fractal 2048 belt balancer (and bigger?)

Circuit-free solutions of basic factory-design to achieve optimal item-throughput.
Involving: Belts (balancers, crossings), Inserters, Chests, Furnaces, Assembling Devices ...
Optimized production chains. Compact design.
Please provide blueprints!
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Circuit-free solutions of basic factory-design to achieve optimal item-throughput
Qon
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fractal 2048 belt balancer (and bigger?)

Post by Qon »

I made some balancers that are slightly larger than the average. Should accomodate even your larger belt bases. I kept going until my UPS got as low (12) as my 20 RPM WIP base so I stopped building bigger balancers. If you want me to build bigger ones for you then please send me a better computer. But instant blueprint, HandyHands and blueprint flipping made it possible to build it even if my computer freezes for several seconds when I just hover my cursor over the blueprints or place them...
  • It's actually a set of balancers for 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 and 256 belts. But who cares about the small ones?
  • Each balancer is exactly as wide as the number of belts it balances. This was important to me so that you can use it in your 256 belt bus without having to move other buses or branch it.
  • Each of the larger (64+) balancers are a bit more than twice as long as the previous while the small ones (32 and less) are about twice (some more some less) as long as the previous balancer.
  • The 128 balancer is significantly larger than my robot megabase (1 RPM).
  • While the larger ones take up significant amounts of space they are actually fairly compressed compared to what I have seen from others.
  • It takes about 5 seconds for the first items in the beginning of the 256 balancer to move when you start to unload from the end of it.
  • It takes more than 70 MW to run all the stack inserters that remove the items from the 256 balancer.
  • The 256 balancer stores about 1.6 million items on the belts.
  • The 256 balancer doesn't fit on the minimap. It's probably slightly less than 700 tiles long.
  • The 256 balancer requires 75k UG belt, 18k express belts and 2.4k express splitters. But with its size you can probably get away with basic belts and still get enough capacity for most needs anyway.
I have the blueprint .txt as a file download because the text is 0.66 MB. I also uploaded the world because that way you can look and blueprint the smaller ones in case you only need to balance a small bus. I don't think people usually submit their balancers as world downloads but I thought it was appropriate in this case. I recommend Creative Mode mod and the 20x20 PAMKII slots mod (15 exoskeleton legs and creative mode extra running speed + energy source is useful) if you want to try runnig it.
Small balancers
128, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 in high quality with individual pictures. Photographer: /u/Lord_Peppe
64 balancer
128 balancer
256 high quality
512 high res
512 even higher quality
512 map view

I have 60 UPS when the belts aren't moving though so I might do 512 and 1024 later... I like fractals q:

Edit: Added the 512 balancer. Someone had done a 256 belt balancer before so it had to be done. Some files (save and blueprint) added to a later post because I've reached the limit here.

Edit 2: 512 balancer savefile and blueprint added here now. Latest fixed version. Updated savefile, 512 belt balancer.

Bigger balancers
2048 balancer and code to generate them at any size on page 4: viewtopic.php?p=344279#p344279
Map view picture by JohnyDL of a 512 balancer in the new style: viewtopic.php?p=310656#p310656
Attachments
512balancer.txt
(2.75 MiB) Downloaded 1060 times
Belt03_0.13.13_256.zip
(15.49 MiB) Downloaded 787 times
256balancer.txt
(663.56 KiB) Downloaded 994 times
Last edited by Qon on Wed Jul 08, 2020 5:54 pm, edited 17 times in total.

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MadZuri
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Re: 256 fractal belt balancer

Post by MadZuri »

This is true dedication right here.

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Re: 256 fractal belt balancer

Post by Qon »

MadZuri wrote:This is true dedication right here.
Glad you enjoyed it. Watched your VOD making a 32 belt balancer just a while ago. The final result in your "all about the belts" video is a maybe a bit shorter than my 32 belt balancer. Mine is narrower though. I enjoyed watching that. You aren't doing everything wrong constantly and I don't always solve everything before you so I don't have to mentally correct everything you do while watching. That's relaxing :)

The big ones are comparativly not that hard to make. The 32 belt balancer and the other small ones were done manually where I aimed at making it as small as possible. The way I made the 64 balancer is fairly extensible though so once I had that design down the 128 and 256 were mostly just extending the pattern. Getting the fractal pattern for the 64 was a bit tricky though. But it payed off.

(Recently updated OP with higher quality version picture for 256. Might get even better pictures later. And maybe bigger balancers...)

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siggboy
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Re: 256 fractal belt balancer

Post by siggboy »

You are nuts.

Now make a splitter based sorter than can sort all the items in the game simultaneously onto separate belts.
Is your railroad worrying you? Doctor T-Junction recommends: Smart, dynamic train deliveries with combinator Magick

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Re: 256 fractal belt balancer

Post by Koub »

Koub - Please consider English is not my native language.

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Re: 256 fractal belt balancer - Edit: 512

Post by Qon »

512 balancer update.
HQ images are in OP.
Freaky pic of the blueprint
Took an hour to fill it with artifacts. Lots of game crashes to get pictures. Lots of forum problems to upload it. But now you can see it at last.

Savefile 40MB, too big for this forum so hosted at zippyshare. The PNG version of the HQ pic of it is actually also 40 MB. JPG compression brought that down to 15MB though.

Edit: The blueprint is now updated. Fixed the misplaced ug belt and the ugly vertical lines of non-ug belt.
Edit 2: World download updated.
Attachments
512balancer.txt
408k entities. You might want to try the world download instead...
(2.75 MiB) Downloaded 409 times
Last edited by Qon on Mon Aug 22, 2016 9:44 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Qon
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Re: 256 fractal belt balancer

Post by Qon »

siggboy wrote:You are nuts.

Now make a splitter based sorter than can sort all the items in the game simultaneously onto separate belts.
Seem like an awful lot of work, it would be unpractically large and bots could do that better. Oh...

:)

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Re: 512 fractal belt balancer

Post by pieppiep »

For an extra challenge, don't use landfill but find a place where this fits. :P

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Re: 512 fractal belt balancer

Post by Qon »

pieppiep wrote:For an extra challenge, don't use landfill but find a place where this fits. :P
The 512 balancer is probaly about 1.5 km long. I think i'll pass on the extra challenge!

Edit: also there's one misplaced UG belt. /u/RedditNamesAreShort has a picture if you want to find where (look at minimap, not that hard to find if you know where to look). And an updated blueprint without the error. I'll update my posts later with correct info.

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Re: 512 fractal belt balancer

Post by ssilk »

Image
Cool suggestion: Eatable MOUSE-pointers.
Have you used the Advanced Search today?
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Qon
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Re: 512 fractal belt balancer

Post by Qon »

ssilk wrote:But why?
Why not?

And making fractal superstructures is pleasant. When it becomes so big that that it's beyond comprehension and you can just zoom in on it and still looks the same and it's still too big to take in, then your mind just wanders. Look at that 512 balancer. It kinda looks the same as the 128 balancer if you see the images side by side. It's hard to tell which one is bigger at just a glance. And then you zoom in at the 512 one and see little 128 balancers everywhere. And then you realise that those little 128 balancers are actually crazy huge and consist of many little 32 belt balancers. Which are also bigger than any reasonable base needs. But you thought those were big before. And now when you look at the 512 balancer you kind of get how big it is to some small extent. And that is beautiful.

That's why.

I wish the game could handle even bigger balancers.

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Re: 512 fractal belt balancer

Post by siggboy »

The answer is obviously: because he can. I don't doubt he does acknowledge that these huge balancers are utterly useless.
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Qon
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Re: 512 fractal belt balancer

Post by Qon »

siggboy wrote:The answer is obviously: because he can. I don't doubt he does acknowledge that these huge balancers are utterly useless.
Most people sprinkle the 4 belt balancer everywhere even when they aren't needed. All belt balancers are close to useless. There are some cases for the small ones but less than most people seem to think. Bigger ones are even less useful since at that stage you should have dedicated belt lines for factories running all the time and have balanced consumption and production in a properly designed factory instead of using balancers. A megabase doesn't need to divert products from gear production to power pole production suddenly so the there really isn't much need for any big balancers at all q:

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siggboy
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Re: 512 fractal belt balancer

Post by siggboy »

Yes, I wrote something similar today on Reddit when it was about how to split from a belt and then re-balance.

I always try to create my assembly lines so that they consume close to (or a little more than) a fully compressed belt. Then I can just use up the belts one by one and don't have to balance the belts at all.
Is your railroad worrying you? Doctor T-Junction recommends: Smart, dynamic train deliveries with combinator Magick

Qon
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Re: 512 fractal belt balancer

Post by Qon »

siggboy wrote:Yes, I wrote something similar today on Reddit when it was about how to split from a belt and then re-balance.

I always try to create my assembly lines so that they consume close to (or a little more than) a fully compressed belt. Then I can just use up the belts one by one and don't have to balance the belts at all.
Yeah, at least the balancers don't directly decrease your production q:

After I'm done with my bot base I'll do a proper belt base. I have some experience with belts now at least ^^
Well, completely useless experience, but still...

But I built my bot base so compressed that it's actually a challenge making it. Can't deliver oil products with bots in vanilla.

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Re: 512 fractal belt balancer

Post by siggboy »

Qon wrote:But I built my bot base so compressed that it's actually a challenge making it. Can't deliver oil products with bots in vanilla.
I'm now on my new map where I build everything on artificial islands -- making good use of my train system, of course.

But there I also have space constraints, islands can't be expanded indefinitely, and as soon as some infrastructure is on the island that's not even a good solution anymore.

Currently I'm using a balance of robots and belts, using both where they're best.

I use a barrel mod, but no rail tanker. You should use a barrel mod for a bot base I guess.
Is your railroad worrying you? Doctor T-Junction recommends: Smart, dynamic train deliveries with combinator Magick

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Re: 512 fractal belt balancer

Post by orzelek »

Big screenshot of 512 balancer (shared as file due to size of image):
http://www89.zippyshare.com/v/3iHinCNc/file.html

Qon
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Re: 512 fractal belt balancer

Post by Qon »

siggboy wrote: Currently I'm using a balance of robots and belts, using both where they're best.
Yeah that is optimal.
siggboy wrote:I use a barrel mod, but no rail tanker. You should use a barrel mod for a bot base I guess.
I want to prove something about the vanilla game, so my base must be able to run without mods. I'll cheat everything else to get around some performance limitations though. q:
orzelek wrote:Big screenshot of 512 balancer (shared as file due to size of image):
http://www89.zippyshare.com/v/3iHinCNc/file.html
Trying to convert it to .JPG in paint becasue it's so big:
ousu(160822-205644-58).jpg
ousu(160822-205644-58).jpg (22.93 KiB) Viewed 48510 times
lol

I managed to convert it in GIMP though.

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Re: 512 fractal belt balancer

Post by Keeper »

Wow that is crazy. I don't think I've ever got past a 32 lane belt, and i didn't bother mixing it all up, i just made an outrageous buffer at the end.

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Re: 512 fractal belt balancer

Post by Qon »

Keeper wrote:Wow that is crazy.
No one says "Thanks, just what I needed". I wonder why that is? :D
Keeper wrote:I don't think I've ever got past a 32 lane belt, and i didn't bother mixing it all up, i just made an outrageous buffer at the end.
32 express belts is considered really wide by most people anyways.
I'm not like most people ;)

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