Finding balance: a guide to belt balancers

[Trifonius]

I couldn't find a general guide to belt balancers, so I made one myself. It covers all MxN balancers, as well as throughput unlimited balancers.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FsT ... sp=sharing

Feel free to critique it all you like! Any mistakes I made, or techniques I forgot, will be corrected/added.

[AngledLuffa]

Very interesting - a lot to digest.

I believe there are a couple typos. On page 14,

"However, if we were to make a MxN followed by another MxN"

I believe the second one should be NxN, although I might be misunderstanding.

Also, rout -> route

[Trifonius]

"However, if we were to make a MxN followed by another MxN"

I believe the second one should be NxN, although I might be misunderstanding.

That doesn't matter here, as we are in the M=N section.

[benkor1]

Brilliant work - but I think you've missed something that a lot of people do. Your 4x4 balancer would not work, for reasons shown in this article: https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics.
You actually need 6 balancers to do it correctly.

How this impacts your golden role, I don't know, but I thought I might point this out.

[Trifonius]

Brilliant work - but I think you've missed something that a lot of people do. Your 4x4 balancer would not work, for reasons shown in this article: https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics.
You actually need 6 balancers to do it correctly.

How this impacts your golden role, I don't know, but I thought I might point this out.

The mistake is not there. 4 balancers makes a throughput limited 4x4 balancer. As I say in my section on throughput unlimited balancers, this will not suffice if you want optimal throughput under every configuration. The 6 balancers of the standard design are a result of placing 2 throughput limited balancers back-to-back, then cutting out two splitters in the middle, as back-to-back splitters on the same two belts provide no extra value.

[netmand]

I like that you decided to put some real thought into sharing your ideas and techniques. I like that there is a guide for such topics. I applaud the time and effort that went into making this. However, It was hard for me to read. The concepts are hard for me to follow, and by page 4 I was like, maybe I should just open up the game and try following along there? Except I don't play with mods, it's a personal choice but I wish a publication that's meant for the general public wouldn't require them to install mods just to follow along with the examples given.

At the beginning there is the observation that balancers are primarily used for loading trains, yet a quick scan of the document yielded not solid examples to follow. Where's a good example of using splitters to efficiently load a train?

You didn't point out any common mistakes and known issues as mentioned by someone above. A section like that would add value to the doc.

[Tiffany]

Thank you for the section on compressors! It turns out that's the thing I've been looking for all along. I was mainly looking into this as a way of making sure my mines (with many non-saturated belts) are guaranteed to compress down into the 4 lines that go to train loaders.

[Ormek]

@trifonous I think 0.17 is stable now and you can cut the loop back section in UTU

After same pages your speed increased, I would have required more in detailed, stepwise explanations to really follow. But, that is okay. Maybe having a balancer is enough and I can then true to understand how it reallyworks. I loved the initial math and would have liked to see more of it.

I am very, VERY fond of the compressor section. I have the same challenge as @Tiffany and will solve it as described.

[vangrunz]

Here's my simple 2 lane balancer I've developed, if you have eg. 2 ore fields and you want to support two furnace lines equally:

2023-03-08_101242_cr.png (628.95 KiB) Viewed 20713 times

It did a good job for me.

[disentius]

there are better solutions, it came up on discord recently:

balanders 2x2.jpg (113.95 KiB) Viewed 20701 times

[vangrunz]

I guess there're some parts missing

[Yodo]

Kind of a necro, but since this is still linked on the wiki, I would like to point out that the document uses some nonstandard terminology (mainly that TU is called UTU), and has some incorrect claims, at least this one:

One more point: there exists no balancer that is FO, FI and non-UTL simultaneously, other than the splitter itself. If such a balancer were to exist, it could serve as any smaller balancer, but it isn’t that simple, unfortunately.

In standard terminology this says "UTU balancers don't exist", which we know now is clearly untrue. See this Reddit post for a recent example.