Balance one lane of belts

[Chuck]

I have had a few different factories, of the few, only really 2 of those were main bus designs (the others being spaghetti) and both times i had this issue.

When i pull resources from the bus, how do i keep the materials on a belt balanced? When inserters pull resources off of that belt, they only take from one side, assuming theres resource on that side, so I end up with a main bus that has a bunch of resources on one side of each belt and the other side of the belts is full.

Is there a way I can pull off of the bus without that belt becoming unbalanced as materials are being used from it?

[MechBFP]

No, not without mods. Instead use a lane balancer, which is just a splitter and then taking 1 of the two outputs and outputting it directly onto the side of the 2nd belt out of the splitter. That will be then balance the material 50/50 onto both sides of the belt.

[Chuck]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3159706045
Something like these?

[MechBFP]

Originally posted by Chuck:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3159706045
Something like these?

The one on the left with the iron, yes that is the classic design.

That design works regardless if the items are built up on the left or right side of the belt, but it can be done like the one shown in the top right of this screenshot:
https://imgur.com/gO8XPdK

However that one will only balance if the items are on the top (left) side of the belt. You just mirror it to do the other side.

[brian_va]

Originally posted by Chuck:

Is there a way I can pull off of the bus without that belt becoming unbalanced as materials are being used from it?

no, at least not unless the other belts that are being used to balance it are backed up themselves and can handle the demand, or you can otherwise replenish that belt.

in a perfect world, each of the sub-factories will require exactly a full belt, and your 4 lane bus will split off, a lane going to that factory and 3 lanes continuing on. obviously, nothing is perfect, so do the best you can.

that screenshot is probably what most are going to do, i've seen a few others that are "better" but really achieve an insignificant amount more efficiency.

[malogoss]

steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3159884890

Right side of my character, the red chips belt with the weird looking splitter and underground belt contraption.

Whatever is downstream will use red chips from BOTH lanes of the belt EVENLY. So just split and pull from your bus normally, but before you start grabbing things from the belt, build that thing. Repeat every time you pull a belt.

[Khaylain]

What malogoss provided is a proper lane balancer.
The ones from the quoted post simply change the lane that is being prioritized around (so that, for example, without the structure it would take from the right side of the main bus belt, but with the structure it will take from the left side of the main bus belt.

Originally posted by Chuck:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3159706045
Something like these?

Personally I often use these kinds of lane balancers: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fkplzhhxgqjtb1.png%3Fwidth%3D638%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D37c20db66f91c2c4a3a091302abb9eefd9e2f1c5 . They should ensure that the input lanes are used equally no matter if the downstream is being consumed unequally.

[knighttemplar1960]

Out of curiosity why are you worried about it? If an inserter is looking for product and its only on one side of the supply belt the inserter will grab it from the opposite side. It just takes the inserter a teeny tiny bit more time to do so.

With a 4 lane belt the goal is to move product from the inner lanes to the outer lanes where you can split it off and use it. You can get away with half the splitters by using output priority settings on 2 splitters instead of 4 and using both sides of the bus.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3159931644

When the center lanes become empty or the center and outer lanes only have material on one side you need to bring in fresh material perpendicular to the bus and merge it (prioritizing the material that was all ready on the bus using the priority settings on the splitters) to keep the bus full.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2854509262

A red belt moves 30 items/sec. One side of the belt moves 15 items/sec. Moving every other item from one side to the other still leaves 15 items/sec on that belt unless your machines are only consuming intermittently which allows the belt to catch up some what from the main belts. The material coming from the main belts still need replenished from another source if you want the belts to stay saturated.

Splitters use quite a bit of UPS. End game when your base gets large UPS starts to become an issue and you want to use the minimum amount of splitters possible to achieve your goals.

[Chuck]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Out of curiosity why are you worried about it?

It just looks gross on the bus when half of each belt is missing items and the other half is completely full.

[Khaylain]

It does also impact the throughput of the bus somewhat if you don't have lane balancers somewhere. Whether that's important enough is debatable.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Chuck:

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Out of curiosity why are you worried about it?

It just looks gross on the bus when half of each belt is missing items and the other half is completely full.

Unless you add more material nothing will change except the look. Half a red belt is still 15 item/sec whether you balance it to be gap toothed on both sides of the belt or solid on one side. The best way to fix uneven draw is to make sure the machines that are consuming materials are evenly matched on both sides of the belt. If you need 10 machines, put 5 on each side.