Full throughput belt compression with buffered merge

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TheOnefinn
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Full throughput belt compression with buffered merge

Post by TheOnefinn »

So the problem is priotity splitters dont do that great of a job at full belt speed with a pulsed input since it has no buffer. Probably the most likely time you'll encounter this is an unloading station and high inserter stack sizes, and you want to maximise unload speed to belts.

I was playing around with the splitters and came up with a pretty simple solution, which I havent seen anyone else mention so I thought I'd spread it around. (Apologies if this is obvious to everyone).
Buffered Merge
Buffered Merge
Buffered Merge.png (1.23 MiB) Viewed 3036 times
The idea is to hold a small buffer of items on a belt ready to be slotted into any gaps in the belt you want to compress, meanwhile any items not needed because the buffer is full get passed on down the line. You can modify the size of the buffer by extending the belt depending on how large the gaps you need to fill are.

Note there currently seems to be a bug on the "Buffer splitter", and it can occasionally cause its input to back up for a frame despite the overflow being clear. This can delay the stack inserter a frame and hurt throughput. This can be mitigated by placing the splitter far enough away from the inserter so the inserter can get its full handful down on the belt first, this caused me much scratching of head about why a couple of my inserters ended up out of sync until I figured out why.

Here it is in action in a comparison between a single prio splitter, and the buffered merge setup

Image

and a proof of concept, 8 wagon unloader station, giving 29 fully compressed belts and one carrying ~31 items/second which is the belt closest to the track.

(Note this setup actually gives a very slightly higher throughput than I calculated from the wiki for the throughput of max upgraded stack inserters, have the timings changed on 16.? ?)
8 wagon unloader station
8 wagon unloader station
8 wagon unloader.png (6.76 MiB) Viewed 3036 times
(Bottom right corner is a 10 second average on throughput, the one closer to the belt is just under a third of a second average so varies much more), I wanted to double check my numbers with 2 different ways of calculating throughput since it was higher than I expected)

Also note, you will want a belt balancer on this if you dont expect to pull all inputs evenly, it has no mechanism for balancing unloading when backed up
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