The ULTIMATE Satisfactory Manifold vs Load Balancers Guide! (For Everyone)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 เม.ย. 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!
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What style do you prefer? (UBG5 coming soon 😅)
Team load balancing here
Take your time, your content is worth the wait
Team Build Enormous here.
Definitely manifolds because the less splitters and belts you use the further you are away from the games object count limits. And the better game performance is.
Anything simpler is better.
I am team whatever works better for the situation. Manifolds are good in some situations and bad in others, and vice versa with load balancers. One thing not mentioned that I don’t see many creators say anything about is utilizing storage “buffers”. With the constant shift in resource needs as you progress, along with the increasing complexity, I always find that having some “buffers” inline makes a huge difference in keeping things running at peak performance. I can always tell if a manufacturing line is gonna have problems when I check the containers. If resource output is faster than the input, I will will investigate the line and make appropriate adjustments while everything is still running smoothly. You can even manifold/load balance a bunch of containers which can seriously increase your total output so you hook up even more machines!
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.
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.
13:23 Downgrading to lower MK conveyor belts to adjust different flow rates is an excellent idea, never thought of this.
I was so happy when I figured it out and additionally figured out that it could be used in manifold setup. Have single line 480 and 60belts coming off and additionally splitting into smelters. Worked like a charm. No stacking and when I turn off the miner basically instantly can delete it without getting excess raw materials.
You don't need smart splitters :)
Soon setting up on copper 60+84 1st then 120 and 168. Need it for oscillator balancing. I was surprised the weird numbers could be balanced with even overclocks. Well according to my math.
And will test sushi belt + splitting. Hopefully everything equals out evenly.
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...
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!
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!.
OMG. Yes! Peak efficiency sounds great. :D
Dude, this video was perfect! It explained everything concisely, and answered sooo many questions for me. Thanks man!
Keep up the great work! Love your vids
Excellent video! If you build your load balancers with endgame resource speeds in mind, you never have to redo your structures. Also, turning down factory speeds drastically enhances early game power usage. The power of spaghetti manifolds in the early game cannot be understated though, always my goto when first harvesting a resource.
Excellent explanations, thank you! I like to use load balancers for smaller/earlier builds and switch over to manifolds for the bigger and later game stuff
I like using a combination of manifold and load balancing for loading into smelters / refiners / etc. When I split off of the manifold, I use a mk 1 belt, so that it only takes a maximum of 60, and then split that 60 between the 2 or so machines next to the manifold entrance.
AHH! Why did you use the same sound effect as Slack?!?! Making me paranoid that my co-workers will know I'm watching TH-cam on the clock! LOL
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
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.
The way I see it, you have a massive map, with planning, balancers are usually the way to go for me. With blueprints, update 8 is super easy to build compact balancers, compared to tedious glitch building to get shit to fit previously. I love they just let you clip now. I dont clip through conveyors, but its nice to snug up to the machines. As long as it looks right, clipping is fine. Vertical building also helps keep compact.
Great video!!
Thank you so much i finnaly understand it❤🎉😊
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.
super clear thanks
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.
Decided to make a super computer farm (10 per minute)
This video saved me because of manifold lines
Usually I just do manifold. If I get to nuclear I've usually got the means to mitigate the radiation so I don't worry about backup too much. However, sometimes if I make a longish manifold I will split the input and feed it from both sides so it gets to efficient faster. I'm sure that's not THAT effective, but it makes me feel good lol. And it adds just a little extra visual interest to just a line of smelters or whatever. If I'm planned ahead enough to build a logistics floor to feed buildings making low volume items, then I'll load balance "properly."
i would love if they added the ability to tell smart splitters how much to send out on each output, blank would mean it will send whatever is left, for example, 30 iron ore to the left, and forward is left blank, it would send 30 iron ore per minute to the left and the rest out the other output.
5:18 You can always do a hybrid system between to add the other two smelters. Add just one more splitter at the start. Two outputs going to the two extra smelters directly and the third goes to the 24 load balancer. The two additional smelters will fill so fast that you’re still getting the quick wind up time of a load balancing system.
I would call hybrid single line 480 and 60 belts splitting off and additional split or overclock. I placed splitting belts and mergers under the smelters, loved the solution I came up with. Blueprint requires more tweaking for looks and modularity.
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
I am team load balancers. I typically route the mess in the floorspace between floors.
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.
So I would suggest, load balancers to balance the material for different machines, manifold after that for the same machine
Ever considered a 4x4 balancer using the Industrial Storage units? 2 ins, and 2 outs, automatically evenly split.
Industrial storage units don't balance between their outputs - they pick one and send most resources there first, the second belt basically being overflow when both input belts give it an item at the same time.
Whichever output is the 'primary' belt is usually the first belt you attach to it, but IIRC it can change on reloads.
Every time I've done a load-balanced setup and also needed an industrial storage container, I had to load balance the outputs or never use move than 1 input and 1 output.
Question that's probably noob-ish since I just started playing this week. You said the manifold layout is scalable, but beyond that 30/30 splitter I don't see how all future smelters operate efficiently. They just get exactly how many they need so there's no overflow. Since 120 is all I can get off a Mk2 belt, am I just hard limited to 4 smelters per miner until I find a way to upgrade? Or do I underclock the later smelters until there's a backup farther down the line?
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.
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
You should always put more than you need into manifold
Me watching this video even though i know i won’t use it because i just use the modular load balancer mod
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!
Are you planning to keep making 100% efficient builds?
1> Load balancers don't automatically give everything the exact required amount. They split the item stream equally. If everything used the same amount then they all get perfectly fed. If not, then it works like a manifold.
2. Load balancers can take up a significantly smaller footprint than shown if you don't build them with 49867543987 miles of useless converyor between each splitter.
Manifolds FTW. If "something" happens and you lose half the input, then you are the problem, not the belt system. Wraping half of your factory in belts just in case is not the way to go. If you sink the final product only, the rest will balance itself out eventually. In this world of endless resources there is no other reason to go load balancers but to grow your OCD to its terminal stage.
spaghetti style is the best
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.
4:25 the splitter directly below the merger is completely unnecessary. You will be hearing from your FicSit Efficiency Manager.
😰
Does not matter, use whatever you like.
Manifolds with intellgient Splitters
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.
Your reinforced iron plates statements around manifolds are actually incorrect. Once the iron plates saturate, the output will stabilize to a fixed amount of reinforced iron plates per minute, the exact same 5 as per the load balanced example.
And that facially must be true, because if it weren't, that means you would have iron ore building up somewhere. But if the iron plates are saturated, then all of your iron must be going into screws, and your system can't starve if it's being oversupplied iron into screws while plates are saturated. The bouncing you describe will happen so fast that it will be literal noise, identical to the same sort of flow fluctuations that happen in every factory.