In the past, I have found myself reaching for a six-to-four quite often, and occasionally an N-to-(N-1) when I need to shave off a belt or two. Who needs a one-to-two or two-to-one? That is simply called “a splitter.” How many times have I ever used a two-to-seven or eight-to-three balancer? Exactly never. Easily half of them are useless to begin with. The reason I do not care that the balancer compendium was removed is because most of those balancers were awful. Regardless, that removes one reason to use them. Priority splitting also allows one to reduce the number of belts, however, it does not do so evenly. The third reason has been superseded by priority splitters in version 0.16.17.
Factorio lane balancer full#
A balancer cannot make the belts full again, but it can prevent bus taps from receiving zero items as long as there are items to distribute. Eventually, resources on the bus start to thin out. You tap into the bus and pull items to the side to do things with them: make science packs, gears, atomic bombs, whatever you need. Love it or hate it, it is a popular factory design. They redistribute items under less than full load.
Factorio lane balancer Patch#
This makes the whole ore patch run out slightly sooner, but avoids the situation where ore is slowly trickling into the train’s buffer chests near the end of its life. You can use a six-to-four belt balancer to reduce the number of belts in a way that draws from all the inputs evenly. For example: perhaps you have a mining outpost with six belts of ore, but they are all 2/3 full. They can change the number of belts in a way that makes them even. This actually reduces overall throughput. Otherwise, you risk having some belts empty while others are backed up. To ensure that the wagons unload fairly evenly, use a belt balancer. For example: think of a train station where you have four cargo wagons, each producing one belt of items. They draw evenly from the inputs under lopsided load.
Until recently, there were three reasons to use them: The wiki still has a good page on the topic even if the balancer compendium itself was removed.
This caused quite a bit of panic on the internets, but ended up being one of those issues that looked larger than it really was.įor those who do not know: what is a belt balancer and why do people care about them?Ī belt balancer is a group of belt entities - belts, underneathies, and splitters - that evenly distributes its inputs to its outputs. During the month of October 2018, the admin at the official Factorio wiki removed the belt balancer compendium.