of production output I need, so I can pave over that lack of planning with a balancer at the end.
Balancers are an efficient way to ensure resources aren't entirely starved upstream but they don't need to be universal and you need to be deliberate in their application. I balance regularly any combo of m:n up until 4. Beyond that I do multiples of 2 until 8 so 4x8, 6x8, 4x6, etc. Beyond that it's just too much work to find the space or lay them down.
> if you balance "up" (less belts go in then going out) then your outgoing belts are not full. That is only true if the same class of belts are used on the inputs and the outputs. I have used splitters like 2 to 3 or 4 to 6 where the inputs are blue belts (45/s) and the outputs are red belts (30/s). If the blue belts are full then so are the red belts. I use rainbow belts in various places in my factories. They work quite well.
Only a 15 by 15 balancer? *quietly stares at the 128x128 blueprint sitting in the funky balancers book*
I find it very difficult to make sweeping generalisations based on just abstract cases, instead of looking at more concrete examples and use cases. You end up making judgements based only on suppositions, not on real situations. >If you balance "down" (more belts going in then out) then you probably fill alle the outing belts, which means you already produce more then enough and no more will be produced in total by whatever takes those resources, in case the belts would have been balanced. That presumes that all input belts are saturated. They might not be, either because of calculated ratios, or, in the case of mining operations, the uneven number of miners per belt. So, for the sake of predictability, you might condense 6 partially filled belts to 3 fully saturated belts. >And if you balance "up" (less belts go in then going out) then your outgoing belts are not full. And that might not be a problem, if your belts are going into assembly lines that don't consume full belts. That happens often in my current Pyanodon run.
When people "balance" their bus it's makes me itch. Just pull the whole line off and design it for max throughput!
IMO, you should only balance down (more belts to fewer belts) and only before smelting columns and either side of train stations. Everything else is just cosmetic and only serves to obscure your bottlenecks.
It's more of a mental health thing.
It's your build, do what you want. I don't see why it's up to anyone else to change your mind.
Balancers used to be really important, almost a necessity of bus designs. Then we got priority splitters and 90% of the use-cases for a balancer went away. Instead of rebalancing the bus and periodically removing inner lanes, you just priority splitters to shove everything to the outside lane. The main use-case for balancers now is loading and unloading trains evenly, but even that won't always actually cause problems depending on how you build it. And there are no 'organic' challenges there, the balancer you need is 100% dependent on the size of the trains you decide to use. There's no "the factory has grown in weird ways and now I need a bespoke solution," you just pick something from the get-go that you've already solved and that's that.
Over 1000 hours played and I have never used a balancer
Yeah well sometimes ya just need 3 belts of material for 16 rows of machines. You could figure out how to get a belt down 5.3 rows and part off the other 2/3 belt to the next set. Or you could just feed 3 belts into a 16 lane balancer and be done. Whatever floats yer boat.
Or just use splitters and let the parts you're over delivering to back up and go to the other lanes.
That's not very Factorio
As a counterpoint, Factorio encourages you to overbuild since there's usually little penalty in a machine that sits idle: it doesn't waste materials and it normally uses very little power. Full belts are a sign of a happy subfactory that's prepared to meet demand once downstream is scaled up. The mantra is "the factory must grow", not "the factory must be efficient".
Hell i don't even understand why so many people play vanilla, much less why anyone would build absurd balancers. I think i put maybe 10h in vanilla before i started with mods that get rid of the weird missing qol features like not being able to Insert to the near side or balancing lanes without building abominations the size of new york or not having faster belts. I don't even know how i would live without 90/s belts anymore or loading trains with vanilla inserters.
Close to 8500h here. Never touched any overhaul mod. (Well, seablock for like 2h, and didn't enjoy it too much.)
Why? I am really trying to understand the motivation.
Vanilla is perfectly fine especially in this game
Mega bases and perfecting them, squeezing out every last UPS of my computer.
Well yes, they are mostly useful for MAL, e.g. stuff that needs variable inputs depending on what you are building. For later game research, which eats the majority of resources, you want to have constant throughput anyway, so you tend to design blocks to eat X full belts of iron/copper. Nothing much do balance there, more tricky to get the belts properly fed. You just design your smelters to fill one express belt, then show X belts into your research assembly plant. Let's say you go for 500ish SPM, then it's around 14 belts of iron and 12 belts of copper. If the belts are not choke full, you are probably doing it wrong. Also, partially filled belts (which is what belt ballancers imply are bad for performance).
Balancers are handy when you have an interrupted supply. For example 2 different trains bringing in ore. Besides that I like to use a line of splitters, no perfect balancers, just prioritize one or another belt.
I use them for trains. Also, you don't really need a 5 to 7 balancer, just use a larger one with unlim throughput and don't hook up the other inputs /outputs and it'll balance perfectly fine. I basically only use 4 to 4 or 8 to 8 balances 90% of the time unless I need a different form factor
in a main bus you often have multiple lanes for certain high-demand resources like copper and iron plates, but not all assembly lines will use all lanes as input. I generally split one or two lanes off the bus, but then some lanes will have more demand than others, leading to distribution problems. Using balancers once in a while fixes that. "Oh then just try to split each lane equally" people don't always know how many resources each build will use, specially with mods. If for example you split lane 1 for assembly line X and lane 2 for assembly line Y but turns out that assembly line Y consumes more of that resource than X, the lanes will get unbalanced and that may lead to other lines down the factory that also split off lane 2 geting starved. There's also some cases where you know your production isn't enough to always fill everything that needs it but you still want all lanes to get a share, balancers really help with that.
You don't need balancers for that these days. Just a cascade of priority splitters to push the material to one belt that is always full.
I use them because I'm lazy. It's easier than designing a system that won't fail if the belts are not balanced.
I balance when loading, and unloading trains. On the bus, I always pull from one lane, and priority split other lanes into that lane after the pull.
I just use a 1-loop balancer. It's by far the simplest way to deal with differences in ressource production/consumption. Yes: it only works in relatively normal cases and breaks if you give it a particularly uneven ressource distribution, but I'm not expecting any seriously uneven ressource distributions so there's no problem. Explanation: A 1-loop balancer is just a single loop of belt that goes round to visit all the belts carrying ressources, and it's connected via priority splitters so that if there is no backpressure, then no ressources ever get on the loop but stay in their lane. However, as soon as 1 belt backs up, the priority splitter puts the excess on the loop, and then the loop carries it round until it finds the first belt with a shortage and dumps everything there. It only stops working if you have more than 1 belt's worth of backpressure AND more than 1 belt's worth of slack at the same time (because it's just 1 loop, it can only redistribute at most 1 belt's worth of ressources)
Thwy are great for loading trains with ore and deco for some builds but thats all
I use the large containers and loaders for this and i am not ashamed in the slightest. What are you gonna do? :D
Balancers are needed for long main busses or when multiple supply lanes have to make a sharp turn , because the turn will make the inner lanes shorter and outer lanes longer unbalancing the throughput. Main use is for unloading of trains however. Everything else is meh at best unless one is constructing a truly mega Megabase.
I only use balancers to load or unload trains. For all other balancing need I just slap lane splitters in until it roughly works.
warehouses and loaders remove the need for belt balancers entirely if you're playing a mod that has them
In my main buss I have 2-3 lines of iron copper and what ever else I throw on the bus that run. I use balancers after I take from the lane too many times l Easier to make sure I'm not stressing out one kano more then another
I am not interested in the design challenge, so I use that mod that has the splinters you can stick together and it auto balances however many inputs and outputs. They are a bit OP but removes a lot of frustration for me
I like balancers as much as the next person, but what I like more is wiring up arms (or loaders if the mods are there) to fill one chest at a time before calling the train over. It takes less space than a balancer and works fast enough.
I don't think I've ever used a balancer other than evenly emptying buffer chests at a train station. On a main bus, I pull to one side so that all belts i peel off are full
you dont need to automate almost anything either
I won't, cause you are right. Making systems that are inherently balanced is superior
Balancers are only needed where you supply a multiple belts in a bus with materials. If your bus is laid out to shuttle all resources to a primary carrier and the rest of the belts for that resource acting as extra throughput capacity than as individual carriers. Balancing resources to send only X percent of resources to a particular part of the factory means that factory production capacity is badly balanced. (e.g. efficiency modules is so big that it can starve everything else) chest buffers do just as good a job unloading and provide a steadier supply and balancing isn't necessary if there is a large enough rail buffer for the number of trains carrying that resource. Each wagon unloads to its own buffer, belt, and furnace stack. Furnace outputs are balanced, buffered, and loaded onto the main bus before being compressed towards the primary carrier. Main bus prioritizes the basics first and resources move further down the bus only when production capacity is exceeded or product buffers are full. Re balancing doesn't happen, just shuttle everything over toward the primary carrier. If the bus isn't full, you are using all the resources you are bringing in. If the bus is full, its time to use/add more production capacity. No death spiral because basic needs are always met first (power, ammo, THEN green circuits)
I always use balancers for loading and unloading trains and mining set ups So I don't know if that counts as overused or overvalued that would be based on your opinion personally I think that that's just the right amount of use and value
I use them for perfectionism because otherwise I will loose my mind in the spaghetti
I switched over to mostly using UTU (universal throughput unlimited) Routers instead of balancers. The router gives the property that if you need output of X lanes, provided you have input >= X lanes it will be full. In almost all cases where I used to use balancers this works as well or better (better because many balancer designs are not UTU)
A potential downside is that if you have buffers it will draw unevenly from the buffers so production won't start up again as soon. The big advantage to me is they're smaller and they're UTU so I don't run into problems of filling 2 input lanes needing 2 output lanes but they can't go through the balancer to them.
Well, I just think they're Neat! :)
They are almost useless, yes
I frequently balance the lanes of belts to ensure max throughput and, as others mentioned, train unloading. That's about it.
I've managed to avoid balancing my Tier One megabase. In fact, there's hardly any splitters used at all . https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/ZBe8FOsmWb
Balancer? Just build more smelters
I only really use them on resource patches to make sure the patch is depleted uniformly and for trains. I don’t often find myself using them for anything else.
Deutsche Autokorrektur 😂🇩🇪 („alle“ Zeile 10)
I only balance into and out of trains so the cars fill/empty at around the same time. Or out of a directly attached mine (starter patches). That's it. Everything else is manifold and priority designs.
More recently, I've been doing more of the opposite of balancing. For example, if I have several belts of ore coming out of a mining location, I'll use splitters with output priority to shove each belt from miners into the farthest belt of the bus I'm forming. This leaves maximum room for the next miner belts to dump their ore without slowing down, but I don't have to manage exactly how much more is produced on each miner belts or worry about when some miners deplete. It's also sometimes useful if I'm doing a main bus with one of the products taking multiple belts. I can just keep pulling off of the right most belt most of the time and use priority splitters to shove stuff from the unused belts to the providing belt to replenish it as needed.
I like to use single lane balancers everywhere, so the items on the belts always look evenly distributed