Techniques for branching a line off the main bus

[thatguy321]

Hello!!

What are your tips and tricks and strategies for directing resources off the main bus lines to the assembling machines that need them? How do you split them? How often do you balance the lanes? Do you always split off from the outside lanes and then balance the lanes right after that? Or do you also split off from the inner lanes? Just looking for some ideas, I feel like my solutions are never very elegant. Thanks!

[Articulating]

I always go with this. 2 half belts or 1 full belt. Doesn't limit throughput. Also I only balance at the start.

[Hannu]

I split adjacent branches from different lines to balance load. If I need more than half belt I use something equivalent to the example in last message. I balance and combine the lines after all branches of a high consumption production cell. For example, if my copper smeltery produces 4 lines of copper I build a green circuit production unit after that. It consumes more than half of copper and I can reduce copper bus to 2 lines and get room for something else, for example green circuits. More than half of iron goes to steel so that I can reduce the number of iron lines after the steel smelting unit. Actually one line of iron plates is enough for anything after steel and green circuits (in my playstyle). I do not like common practice to use 4 belt wide buses for all high volume stuff through the factory. Someone says that it is buffer, but a steel chest in critical place would give much larger buffer for critical production line with much less wasted room and stuff. It has no significance in linear factories which have building lines on one side of the bus, but I want to make more compact factories with production cells and limited sized buses and walkways between them.

[thatguy321]

I always go with this. 2 half belts or 1 full belt. Doesn't limit throughput. Also I only balance at the start.

Awesome, thanks, I'll try those out, much more elegant than my solutions!

I split adjacent branches from different lines ......walkways between them.

Appreciate your thoughts on this. Always love hearing other Factorian's insight!

[ross]

I never use more than one belt for any resource. When the belt gets low, I just add another input.