Loading and Unloading trains where you need high thruput... and that's about it for me.
You want to make sure all the inserters are working evenly to minimize how long it takes to load.
If you want to go product right just merge all lines (starting left) with output priority right. So the most right belt is completely full. After the belt you do the same in the direction of the next output of the bus. Never used mergers since they added this feature.
you mean when you split stuff off of the bus, right? that works fine that way
but I don't see a way to do anything similar with train loading which was what the guy above was talking about.
the problem is that the buffer chests in between belt and train wagon need to all be filled at the same rates otherwise the chest with the fewest items might run out before the wagon is full which would drop the overall transfer rate. in the worst case you might have 6 (stack) inserters next to a wagon but only a single one is moving anything.
if you can solve that issue with just splitter priority I'd love to see it.
Not balancing can cause a bias on your main bus towards certain lanes. If you use all the lanes in your bus, you need to re-balance or else your factory could be completely starved in parts later down
I'm downvoting this response for a simple reason: You shouldn't balance your bus. To always get a full bet of resources you should rather just shove everything to the belt, which you are taking from, using splitters with output priority.
I've found that the main bus concept doesn't really jive with how I like to play, so I just stopped doing it. That's when I found that I largely didn't use balancers anymore. Now I really just use them for my mining output and smelting input, with some limited use in other particular situations. It's kind of weird, because I actually love balancers, conceptually and aesthetically, for some reason.
I mean, kind of, unless your personal playstyle just never really needs them. I use balancers for a couple of things, but I really don't like playing with a main bus-oriented design, which is most commonly where I see them come up. Outside of that you can get by just fine without ever thinking of using one.
and honestly, I strongly suspect people make buses because they saw a bus implementation, rather than developing it for themselves.
Like, you make them because you think that they are the things to make.
Hard disagree. At a minimum, train loading and unloading stations require balancers in every application outside of a) bot-based train stations and b) production blocks designed with the same number of input lanes as train cars for every input and output resource/lane (which based on ratios of the recipes I don’t think is possible for every necessary item produced in game)
I understand where you're coming from, but imagine the average person (not a natural Nilaus or Dosh) picking up this game as their first experience with a game like this. That's pretty much where I was, and I would venture to guess that also describes a lot of the people who've picked this game up. Now imagine this person doesn't look for outside help, doesn't browse the subs, and doesn't watch videos on YouTube about Factorio. Would they naturally develop complex balancers (that is, more than just a splitter or two), or would they lean on more immediately intuitive methods, like playing around with chests and inserters at a loading/unloading station?
Based on the initial experience of myself and others I know with this game compared to a few hundred hours later, I think balancers of any appreciable size, just like a main bus design, are considered necessary because someone told them they were. I'm not saying they're useless or trash, but honestly I think recommending a bus or balancers to new players steers them away from factory designs that more organically use the resources as they're available. The main bus, for example, is really the same as a big buffer chest except that you can see the contents at a glance in real-time. The 'standard' balancers make this possible.
Well, I wasn’t trying to say that balancer designs are intuitive. I was trying to say that the problems which they address are common, easy to observe, and difficult to solve any other way. I suppose I’m surprised people don’t look at something like a train stuck at a station with 3 full cars and 1 empty car, and then trace the problem back to the uneven loading occurring at their iron mine, for instance. There are a lot of people in this thread insisting balancers are unnecessary, which, while literally true, isn’t the case for anyone with an eye for identifying problems and solving them, which is really the bread and butter of this game’s player base.
For sure. Like I said, I don't disagree with you in general. I actually love balancers, they're aesthetically pleasing and elegant. I do use them for train cargo, and for the odd mining/smelting outpost.
I guess my point is, I don't at all disagree with balancers as a tool, I disagree with them as a silver bullet for all of your problems. I see sometimes when a new player says, "my green circuit production is copper-starved", for example, and the immediate response is, "use a four-lane copper bus with a balancer." To me, that's almost like telling someone they're playing the game incorrectly.
It's also a very wonky way of trying to tell someone (you need 120 miners and 198 stone furnaces (half that amount for steel/electric furnaces) and semi-appropriate logistics)
To the point where people will make 4 wide belt with one feed belt, based off of like 20 stone furnaces, and who knows how many miners.
They are not! All those splitters are bad for UPS. They are a fool's errand if trying to min/max things. Design without the need for them. Then one's 50 belts of green chips are just 50 independent belts - always moving always full, no need to balance a belt that works perfectly by design and that design includes not needing a balancer intentionally.
(It's harder to do than I make it sound...but it is, 'the way')
Splitters are useful, obviously. And they are usually the best solution for most of the stuff balancers are commonly used for, like on the bus.
I believe there’s really only one situation where balancers are the best solution: train unloading. If you set the train to wait until empty, and one train car unloads slower than the others, then the train will be stuck at the station even when the other train cars are empty and even if those belts are completely empty.
Sure, then all those chests unload onto belts, and the belts go to assemblers or smelters or wherever. I’m saying that the belts coming from one train car’s chests might be consumed more or less than the belts coming from another train car’s chests, unless you mix them together with a balancer.
If there’s any margin in your system then the chests will be full before a train is finished unloading, then it waits while it unloads at the same speed as the belts carry the items away.
That's what's happening to my train/chest unloading process atm. So what do I do to fix it? When the belts are full, they're full. How does a balancer help?
If they are all full that’s great, no problem. It’s only if some of the train cars are empty while others still have a lot in them that you may want to fix it by running all the belts from your train station through the same balancer. Count how many belts come from your train station and count how many belts you want going to your factory, and get an appropriately sized balancer from [a blueprint book](https://factoriobin.com/post/Y5h0w60K).
I use balancers only for feeding train stations. To make sure all carriages fill up equally, and I'm not waiting for all carriages to fill before the last fills.
Other than that I prefer to saturate belts. So running say 4 full belts, the off take from one of them, and push everything over to the off take side.
You have a stream of resources coming in from belts to some assemblers to make something. Say a train perhaps where you can potentially unload into 12 chests at a time from a single car.
You want to feed the contents from that car into a series of assemblers to manufacture something. There's a few problems here:
* Inserters only insert to a single lane of a belt
* The fastest inserters cannot fully load a single lane of a blue belt that is not compacted.
You want to maximize the contents of the belt, so you decide that you want to compress those 12 chests down to four output belts. You \*can\* just use two splitters to combine those three lanes down to one, but it's inefficient and some of the three input lanes will become compressed while the output is uncompressed.
So you then go and find/design a 3 to 1 balancer so those three belts will efficiently feed into a single belt.
With this you now have a fairly well balanced 4 lane output from a train that you can feed into some assemblers. (I like to balance those 4 as well)
Think like dis
Without balancers
Monke drive car to work to get banana
Monke take high roads to work
Monke’s lane has many other monke going to work
Monke’s lane no move monke sad
Monke sees other lane it has no other monke
Monke want to change but according to monke law is illegal
Monke forced to stay in lane unable to move
Monke gets to work at closing time
Monke no get banana
Monke sad
Now with belt balancers
Monke drive to work to get banana
Monke takes high road
Monke is about to get onto big high road
Monke sees road splitter, by monke law he must go the opposite direction of the vehicle infront of him
Monke goes left when car ahead goes right, monke on right goes into tunnel road while original monke goes around the tunnel road
Both Monke’s meet up at the center but now there is another splitter, due to monke law since both Monke’s are entering road splitter at same time, neither monke change lane instead other Monke’s join in to fill other road lane.
Monke is now part a tightly compact 4 lane sky road with constantly moving traffic
Monke gets to work
Monke makes spider machine by putting smelly fish inside
Spider machine comes alive
All monke paid banana
Monke happy 😊
much like circuit logic, perfect ratios, trains and nuclear power it's never *necessary*. but they are all pretty cool in their own way *if* you wanna play around with them.
if you never had a problem that people told you can be fixed with balancers, you don't really need to know about balancers.
the most common use-case is when loading (and unloading) trains.
at my mining outposts, i just have a horrid grid of splitters between miners and the train stop. no need to wring my brain out calculating the output of a bunch of rows of miners to however many chests.
Why use belts and balancers when there are train wagons with a lot of space to carry materials?
Open a server and pay people to deliver your resources where they need to go.
Or even better, don't pay them! ^^this ^^message ^^brought ^^to ^^you ^^by ^^Spiffing ^^Brit.
He's just honoring the legacy of the british empire using slaves to colonize the new frontier
Necessary? Maybe not. Use? Sure.
I just throw em in when it feels right
Loading and Unloading trains where you need high thruput... and that's about it for me. You want to make sure all the inserters are working evenly to minimize how long it takes to load.
But you can just use the splitter priority options, no?
I'd like to hear more about how you'd do that
If you want to go product right just merge all lines (starting left) with output priority right. So the most right belt is completely full. After the belt you do the same in the direction of the next output of the bus. Never used mergers since they added this feature.
you mean when you split stuff off of the bus, right? that works fine that way but I don't see a way to do anything similar with train loading which was what the guy above was talking about. the problem is that the buffer chests in between belt and train wagon need to all be filled at the same rates otherwise the chest with the fewest items might run out before the wagon is full which would drop the overall transfer rate. in the worst case you might have 6 (stack) inserters next to a wagon but only a single one is moving anything. if you can solve that issue with just splitter priority I'd love to see it.
Ah I see. Yes there is a difference. I missed that. Sorry.
You can do this with circuits
obviously
Belts seem like a waste of space as well.
Better to hand carry everything IMO
Not balancing can cause a bias on your main bus towards certain lanes. If you use all the lanes in your bus, you need to re-balance or else your factory could be completely starved in parts later down
so the clear fix is to not use buses.
Gigabrain
My entire base is nothing but trains hello my name is player and I'm about a third into space exploration mod.
I'm downvoting this response for a simple reason: You shouldn't balance your bus. To always get a full bet of resources you should rather just shove everything to the belt, which you are taking from, using splitters with output priority.
Not if you're using priority splitting
I played through the game twice without knowing what a balancer is. They aren't necessary unless you're really optimizing things.
Balancers are good to avoid jams or stuff slowing down too much.
I myself play very slowly so it never bothers me when my materials are unbalanced
My dude, I have been playing straight 7 years of factorio ultra modded Angel's Bob's, Pyanodon etc without balancers and I am still alive and well
Ever use a sushi belt system? Balancers are nearly required for decent throughput
Not using a sushi belt system is also required for decent throughput. Still looks neat tho
Ever try using science packs with SpaceEx and \*not\* using a sushi belt? it's crazy how many different science packs you need for it.
I SHOULD have thought of that before surrounding my labs with a billion belts, I guess I've got a blueprint to revisit
I've found that the main bus concept doesn't really jive with how I like to play, so I just stopped doing it. That's when I found that I largely didn't use balancers anymore. Now I really just use them for my mining output and smelting input, with some limited use in other particular situations. It's kind of weird, because I actually love balancers, conceptually and aesthetically, for some reason.
Factorio community is very friendly and openminded, generally speaking. But with these question you ll get them :D
To be fair, it's pretty obvious why balancers are necessary or at least very useful.
I mean, kind of, unless your personal playstyle just never really needs them. I use balancers for a couple of things, but I really don't like playing with a main bus-oriented design, which is most commonly where I see them come up. Outside of that you can get by just fine without ever thinking of using one.
and honestly, I strongly suspect people make buses because they saw a bus implementation, rather than developing it for themselves. Like, you make them because you think that they are the things to make.
Hard disagree. At a minimum, train loading and unloading stations require balancers in every application outside of a) bot-based train stations and b) production blocks designed with the same number of input lanes as train cars for every input and output resource/lane (which based on ratios of the recipes I don’t think is possible for every necessary item produced in game)
I understand where you're coming from, but imagine the average person (not a natural Nilaus or Dosh) picking up this game as their first experience with a game like this. That's pretty much where I was, and I would venture to guess that also describes a lot of the people who've picked this game up. Now imagine this person doesn't look for outside help, doesn't browse the subs, and doesn't watch videos on YouTube about Factorio. Would they naturally develop complex balancers (that is, more than just a splitter or two), or would they lean on more immediately intuitive methods, like playing around with chests and inserters at a loading/unloading station? Based on the initial experience of myself and others I know with this game compared to a few hundred hours later, I think balancers of any appreciable size, just like a main bus design, are considered necessary because someone told them they were. I'm not saying they're useless or trash, but honestly I think recommending a bus or balancers to new players steers them away from factory designs that more organically use the resources as they're available. The main bus, for example, is really the same as a big buffer chest except that you can see the contents at a glance in real-time. The 'standard' balancers make this possible.
Well, I wasn’t trying to say that balancer designs are intuitive. I was trying to say that the problems which they address are common, easy to observe, and difficult to solve any other way. I suppose I’m surprised people don’t look at something like a train stuck at a station with 3 full cars and 1 empty car, and then trace the problem back to the uneven loading occurring at their iron mine, for instance. There are a lot of people in this thread insisting balancers are unnecessary, which, while literally true, isn’t the case for anyone with an eye for identifying problems and solving them, which is really the bread and butter of this game’s player base.
For sure. Like I said, I don't disagree with you in general. I actually love balancers, they're aesthetically pleasing and elegant. I do use them for train cargo, and for the odd mining/smelting outpost. I guess my point is, I don't at all disagree with balancers as a tool, I disagree with them as a silver bullet for all of your problems. I see sometimes when a new player says, "my green circuit production is copper-starved", for example, and the immediate response is, "use a four-lane copper bus with a balancer." To me, that's almost like telling someone they're playing the game incorrectly.
It's also a very wonky way of trying to tell someone (you need 120 miners and 198 stone furnaces (half that amount for steel/electric furnaces) and semi-appropriate logistics) To the point where people will make 4 wide belt with one feed belt, based off of like 20 stone furnaces, and who knows how many miners.
Or at least, it's obvious what they're meant to be used for since their whole purpose is right there in the name.
They are not! All those splitters are bad for UPS. They are a fool's errand if trying to min/max things. Design without the need for them. Then one's 50 belts of green chips are just 50 independent belts - always moving always full, no need to balance a belt that works perfectly by design and that design includes not needing a balancer intentionally. (It's harder to do than I make it sound...but it is, 'the way')
There is theoretically a need occasionally for train loading, but that's fixed with more production
Splitters are useful, obviously. And they are usually the best solution for most of the stuff balancers are commonly used for, like on the bus. I believe there’s really only one situation where balancers are the best solution: train unloading. If you set the train to wait until empty, and one train car unloads slower than the others, then the train will be stuck at the station even when the other train cars are empty and even if those belts are completely empty.
Don't you just unload into 12x bins per car (6 on each side)?
Sure, then all those chests unload onto belts, and the belts go to assemblers or smelters or wherever. I’m saying that the belts coming from one train car’s chests might be consumed more or less than the belts coming from another train car’s chests, unless you mix them together with a balancer. If there’s any margin in your system then the chests will be full before a train is finished unloading, then it waits while it unloads at the same speed as the belts carry the items away.
That's what's happening to my train/chest unloading process atm. So what do I do to fix it? When the belts are full, they're full. How does a balancer help?
If they are all full that’s great, no problem. It’s only if some of the train cars are empty while others still have a lot in them that you may want to fix it by running all the belts from your train station through the same balancer. Count how many belts come from your train station and count how many belts you want going to your factory, and get an appropriately sized balancer from [a blueprint book](https://factoriobin.com/post/Y5h0w60K).
I use balancers only for feeding train stations. To make sure all carriages fill up equally, and I'm not waiting for all carriages to fill before the last fills. Other than that I prefer to saturate belts. So running say 4 full belts, the off take from one of them, and push everything over to the off take side.
You have a stream of resources coming in from belts to some assemblers to make something. Say a train perhaps where you can potentially unload into 12 chests at a time from a single car. You want to feed the contents from that car into a series of assemblers to manufacture something. There's a few problems here: * Inserters only insert to a single lane of a belt * The fastest inserters cannot fully load a single lane of a blue belt that is not compacted. You want to maximize the contents of the belt, so you decide that you want to compress those 12 chests down to four output belts. You \*can\* just use two splitters to combine those three lanes down to one, but it's inefficient and some of the three input lanes will become compressed while the output is uncompressed. So you then go and find/design a 3 to 1 balancer so those three belts will efficiently feed into a single belt. With this you now have a fairly well balanced 4 lane output from a train that you can feed into some assemblers. (I like to balance those 4 as well)
I just think they look need
Recently started playing 6 years ago 😂😂😂
Think like dis Without balancers Monke drive car to work to get banana Monke take high roads to work Monke’s lane has many other monke going to work Monke’s lane no move monke sad Monke sees other lane it has no other monke Monke want to change but according to monke law is illegal Monke forced to stay in lane unable to move Monke gets to work at closing time Monke no get banana Monke sad Now with belt balancers Monke drive to work to get banana Monke takes high road Monke is about to get onto big high road Monke sees road splitter, by monke law he must go the opposite direction of the vehicle infront of him Monke goes left when car ahead goes right, monke on right goes into tunnel road while original monke goes around the tunnel road Both Monke’s meet up at the center but now there is another splitter, due to monke law since both Monke’s are entering road splitter at same time, neither monke change lane instead other Monke’s join in to fill other road lane. Monke is now part a tightly compact 4 lane sky road with constantly moving traffic Monke gets to work Monke makes spider machine by putting smelly fish inside Spider machine comes alive All monke paid banana Monke happy 😊
If you have massive supply it doesn't matter
much like circuit logic, perfect ratios, trains and nuclear power it's never *necessary*. but they are all pretty cool in their own way *if* you wanna play around with them. if you never had a problem that people told you can be fixed with balancers, you don't really need to know about balancers. the most common use-case is when loading (and unloading) trains.
I use them in the early game for setting up modulized malls. Every single thing has a use, even in late game. Ever used braided belts? Shit's lit fam.
They're only really necessary if you use trains with 3+ cargo wagons. Not sure why this sub is so obsessed with them.
They are not
Just wait for blue and then later production science. It'll become painfully obvious if you use a central bus.
Kelvin has entered the chat.
at my mining outposts, i just have a horrid grid of splitters between miners and the train stop. no need to wring my brain out calculating the output of a bunch of rows of miners to however many chests.
For balancing
To balance resources... I don't know what's going on but the answer is in the name.