Factorio Forums

Recently a belt lane balancer was suggested on the factorio subreddit. You can see this post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... ubject173/

A found an issue with it as described here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... 3/foalw9n/

Incase linking to the subreddit isn't sufficient I will do my best to describe it below.
If you have a belt set to read content wired to the belt behind it, with the condition that everything on the belt being read infront is <5, you can use this to sideload a further belt line and balance the input consumption of the belt line behind. This works with a single item type on both lanes, or a single item type on each side lane of the belt. However, if you introduce more than one item type to either lane then the circuit doesnt seem to be able to calculate fast enough to deal with it, and the system breaks. If you use an arithmetic combinator however, this solves the issue but introduces another (explained on the reddit post, not a bug I dont think).
This doesn't change the fact that the bug exists though, even if it can be somewhat worked around.

EDIT::::::::::::::::::
This isn't a bug, intended behaviour, I just misunderstood the everything signal. I'll leave this thread here for anyone who might stumble across it also confused.

Save file can be found at this dropbox link
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vjdjrjk0b4qe5 ... p.zip?dl=0

"Everything" signal works as "for each", not as a sum. https://wiki.factorio.com/Circuit_network#Everything
That's why adding arithmetic combinator fixes it for you, because it converts every signals into dot signal and then all the dot signals will get summed up by the network

Thanks Posila! I had no idea haha. I am new to signals to be honest. I now want to figure out why it works at all with the two item types, but I'll search the wiki some more, thanks again.