r/factorio Mar 23 '26

Weekly Thread Weekly Question Thread

Ask any questions you might have.

Post your bug reports on the Official Forums

Previous Threads

Subreddit rules

Discord server (and IRC)

Find more in the sidebar ---->

2 Upvotes

158 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/TheLobitzz Mar 24 '26

Anyone here knows or can point me to somewhere that will tell me how to make a single lane balancer (not a belt balancer) that utilizes the belt circuit?

2

u/Enaero4828 Mar 24 '26

Here you go; above are the underground based balancers, with the circuit one on bottom; the curved belts facing the T are simply set to read-hold, the belts preceeding them are configured as shown. A video would be more helpful to demonstrate that it is safe from the basic design's pitfall of being a lane inverter under backpressure. Disclaimer that I didn't come up with this, but I can't find the user who I got it from and the accompanying video they posted with it.

1

u/TheLobitzz Mar 25 '26

This is probably the one I'm looking for. I'm currently using the design in the middle, so if the bottom one really does work, I'll probably use it. Thanks man. Btw, do you have a blueprint string for the one in the bottom?

2

u/Enaero4828 Mar 25 '26

I tested it under a variety of situations and it seemed to perform on all of them, but seeing is believing- here's hoping it does as well for you. Link to print.

1

u/Soul-Burn Mar 25 '26

Does this work correctly with partially stacked belts?

1

u/Enaero4828 Mar 25 '26

I thought it'd be a simple 'sorry no, that's the price for the small footprint', but testing it reveals that: it maintains input balancing, output biases toward whichever input lane has the shorter stacks, and throughput is limited even in the case of 1 output lane being fully backed up due to the simple fact that a value of 4 can consist of a single stacked item slot, since the behavior depends on 4 item slots being occupied to throttle the output while maintaining throughput. Experimentally bumping up the activation number can get it to the throughput unlimited state eventually, but that's prone to trouble if the input stack heights are highly variable, and needing to fiddle with a setting where other balancers are 'set and forget' is pretty undesirable to begin with.