Factorio Forums

This is the recommended way of pulling two lanes from a four lanes bus (I believe):



What is the recommended way of pulling four lanes from an eight lanes bus? Right now I use this, with preceding and following balancers, but it's suboptimal:

I don't know, but what I found interesting was that in your 4-lane design it would pull 2 half-compressed belts if there was no backpressure on either end.

Edit: Since your 8-lane design is just two of those stung together it would still only output 4 half-compressed belts (2 full belts).

Like this:
OK, snarkiness aside, it depends on what you're trying to do.

If you're expecting the 4 lanes to pull pretty consistently near 100% capacity, there's no need for the bus to continue to be 8 lanes wide.

If you're expecting each of the 4 lanes to pull at, say, 80% of full belt speed, you can use cascaded splitters to "mix" each of the 4 lanes with the next one up. At the end of the 4 lanes, you wind up with an extra lane which can be re-added to your now-5-lane bus. A 4-5 balancer would do about the same thing.

If you're expecting the 4 lanes to pull at close to capacity, but only part of the time, while the rest of the time the full 8 belts of material does actually continue down the bus... well first of all, not sure how that situation would arise... but my instinct would be use 4x 2-3 balancers (or 2x 4-6 balancers), so that each pair of bus lanes feeds a single output lane as well as continuing on with the bus.