How to balance belts In Factorio

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- Getting material on both sides of a belt

IN FactoryBelts are your best friend. When you need to get materials from one point to another, the belts will always be there for you. But as you expand your factory, you also need to expand the capacity of your belts, add lines, split them up, and generally make things more efficient.

The player standing in the middle of four chests.

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Splitters are used to split the contents of a belt equally into two outputs, allowing you to split your lines evenly. However, it can get messy when you need to use a second or third Splitter further down the same row. This is where the mechanics of belt balancing come in handy, which we'll learn about below.

How to balance belts

A belt balancer fully saturated with copper plates.

Placing a splitter at the end of a row of belts will do that divide that line into two halves evenlymeaning that the new left side of the splitter will have 50 percent of the original's material, and the right side will have the other 50 percent. If you add another splitter to the end of the left side, its left and right sides will each have 25 percent of the original line's material, and so on.

While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, managing the right amount of resources you need for your machines can get complicated. This is where you can make use of Belt balancerwhich are specially designed to distribute the material evenly along a set of belts.

There are several ways to set up a belt balancer, but here is the standard way that will suit almost all of your needs.

A basic design for a universal belt balancer.

In this setup you have four belt lines which are then split into two columns of two, combine the inputs from columns one and twoand the entrances to columns three and four. Then both of these columns are sent through an additional splitter, evenly combine the contents of all four.

This setting requires the minimum two inputs to evenly distribute all four beltsbut that can be done with an input use a different balancing design.

A simple design to distribute material over four belts.

This design essentially just stacks three shards so that all four belts receive material. This doesn't distribute them evenly, but it doesn't matter, because then the master balancer will handle it.

Getting material on both sides of a belt

Belts have two sides from which material can be takenso it is effective to know fill both sides of the belt rather than just one. Since inserter will only place material on the nearest page, you need either has inserters on both sides of the beltor you can use a design like in the picture above.

This simple design splits the belt and then coils it back on itselfso that both left and right sides receive material. You can place this device anywhere along your Belt line to ensure maximum efficiency.