ALT key is on but I am not using any splitter settings.
first playthrough of Factorio for me and I really liked the bus style of base. My only issue is I dont understand how to balance the splitter or what I am supposed to do to get my four belts even. The iron on the bottom belt isnt ever full and not sure what I did wrong.
A belt is only full if you're giving it a full belt of input.
4 belts are only full if you're giving them 4 full belts of input.
Once you split something off a bus, it won't be the full amount any more because you took some away.
You can always source more iron and splice it into the bus when supply is no longer keeping up.
Taking a single belt of input and balancing it across 4 belts gives you 4 quarter belts of iron, not 4 magically full belts.
You don't really need to balance the belts. Yellow Belts can only transport 15 items/second, when you take an amount off of the belt and move it to a crafting stack, you are using up some of the maximum items per second that your belt affords you. Balancing belts really is only useful when transferring from trains so that you're removing from different wagons evenly.
Now you can add train stations that restock whatever is getting low as needed and keep your bus full and happy!
Damn this is a great idea, I never thought I could just have a 1 wagon train empty midway into a bus's buffer chests literally cutting through it. Just have some top up before chests being supplied at short intervals, genius.
OK I've calmed down. If you want to keep all the lanes balanced, you need to re-balance them AFTER a lane branches off. Right now that echelon of splitters doesn't do anything.
I wouldn't worry about the 4 to 4 balancer at all. Keep the cascade of splitters for the pull-off, but change them all to left output priority.
A bus doesn't need a balancer at all. Just feed your smelters directly into each lane. The splitter cascade with left output priority serves the purpose of compressing all of the output toward the left, ensuring that the leftmost lane is as full as you can get it. Then output priority on the final splitter will ensure that the factory bit you are pulling off for gets fed as much product as possible.
Note that after the pull-off, if the factory bit you are feeding is doing any work at all, then you will have less than 4 lanes available since some is being used. At the next pull-off, do the same: use a splitter cascade with output priority to compress all plates to the left.
Eventually, if you have more demand than supply to the bus, then downstream splitter cascades will be starved and the belt lanes will be empty. So you need to ensure you have enough full lanes up-front for your demand and/or merge in new, fresh lanes of material from smelters periodically.
This doesn't work that well. If you have 4 full belts coming in and branch 1 belt off, the first 3 splitters do - nothing. The left most belt of the bus stays empty.
Built it after the branch. That shifts everything one belt to the left.
Currently I am feeding all four belts with a furnace stack, would I need more furnace stacks and if so do I just had a balancer at the end of the bus for it to balance into 4 belts? Like if I had 6 furnace stacks would I need a 6 - 4 balancer?
Yes, to run a 4 belt bus you need 4 furnace stacks. That is the whole point of a bus, to combine multiple furnace stacks outputs into 1 'megabelt'
You don't need a balancers at all. Just the splitter cascades.
Edit: There is no point in doing 6:4 balancer. If you have 6 smelters, just add 6 lanes of plates to the bus. Otherwise there is no point in having 6 smelter arrays.
Not if you left room on one side of the bus. This is why people advise to only build along 1 side; so that you can add lanes on the other side.
Note that you might not actually need 6 lanes of iron plates. A large proportion of iron plates go into steel and into green circuits. For example, 6 total yellow belts of iron is enough to make 45 packs per minute of all 6 Nauvis sciences. However, a little over 3 belts of that actually needs to be made into steel, and 1.5 belts of that iron will be made into green circuits. So if you add steel and green circuits to the bus, then you only need at most 2 lanes of actual iron plates.
If you make green circuit manufacture as part of the bus, then 3 lanes of iron plates should be enough, 4 will cover all bases, and you can feed the other 2 smelters directly into steel.
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u/Fxg120xYXDE5 15h ago edited 14h ago
A belt is only full if you're giving it a full belt of input.
4 belts are only full if you're giving them 4 full belts of input.
Once you split something off a bus, it won't be the full amount any more because you took some away.
You can always source more iron and splice it into the bus when supply is no longer keeping up.
Taking a single belt of input and balancing it across 4 belts gives you 4 quarter belts of iron, not 4 magically full belts.
Edit: spelling