Factorio Forums

Greetings,

I've been looking at some of the builds and noticed a common theme: Conveyor belts and Splitters are being used to balance items on the conveyor belt.

I was wondering if someone could explain what is actually happening at each Splitter so that I can apply the same logic to my builds.

Thanks.

The wiki can explain it better than me: Splitters

Basically, a splitter has two inputs and two outputs. It will evenly distribute all the items that come in to the outputs, making sure they stay on the same belt side/lane.
You can use it to:

• Split a belt into two belts
• Fully load a belt that currently only uses one side, by splitting and merging with the other side (see wiki)
• Join 2 belts together
• Balance the output of two parallel belts (useful for iron/copper mining)
• ...

In simple terms, a splitter evenly divides items coming into it and then outputs them. So in other words... Item 1 goes to the top output, item 2 goes to the bottom, 3 goes top, 4 goes bottom etc etc
If there is nowhere for the output of one side to go, it just sends them all to the other side, for example when you use a splitter to merge one lane into another.

One thing to note, it won't change the side of the belt that an item is on. So say you want to use a splitter to merge one line of Iron onto another line of Iron, if line A is not balanced and only has iron on the top side of the belt, once it merges onto line B, all the iron from line A will go on the top side of line B. Hope that made sense, just something to keep in mind. :p