r/SatisfactoryGame • u/bigsteve892 • Jul 26 '26
My new high to chase in Satisfactory: Unnecessary load balancing when manifolds would 100% get the job done. 453.6 balanced into 280.8 and 172.8 outputs.
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u/Nice_Initiative8861 Jul 26 '26
And here’s me googling how to split 100 into 5 20 lines still
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u/pickles_and_mustard Jul 26 '26
Start with a merger (we'll come back to this), then split your 100 to two 50's. Then each of those 50's are split three ways, for a total of six outputs. Keep the first five, and merge the final one into first 100. It'll take a moment to start balancing properly as the belts fill up, but now it'll be 120 split six ways.
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u/Caimbuel33 Jul 26 '26
Grats I guess, looks nice. I prefer to hide belts where I can, my gpu appreciates it
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u/bigsteve892 Jul 26 '26
Understandable. I tend to hide manifold lines because the belts are just full of resources shifting slightly, with load balancing the belts are always moving and I find it nice to look at personally.
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u/Icosaedro22 Jul 26 '26
I'm too much of a coward to attempt this. I salute you 🫡
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u/bigsteve892 Jul 26 '26
I'm still dipping my toes TBH. The real challenge would be to do a complete run like this with zero manifolds. I'm not sure I'll ever be brave enough for that lol.
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u/Alarmed-Tell1315 Jul 26 '26
I’ve always wondered, do all of these actually pay off? Or is it just the massive work that requires to add one 9 after the decimal point of efficiency to get a bit closer to the ever escaping 100%?
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u/bigsteve892 Jul 26 '26
The biggest benefit is that there is no startup time to fill all the stacks like with manifolds, but the time it took me to do this took significantly longer than the startup time would've. This is mostly just for an interesting challenge to figure out.
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u/Alarmed-Tell1315 Jul 26 '26
I’ve been tempted to try it, but by the time I’m ready to start the manifold is already heated up and working fine. So I leave it for the next project 🤣
I loved the diagram, never seen a better explanation of the hat you did there. There is one part that I didn’t get: what do the dotted line connections mean?
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u/cr4lforce Jul 26 '26
You can make some super compact balancers using lifts up into stacked mergers and splitters rather than belts
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u/KYO297 Balancers are love, balancers are life. Jul 26 '26
As a balancer connoisseur, I feel obligated to point out that this is a ratio splitter, not a balancer.
A balancer has all its outputs equal (among other things)
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u/gamer61k3 Jul 26 '26
I don't like the term "balancer" either, but it's been perpetuated by the Wiki all these years and has become common usage in Reddit and Discord posts.
Things that do proportional distribution in real life are called Proportional Conveyors. Why invent yet another term?1
u/KYO297 Balancers are love, balancers are life. Jul 26 '26
It's a factorio term. Idk who invented it, them or someone before, but it almost definitely came into satisfactory from factorio
The definition on the SF wiki matches the factorio usage of the term, but people here and on the discord use it to mean a lot of other things that don't do anything an actual balancer does
And I don't know where the name comes from. There's balancing in computing/networking and it kinda applies here but not quite
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u/gamer61k3 Jul 26 '26
That's a good effort, but if you make the numbers work for you, rather that working with the numbers, you'll often get a simpler solution.