The ULTIMATE Satisfactory Manifold vs Load Balancers Guide! (For Everyone)
Vložit
- čas přidán 6. 04. 2024
- The Ultimate Beginners Guide to Satisfactory! • The Ultimate Beginners...
In this Ultimate Satisfactory Guide, we talk about the differences between Manifolds and Load Balancers, why you would use one over the other, along with some tips & tricks you need to know in order to create efficient factories!
🔥Gain full access to my Blueprints & Layouts save file here: / spectrumdad
#SpectrumDad #Satisfactory #SatisfactoryGuide - Hry
What style do you prefer? (UBG5 coming soon 😅)
Team load balancing here
Take your time, your content is worth the wait
Having played Factorio a lot, I have religiously used load balancers in Satisfactory to maintain what I need for inputs to smelters and machines, but I will agree that the manifold on outputs is an absolute must for space saving. To save space with load balancers, I construct a basement floor beneath the machines so that the belts and splitters have their own space.
13:23 Downgrading to lower MK conveyor belts to adjust different flow rates is an excellent idea, never thought of this.
I find designing elaborate load balancers more fun and engaging than extending a manifold. Combinations of both are also fun where you split off the input and reintroduce it halfway along a manifold line to get it to fill up faster.
You pointed out why I'm usually on team manifold, but for some low volume items like uranium rods for nuclear reactors, load balancing is usually the best way to go unless you want to build enough rods to fill up all the reactors. While you point out radiation is an issue, its not so much anymore now that you can always wear your super suit. lol. Thanks for the video!
Solid arguments, especially nuclear, which I hadn't thought much about. I generally do minimal load balancing on resources, like belt compressors or saturate an mk.3 miner on pure node for mk.5 belt at 780, then "peel off" 30 or 60 or whatever to get full multiples of machines, or maybe 0.5 multiple and send excess of 2 manifolds to an odd machine. To make manifolds faster, I put the smallest speed input belt possible that is at least 1 faster than machine input speed. if machine needs 1-59 input, mk.1, but if it needs 60-119 input, mk.2, so each machine will eventually saturate, but excess gets kicked down the manifold a lot faster, and it slows the fluttering/struggling between head and tail during starvation. But sometimes load balancing is fun, so I might manifold to simpler load balancers, as it gets benefits of scalability, compactness, versatility, and speed... Sometimes vertically stacked balancers look cool too. I avoid 4x4 because if it gets to that point, I really messed up bad. 4x4 is just too clunky. I limit myself to 3x3, 3x2, 2x3 and 2x2, sparingly.
Yea I usually put in the highest speed belt I have in the manifold hwy belt to make things go quicker
Yeah I do that quite often. My input line is typically an MK4 belt (pre-aluminum builds). And I peel off with either an MK1 or 2 pending... And I also try to keep each manifold array in the range of 8-12 machines max. In some situations I may even add a merger just before the last couple of machines to saturate the belt so that they are not starving and just let the end of the belt overflow and feed that back into the system. This does require a second input source line of say about 20-50% extra material but any excess could be transported back out as output or can simply be set to a sink just to keep the lines moving. I also use buffer storage bins before and every each stage of production. And using over and under clocking schemes in some situations can also help with the manifolds. I typically do not use belt balancers and I do not suffer from any issues of either shortages or backed up bottle necks either, but I may use partial hybrids... still a manifold but with some balancing towards the end so that the machines aren't starving with an overflow or feedback output. Now once you start getting into Aluminum production and especially Nuclear that's when and where belt balancing is kind of a requirement...
OMG. Yes! Peak efficiency sounds great. :D
An easy solution to manifolds is to prime them, just disconnect the power to the tools and let them fill a bit, or pull some of whatever component out of storage and prime by hand. Make sure every tool has full stacks in it (or leave the last tool half empty to keep stuff on the belt moving) and and the manifold will just continue to feed everything.
For nuclear, a load balancer, if you're making the EXACT amount you need, would be ideal. With their size, hiding a load balancer in plain sight would be very easy.
With that said load balancing and manifolds could be a thing simultaneously, but noooo we only get flow rate limiters for liquids and not solids
Keep up the great work! Love your vids
I find load balancing a lot of fun. Figuring out how to balance between a prime number of belts, how to do so with a full belt that has no extra wiggle room, or how to balance an unfull belt evenly onto the same belt were all fun challenges. Anywhere I can use a load balancer I do, but boy do I pay for it in time and space.
I used to use manifolds exclusively, Now I exclusively use load balancers. I find the puzzle of how to build it as small as possible (no clipping) very fun. I have a blueprint I made with 16 smelters load balanced within walls. Also in addition to immediately being efficient it's also just as fast to turn off. When you want to disassemble to replace it (like where you have new alternate recipes) it's nice to be able to immediately disassemble without clogging my inventory with unprocessed machine fill and belt items. Also balancers are more fun to watch, very satisfactory.
An information Id like to add. If you want to use manifolds, and you want the start up time to be better, you can easily do this using smart splitters. Instad of always splitting 50%/50%, just send to the first machine everything, and then the overflow to the rest of the line. This will make the machines fill up way faster!.
Dude, this video was perfect! It explained everything concisely, and answered sooo many questions for me. Thanks man!
Thank you so much i finnaly understand it❤🎉😊
I would add to the end for when to use load balancers, when the production is small compared to the storage of machines, so it fills up very VERY slow.
I usually use manifolds though.
super clear thanks
Great video!!
I tend to use saturated manifolds to create a pulling system.
In this setup I can get more variety covered from a small number of resource nodes.
I just need to accept slow progress on restocking when I grab large amounts of many materials.
Yea same. You can preload to make things go faster too
12:53 I'm confused, why don't we want to radiate the areas? I love making my desert a wasteland.
Desert is the best kind of wastelands.
@@spectrumdad_ That or the swamp... Let's build a Nuclear facility in the heart of D.C.
8:06 what is that belt speed counter mod known as???????????????
I wondered the same thing
Throughput Counter and Limiter
That's the one!
i prefer te syle of ubg5
AHH! Why did you use the same sound effect as Slack?!?! Making me paranoid that my co-workers will know I'm watching CZcams on the clock! LOL
What about a hybrid of a manifold and partial load balancing? What do I mean by this?
Let's say you have an array of say 12 smelters pulling on an MK4 belt (pre aluminum processing and MK5 belts). You set up a simple manifold and yes over time it will balance out to where all the machines are running at 100% efficiency due to the back propagation and overflow mechanics of the splitters and mergers. If you want your manifold to work at 100% efficiency early on instead of waiting for it to catch up where say the last 2-3 smelters are starving for materials, then what I would do in this situation is to add a merger before the last 3 splitters. This will involve and require another line of material coming in though. For this we don't need another MK4 belt. A simple MK2 or 3 belt would be more than enough. We can feed this second line into the manifold after say the first 8-10 machines, or if you want to be more symmetrical we can place it after the 6th machine on the line of 12. This will over saturate the belt source belt. This okay though. At the end of the line we can feed it back to an extra output with the last splitter on the line to be a smart splitter taking all overflow out of the line so that the line keeps on moving and doesn't back up. These are little extra padding on a simple manifold but are less complex than a full load balancer. We can always either transport this extra material out to another location to be used somewhere else or we can simply just sink it. But yes this does require bringing in a little extra resources into your assemblies. If you are feeding this second line 1/2 through your main manifold line, then I would say an extra 30-50% would help to have your machines running optimal early on. If you add it towards the end of your array to component for the last few machines only then perhaps only an extra 10-20% of material would be needed. Again this would also depend on how long your manifold lines are. Personally I try to keep my manifolds on the smaller side such as saying an array of 8 machines, this way those machines are not starving early on. The extra material at the end of this array would merge into another belt and then start another manifold of 8. There are hybrids of the manifold - belt balancers that work well too. However, these are only good for pre-aluminum and uranium solutions. You might be able to get away with these with oil production for plastic and rubber but you have to be careful with your fluid flow and intakes. As for aluminum that's a different beast altogether. Anything that is simple smelter - constructor, assembler... A simple manifold system will do especially if your manifold lines are kept small. If you start to run say 12+ machines on a single line... then this is where the manifolds start to have that accordion effect. Anything that is 8 or less is just fine. For lines that are between 8-12 it may vary on your needs but this is where overclocking and underclocking comes in handy! A trick here might be to underclock your first few machines and use a lower belt feeding them so that they don't become belt hogs and allow more material to pass through. Then your middle array machines could be set to normal production, then the very last machine or two on the line you can add a second feedline with a merger and over clock these two. There are many ways to build these systems. I find these hybrids solutions to be good in several situations, but most of the time, for all lower level productions I simply use a basic manifold system and I also use buffer storages before and after each stage of the assembly lines.
That works too, but what I love to do instead of the extra logistics is to just turned off all the machines, let them all fill up, and turn them back on. Or manually load them up first. This speeds up the whole process.
Still not reach nuclear, but i only use balancer on a stator factory, 1 belt needs 320 and other 400, excepet that never use balancer, only manifold system ^^ . Kind afraid try to make any nuclear power plant now. Btw i play this game like 1year ago and was a recipe called "wet concrete", now i cant find anymore, already open last tier´s and got all alternate recipes from drives and the thing dont show in refineries, so the question is this recipe was removed from the game?
Wet Concrete still exists. Only need Tier 3 Coal Power milestone unlocked.
@@spectrumdad_ I dont know why my alternate recipes just vanish. Solution was upload save on satisfactory calculator and re-unlock all recipes, now they apear o.O
manifold gang here!
spaghetti style is the best
Are you planning to keep making 100% efficient builds?
manifolds save time and space. Just make an extra machine or 2 here and there. At the end of the day your production is always limited by the output of your miner.
5:10 I know you're trying to showcase how load balancers take up more space here, but this example is absurdly exaggerated. You could've easily cut that down to half the size by not making the belts needlessly long.
Yes for sure, but I mostly wanted to show the layers of splitters more than anything.
Does not matter, use whatever you like.
4:25 the splitter directly below the merger is completely unnecessary. You will be hearing from your FicSit Efficiency Manager.
😰