Factorio Forums

So I am semi-new and have no clue why you need some huge elaborate smattering of splitters, belts, and such can anyone explain the purpose?

You don't need it.

I believe the purpose is to make sure nothing in your factory shuts down as long as you have a single active mine.

But a better solution is build extra mines.

Honestly, if I want loads to be even, I got into the habit of ensuring that at the source - aka, if I want an even belt, I'll put a miner on either side, or smelters on either side.

This is because if you have one full track, you gain very little benefit from evening the belt, as now you still only have the equivalent of one condensed track. Also, you also introduce a bottleneck where you will never be able to go above that without feeding another belt, or using the other track before the evener.

In other words, if you already have a fully condensed track on one side, splitting it only allows a bigger buffer (to sit on the track), but doesn't improve density after the evener. The only way to make both tracks dense (and even) is to have a source outputing to both tracks of the belt.


That's my 2 cents.

EDIT: Also, since inserters prefer the closer (???) track when taking items, it also makes sense to even the inputs, too - this ensures that even with inserter preferences, if continued down the line, you will typically have belt balance - in the long run.

It makes sense when you merge 2 lines.

R4CLucky14 wrote:EDIT: Also, since inserters prefer the closer (???) track when taking items, it also makes sense to even the inputs, too - this ensures that even with inserter preferences, if continued down the line, you will typically have belt balance - in the long run.

I would add that you may want 2 item types on a single belt, and ensure that at one moment, if you produce enough of each, you always have both in reach of an inserter.
Like in this image : https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... ines-1.jpg (which, by the way, is an old screenshot XD).

thanks you guys preciated

Elaborate setups are often unnecessary beyond sating highly technical forms of OCD. Most simple 'load balancing' as an idea is good when you have two or more sources of the same goods, such as a parallel pair of iron smelting layouts. A load balancer is ideal to ensure that neither source is the sole supplier to the rest of your factories, it helps improve maximum overall throughput. Splitting ensures no single factory starves out another layout for resources.

The other "load balancer' concept is lane manipulation. If you have items all being laid on one side of the belt, you can 'load balance' the belt with a splitter to have items moving in both lanes to improve the speed which goods can flow on that belt. Lane splitting is the other end of it, where you do a little voodoo trick with underground belts to separate the lanes of a single belt on to two separate belts. This is useful for, say, putting iron plates on one lane, and copper bars in the other lane of the same belt. This can greatly simplify a factory layout by having the input resources coming in on a single line.

The least used form of 'load balancing' is when you're running multiple lengths of transport belt from point A to point B. If you have two lengths of belt both running two lanes of iron plates, but you're splitting off one of them to different factory layouts, that transport belt is going to get pretty sparse pretty quick. By 'balancing' the two lanes with a splitter, you can ensure that neither belt starves out before goods reach the last factory. Of course, you'll have less material reaching those factory layouts, but they won't be starved out completely by the earlier split offs.

Load Eveners get used because those who use them believe they work... of course, no one would bother to use something if they knew it didn't work.

Evening out a load does provide some additional buffer space on the line, which is useful for those long factory lines where you have a lot of resources being pulled off one side of the belt (due to inserters favoring the near side of the belt). Sure, you can make sure that (in the case of ore) you be OCD and make sure you have exactly the same amount of miners putting ore on each side of a belt, and then be OCD by making sure you have exactly the same amount of smelters drawing off the belt at the other end, OR you can simply throw throw in a balancer somewhere in the system so that if one side is more likely to backup due to inserter preference, you can simply balance things out so that the maximum possible resources can be on the belt at the same time.

You'll only really find the complicated splitter/balancer setups with players that have spent hours (usually numbering in the hundreds of hours) maximizing and optimizing their factories to be fast, efficient or some other reason that may also have to do with OCD (or CDO for those who understand the joke

With that said, what I find silly are the players who use a series of splitters to do nothing other than shift resources over a couple tiles because they don't want to have their belt make a couple extra turns, which slows resources on the belt.