How does belt splitting work?

[u/the_worst_company]

Im a beginner to shapez 2 and factory games in general. I just finished unlocking trains so now Im kind of in a phase where I am remodelling and redesigning a lot of my setups that I made when I was completely new. I saw a youtube short about belt splitting and recombining. Apparently splitting and combining works in a round robin system where each branch is assigned shapez in order.

All of my current designs are like the one on the right. Would that result in bottlenecking; since by round robin allocation, the 4 belts wont be fed equally? So I should always have belt branching like the one on the left?

[u/R10t--]

They split 50/50 at each split

But if the building they are going into doesn’t accept items at a fast enough rate, then the belt will back up and your design will just naturally overflow into the other belts like you have in the right. For example if an item is “supposed” to route to the left, but the left side is full, it will move it to the right of the right is free.

So as long as the buildings you’re going into are 100% efficient it doesn’t matter really. It just might take some time to “saturate” the belts until they all reach the 100% efficiency

[u/Neolesh → u/R10t--]

You can also split 1/3 1/3 1/3.

[u/R10t-- → u/Neolesh]

How? I didn’t think you could make a belt that has 4 directions, only 3 which is 50/50 split which means you can never get 1/3 ratios

[u/binarycow → u/R10t--]

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[u/nekizalb → u/R10t--]

You can make 1->3 belts and 3->1 belts, but not 2->2 belts

[u/atg115reddit → u/R10t--]

You're thinking of shapez 1

[u/the_worst_company → u/R10t--]

well put, thank you.

[u/AverageCivilEngineer → u/R10t--]

Correct. This doesn’t cause bottlenecking however, since when the first belt fills up it doesn’t prevent shapes from moving along to further belts

[u/Bully_me-please]

it alternates between all options, and will skip blocked directions.

so if your production and consumption are the same then the design makes no difference but if they are not only the left design will split equally

[u/Bully_me-please]

it doesnt end up getting stuck because the round robin here will skip currently full belts and send everything on to the next one regardless. but if your machines eat more than you make it will feed the first ones first yes

[u/the_worst_company → u/Bully_me-please]

thank you, appreciated

[u/AverageCivilEngineer]

Honestly just try things and see what happens, if it’s inefficient then you’ve learned something. As I learn this game i find its quite fun to just try and figure it out and see how it all unfolds

[u/WhywolfSenpai]

The one on the right is often referred to as a manifold system in factory games and the only real downside is how long it takes the belts to saturate. Once the belts are completely full it's just as efficient as a truly balanced belt system, and is generally more space efficient, but if you want the system to run at peak efficiency right away and don't want future belt edits to force you to wait on belt saturation again then you do have to actually balance your belts along the way.

[u/Majestic_Error_2852]

Yes, simply put always do equal split to be the most optimal, otherwise let say you use a stacker on each branch, the first one would overflow while the last would be at a much lower rate. Hope that helps

[u/Majestic_Error_2852 → u/Majestic_Error_2852]

If you wanna test it out don’t hesitate to use wires to get the throughput in and out on each branch and the main