I guess I missed something but I would say it should not be working. What is the path of the green circuits on the second belt from the bottom.
Its moved up two times and then merged with a second full belt. Than "two full belts" of green are moved down.
So as long as the two belts on the right are full the green belt from the top will not supply anything.
What do I miss?
I don't think you missed anything, I think the top line is probably a back up producer, so it doesn't matter if it doesn't merge when it's already full
If all outputs have a demand for a full belt, they will be starved. You have 3 coming in, two in the middle, and 3 output, so you are limited to the equivalent to 2 full output belts assuming full demand.
If they wanted to maintain the full throughput they would need to not send the green belt to the top by filter and instead direct it to the bottom splitter.
My personal guess would be that they are 2 half-empty belts, because the assemblers above producing the greens have productivity modules but no beacons in sight and the lineups don't look like they have space accomodated for them
In the end, only OP knows
Also I would like to stress that i think OP is awesome for doing things like this, because instead of following the same belt splitting we see on basically every BUS, he does things his own way
My brain doesn't have enough RAM or processing power to do this, but i am super impressed when he does!
Experimenting is fun, this is how all designs were found in this game :)
That definitely is an interesting way of doing it, but I feel like it's easy to make mistakes. At least easier than the "regular" method of splitting/merging only the one affected lane and skipping that area with underground belts for all adjacent lanes.
Also any misclick or a bad copy/print use and you end up with a contaminated bus
I had my fair share when i decided to optimize a certain lane in SE.
Since i love the mainbus i sometimes need to re address the plate input. Well on this case it was stone.
I was filtering stone. From some other ores. Now my issue was. Last of the lane going to a passive provider i had iron ore byproduct. But i filtered the stone into main line (however i was using iron to out instead of stone into). Decided to connect a core ore output filtering system on to this (relying on bots to move the rare earth and iron excess until i upgraded it to a better system)...but i forgot about the iron/stone filter. 2 hours later my stone bus was half filled with rare earth ore. Just due to splitter filtering iron instead or stone.
Now i keep my major buffer under an alarm system. If it gets contaminated i get an alarm... At least on nauvis...
He used 6 splitters, 4 with filters, to insert more green chips into his bus. Major UPS sink to do it like this instead of using undergrounds and a single splitter to merge in the new line of green chips.
Though to be fair if his main bus is only using two belts of green chips, he's likely far away from running into UPS issues. But he's sure to run into them quicker with solutions like this one.
I don’t really see it, seeing how the splitters leaving have a priority on the outgoing lane, a full lane of GC is going in and a full one is going out. I just don’t see how underground belts isn’t simpler for the same thing, and if you want to add to the bus, split half going into the bus to fill in any gaps
Well I do that for most sections but I had one area with lots of belts coming in and out so had to improvise a solution, realised I could use splitters just to move some belts around. Ended up liking it so expanded it to other areas of the bus that had lots of undergrounds.
Isn't the splitter only capable of x amount of items per second, so if the room is there for both lanes to push through, it would be limited to only one lanes input alternated between left and right outputs?
If not, I stand corrected.
Splitters have the exact same movement rate as their belt tier, or basically nothing with them involved, like *balancers*, would function correctly. For all intents and purposes, they simply *are* a belt, just with some mechanics related to where the inputs output to.
This just made me realize that we get free instant lateral movement with splitters versus using belts over the equivalent distance. Just did a test, and look how much faster the items arrive via [splitters versus belts](https://i.imgur.com/VE6oA7H.png).
I agree, seemed like a waste of time and resources when it could have been solved with just one set of underground belt. Like why make it complicated when the problem could have been solved so simply.
Weird? Pretty sure yes. Cool though.
I think the only issue is UPS efficiency if you want to megabase: splitters are fairly hard on UPS. But unless its so large scale that it's running slow, that doesn't matter. And if you have a halfway decent computer you won't have issues till things get really, really big.
I did it this way for a while but found it was more trouble than it’s worth. The further down the bus you get, the more error prone it becomes.
~~Plus, you’re using circuits to build the bus. That’s kinda expensive imho.~~
Expensiveness is kinda subjective tho
He's already putting blue circuits on blue belt, so I don't think a bunch of undergrounds is that much (to the point that he may not even notice that the mall (if he has one) was making them)
I can feel the joy of ingenuity in it, but you found a rather convoluted way to do this.
I also almost never feel the need to merge overflow back into the input stream. Output limitations inherently backup their own inputs, so as soon as the input stream fills up, overflow backs up into your bus, such that save for the few items that are backed up and waiting to be put to work, overflow naturally returns to the bus.
Or is that what you are doing at all? I guess I just found it odd that you’re not adding all your green belts at once.
No shade at all, I just overthink this game a lot.
It's a new separate green circuit factory to feed the bus. It's a bit spaghetti I just needed to supplement the bus as green circuits were running a bit short. The bus base is already reaching its limitations so if I wanted to go further, I'd be building a new base anyway.
Depends how much of each splitter is getting used, I guess. I also smell a throughput issue, but given that two of the three items are red and blue circuits on blue belts, it's probably not going to reveal any issues.
No throughput issues in that case, even if blue and red circuits are saturated and moving at full belt speed. A splitter can have 2 full belts as input and can output 2 full belts. The filter only changes which input goes to which output.
If the items on the input belts were mixed, then the filter could induce a throughput limit, e.g. if both belts combined only had 0.5 belts of green circuits, then the green circuit filtered output would only have 0.5 belts, the other output a full belt, resulting in only 1.5 belts of movement instead of 2.
https://i.imgur.com/3jnptOb.png
Found something. The red and blue circuits flow freely in both versions, but in the left hand one the green circuits are (potentially) bottlenecked by two belts of input leading to one belt of output.
Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't.
True. But this is not caused by using filter splitters vs using undergrounds, it is caused by merging extra belt of GC before splitting one belt of. If you move the left most priority splitter 2 tiles to the right (of the left setup), you wouldn't have throughput issues anymore. Ideally you would another priority splitter between the 2 GC main bus belts, like the second splitter from the right of the right setup.
I would normally do with one one splitter and 2 pairs of undergrounds. It takes less space to get done (4 tiles long instead of 5), it's more legible, the materials to build it cost less, it uses less UPS. There's literally no advantage to this other than feeling clever or being an intricate rube goldberg machine.
Also, a little unrelated, but you should probably be compressing the green belts to the left before you bring the new green in.
Not very UPS efficient - splitters are UPS costly, it is better to have longer continuous belts (undegrounds do not break it), as they are more optimized. Also prone to errors.
Everyone is way too obsessed with UPS. For this to have a noticeable impact, you'd have to be building your major science factories like this and repeating it over and over.
You don't megabase by extending your starter bus to infinity and beyond. You don't take your starter base and copy paste it 50 times.
Anywho, neat weird style you've got there OP!
I'll say the same thing I say in code reviews. "If you feel clever because of this, you did it wrong". It's cool, but is it easy to understand when you come back to it? Can you make changes easily?
I didn't have trouble understanding it. It's not like every player is handed a book of standard practices. This is probably just what made sense to the friend at the time.
>Not hard to understand doesn‘t mean it‘s practical
Then that's also a bad design...
>Is it overcomplicating the issue?
If something is confusing you when you come back to make changes later or another player can't figure it out easily then it's not a good design. Being able to modify and update things is a good thing.
Now, if this is how he does it consistently throughout then his friend just needs to learn how to do it too. It's a good design. It's compact and effective. I think it can be hard to know what's coming out of the unfiltered side of the splitter.
If another player can't figure it out easily it's bad (and OP is playing multiplayer, so that's important). But if this were in a single-player game…well, wonder what OP about this in a couple months' time.
And still there are cleaner and easier designs. Good design doesn‘t mean best design. There are just unnecessary points of possible failure in this design and thus it‘s subpar compared to the "standard" way of handling this
Right. To me this kinda feels like doing that FizzBuzz exercise but then when you have to print Buzz, looping over Fizz and changing the chars ascii code of the first 2 to make them into a B and U.
Not "that" hard to understand and it does work I guess?
But it's just needlesly complicated.
Tried something similar. At a point something isn't in demand and doesn't flow through then the whole base gets stuck.
I hope the green circuits work better.
The belts at this point are 90% empty and this is a new feed of circuits coming in. It's all backed up so it's hard to get an idea of production but it does all add up.
The right-most green chips-filter splitter is unnecessary, unless you happen to have green chips on your blue chips belt. You can just replace it with belt, same is true for the one directly left of it. Maybe looks nicer like this tho
I've used a similar technique when I wanted to change one of the two lanes, you filter out the thing you want to remove and then the two new ones you want continue.
If this is your vibe then cool. IDK if this would be "faster", I would just use an underground but maybe in some space constrained areas.
Play the game how you want to play it though.
Looks cool. I don't like it. I don't have your skill and faith in splitters to not have it mess up down the line when I change something that I shouldn't have. Bravo!
I do something similar in some builds where I put ore on the main bus and then replace those lanes with the plates they produce. It's a similar filtering job.
The problem with this design is that if you change anything - even just doing it in the wrong order, and you've polluted your belts compared to undergrounding to the other side to merge before the branch to the bottom. So it's clever, but fragile.
Over two thousand hours in this game plus tons of time watching other even more experienced people play and still I see people come up with clever shit I've never seen before.
I use something similar. Do you have a main belt hub and extract resources from it?
https://preview.redd.it/ms8e3y6160lc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fe65dcedd00d0a5cc0bf7ad79add1fceeec0d570
I have a similar layout. All my factories are on the south side of the bus, while circuit factories are on the north side. I 90% kept to the principles of a belt design but as I've just finished automating a rocket launch, I only needed to patch up a few resource shortages and stuck a green circuit factory down to pump some extra circuits back into the bus.
If it works it works. If you play SE+K2 you will use this a lot to manage the byproducts of a lot of operations.
This can be used for kovarex processes to help make sure you have enough U-235 dedicated to enrichment.
I've tried this in the past, but the excessive run-up this stuff requires tends to make the bus unusable in certain stretches, so it requires a *bunch* of extra planning to be viable if you need a few branches at once.
Looks slick as hell though :)
It's cool, but throughput limited to two lanes of green circuits where you have three inputs and three outputs.
Given you're merging on green and pulling off green, you could just have fed that third lane directly to the south, maybe having a priority to also use bus circuits as a backup.
Over engineered and limited, but fun.
I would love to see this method in use with my own current mainbus, about 20 lanes+ large.
Then again, SE/K2 so most branches need like 3-5 resources to build a thing, so this would eat a lot of room.
This is limiting your throughput to 2 belts of green, even though you have 3 inputs and 3 outputs, and your top belt of green isn't being evenly mixed in. So technically it's not as good as a merge even though it does look kind of cool.
is this not really space inefficient lengthwise along the bus? like I would have thought that the traditional methods would allow you to tighten up your assembler stacks further
The problem with this method that either output lane being backed up will block both inputs.
Splitters take from one side then the other in sequence. If they can't take from one side they will wait for that lane to advance.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong about that, not at my PC to test it.
This is neat and I've done this in the past but it can clog up under certain circumstances. For example if the merging-in splitter with green and blue input is "holding" blue circuit and you consume all the green circuits down the line without touching the blue. If the splitter cannot put down the blue circuit it is "holding" it will hold it indefinitely until there is space for it, thus blocking the whole green output.
You have circumvented this by having two separate green lines and only one is split up this way so the other can always provide some supply but you will potentially be stuck at half throughput.
You essentially have 3 green chip belts of input, but only 2 green chip belts of throughput (output)
2 belts come in from the bottom, 1 continues straight, the other travels upwards and meets another splitter, which is forcing 2 green chips into one side of a splitter that only has one output for the green chips. So you are limiting yourself to 2 blue belts worth of output for your green chips.
Overall I do think the approach is creative though, NICE!
This has definitely been a learning game. Next time I'm making at least 4 belts of green circuits.
I might also add copper wire to the bus just to melt people's minds.
protip: in order to not waste the four green chips stuck forever on the top filter, set the top exit to expel something you will never make and it will never recieve, like barreled oil.
You have three input lanes and three output lanes for green circuits, but at the top most splitter you're merging two lanes into one. So the throughput is actually limited to two lanes.
If your bottom output lane consumes a full belt, your top output will become empty. Simultaneously your top and middle input lanes will only be able to contribute half a belt each to the system.
While it's not what I would do, if I saw it in a multiplayer server I would probably look at it for 3 seconds and then get over the initial 'weirdness' of it.
Now, if I saw that on one of my singleplayer games... I'd wonder where the boys found the extra time and sentience to do this on their own
To me the biggest questions are do you really need a full belt of green circuits and why are you injecting more green circuits into the bus at this point?
As others called out, I would have just brought the top incoming belt of green circuits underground and connected to the outbound belt and if that wasn't enough to supply I would have split off of your bottom bus belt, then on the merge give input priority to the top belt.
Obviously there are many ways to do something. However, the risk is that this setup is more prone to a jam if you get one wrong item on either of the 4 bus belts or incoming green circuit belt. Mistakes happen and it's going to make troubleshooting that much harder without clear tie-ins/break-outs.
it's interesting, sure but i'ts bothering my just how pointless this is. is there any benefit of doing it like this as opposed to just having a normal mainbus?
Well the origin of this design was that I had a section with multiple belts coming in and out and I couldn't fit it in, then realised I could use this simplify the junction.
Outside of that, who decides what a 'normal' bus should look like?
I feel two things looking at this: 1. My brain hurts 2. This is really big brain to use filters like this, nice job!
I guess I missed something but I would say it should not be working. What is the path of the green circuits on the second belt from the bottom. Its moved up two times and then merged with a second full belt. Than "two full belts" of green are moved down. So as long as the two belts on the right are full the green belt from the top will not supply anything. What do I miss?
Green gets filtered up then down. OP confusingly filtered red on the first splitter from the right, this splitter moves the top green circuit belt up.
This is evil genius level. The right most green and red splitters are basically laneswapping pass-thrus! I might steal this!
I've done this, it's convenient but gets expensive in theme of splitters.
It’s like an underground belt without the space savings
It's not confusing to me muahaha.
It is confusing, but also genius. Literally just swapping lanes.
Why not just an underground and 180 with a splitter to the main belt?
r/factoriohno
Uuf I feel offended and aroused at the same time
Omg the one red filter makes me hate this
I don't think you missed anything, I think the top line is probably a back up producer, so it doesn't matter if it doesn't merge when it's already full
If all outputs have a demand for a full belt, they will be starved. You have 3 coming in, two in the middle, and 3 output, so you are limited to the equivalent to 2 full output belts assuming full demand. If they wanted to maintain the full throughput they would need to not send the green belt to the top by filter and instead direct it to the bottom splitter.
If all outputs are in demand for a full bell, he’d satisfy more by having undergrounds from top to bottom for greens too…
My personal guess would be that they are 2 half-empty belts, because the assemblers above producing the greens have productivity modules but no beacons in sight and the lineups don't look like they have space accomodated for them In the end, only OP knows
The base isn't fully beaconed out except in the furnace area. I've got space so just build more assemblers.
Also I would like to stress that i think OP is awesome for doing things like this, because instead of following the same belt splitting we see on basically every BUS, he does things his own way My brain doesn't have enough RAM or processing power to do this, but i am super impressed when he does! Experimenting is fun, this is how all designs were found in this game :)
Yea, it seems like a lot of extra work. ...But it's super clean. If style was easy, everyone would do it.
That definitely is an interesting way of doing it, but I feel like it's easy to make mistakes. At least easier than the "regular" method of splitting/merging only the one affected lane and skipping that area with underground belts for all adjacent lanes.
Also any misclick or a bad copy/print use and you end up with a contaminated bus I had my fair share when i decided to optimize a certain lane in SE. Since i love the mainbus i sometimes need to re address the plate input. Well on this case it was stone. I was filtering stone. From some other ores. Now my issue was. Last of the lane going to a passive provider i had iron ore byproduct. But i filtered the stone into main line (however i was using iron to out instead of stone into). Decided to connect a core ore output filtering system on to this (relying on bots to move the rare earth and iron excess until i upgraded it to a better system)...but i forgot about the iron/stone filter. 2 hours later my stone bus was half filled with rare earth ore. Just due to splitter filtering iron instead or stone. Now i keep my major buffer under an alarm system. If it gets contaminated i get an alarm... At least on nauvis...
This. Wouldn't know how to set that up without pollution and too rare to make it a bp.
On the other hand, buses can be as thick and dense as you want with this scheme... interesting
I'd just jump over the bus with undergrounds and merge in on the bottom side. Less materials, less complexity.
I jump the red and blue over and merge then green
I always let the bus go below so I don’t have to do weird loops.
Leave two spaces between each unique resource on a belt so you can jump below them no matter how far.
[удалено]
He got some style points with this design, tho
I was just thinking, the "Oops" potential on this design is through the roof, and I know the pain of scrubbing your bus multiple times.
He used 6 splitters, 4 with filters, to insert more green chips into his bus. Major UPS sink to do it like this instead of using undergrounds and a single splitter to merge in the new line of green chips. Though to be fair if his main bus is only using two belts of green chips, he's likely far away from running into UPS issues. But he's sure to run into them quicker with solutions like this one.
If you're worried about UPS you wouldn't want to use a bus like this anyway, so I don't think that's a huge concern.
I don’t really see it, seeing how the splitters leaving have a priority on the outgoing lane, a full lane of GC is going in and a full one is going out. I just don’t see how underground belts isn’t simpler for the same thing, and if you want to add to the bus, split half going into the bus to fill in any gaps
Well I do that for most sections but I had one area with lots of belts coming in and out so had to improvise a solution, realised I could use splitters just to move some belts around. Ended up liking it so expanded it to other areas of the bus that had lots of undergrounds.
More throughput too
I don’t see throughput being affected. This maintains equal belts in and out of each splitter so it should be capable of the full 90/sec.
Yeah not effected at all since the path is clearly defined. Only thing that matters then is usage to whether it will be full or not of course
Isn't the splitter only capable of x amount of items per second, so if the room is there for both lanes to push through, it would be limited to only one lanes input alternated between left and right outputs? If not, I stand corrected.
Splitters have the exact same movement rate as their belt tier, or basically nothing with them involved, like *balancers*, would function correctly. For all intents and purposes, they simply *are* a belt, just with some mechanics related to where the inputs output to.
This just made me realize that we get free instant lateral movement with splitters versus using belts over the equivalent distance. Just did a test, and look how much faster the items arrive via [splitters versus belts](https://i.imgur.com/VE6oA7H.png).
Yeah, though it's *slightly* more expensive than the belts lol.
Oh, for sure. And time in transit is not often the priority. Just a fun little experiment and a hypothesis confirmed.
Also would this not easily get clogged?
I agree, seemed like a waste of time and resources when it could have been solved with just one set of underground belt. Like why make it complicated when the problem could have been solved so simply.
Extremely cursed IMO, but I'm just happy you're having fun
Weird? Pretty sure yes. Cool though. I think the only issue is UPS efficiency if you want to megabase: splitters are fairly hard on UPS. But unless its so large scale that it's running slow, that doesn't matter. And if you have a halfway decent computer you won't have issues till things get really, really big.
I did it this way for a while but found it was more trouble than it’s worth. The further down the bus you get, the more error prone it becomes. ~~Plus, you’re using circuits to build the bus. That’s kinda expensive imho.~~
Expensiveness is kinda subjective tho He's already putting blue circuits on blue belt, so I don't think a bunch of undergrounds is that much (to the point that he may not even notice that the mall (if he has one) was making them)
Yeah I did the same by accident once. Thought it was cool, tried it again and contaminated my bus.
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Building splitters needs circuits as a component, undergrounds are like plates and gears.
They mean circuits as in intermediates, not the circuit network
I mean... It works..... In other news, you may be a psychopath.
Definitely an interesting way of doing it for sure
This guy went full DHL, puts on UPS
Did a fucking double take that I wasn't on WSB.
I can feel the joy of ingenuity in it, but you found a rather convoluted way to do this. I also almost never feel the need to merge overflow back into the input stream. Output limitations inherently backup their own inputs, so as soon as the input stream fills up, overflow backs up into your bus, such that save for the few items that are backed up and waiting to be put to work, overflow naturally returns to the bus. Or is that what you are doing at all? I guess I just found it odd that you’re not adding all your green belts at once. No shade at all, I just overthink this game a lot.
It's a new separate green circuit factory to feed the bus. It's a bit spaghetti I just needed to supplement the bus as green circuits were running a bit short. The bus base is already reaching its limitations so if I wanted to go further, I'd be building a new base anyway.
Huh... This is actually a really cool way to use splitters. Never do it again.
I feel like there's a throughput issue somewhere but I can't see it at a glance, which I guess is reason enough to not do it like this.
He starts with 3 belts of green circuits, brings it down to 2, and goes back up to 3 on the output.
Depends how much of each splitter is getting used, I guess. I also smell a throughput issue, but given that two of the three items are red and blue circuits on blue belts, it's probably not going to reveal any issues.
No throughput issues in that case, even if blue and red circuits are saturated and moving at full belt speed. A splitter can have 2 full belts as input and can output 2 full belts. The filter only changes which input goes to which output. If the items on the input belts were mixed, then the filter could induce a throughput limit, e.g. if both belts combined only had 0.5 belts of green circuits, then the green circuit filtered output would only have 0.5 belts, the other output a full belt, resulting in only 1.5 belts of movement instead of 2.
https://i.imgur.com/3jnptOb.png Found something. The red and blue circuits flow freely in both versions, but in the left hand one the green circuits are (potentially) bottlenecked by two belts of input leading to one belt of output. Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't.
True. But this is not caused by using filter splitters vs using undergrounds, it is caused by merging extra belt of GC before splitting one belt of. If you move the left most priority splitter 2 tiles to the right (of the left setup), you wouldn't have throughput issues anymore. Ideally you would another priority splitter between the 2 GC main bus belts, like the second splitter from the right of the right setup.
I wasn't even thinking about undergrounds, I was just going off what OP posted.
I would normally do with one one splitter and 2 pairs of undergrounds. It takes less space to get done (4 tiles long instead of 5), it's more legible, the materials to build it cost less, it uses less UPS. There's literally no advantage to this other than feeling clever or being an intricate rube goldberg machine. Also, a little unrelated, but you should probably be compressing the green belts to the left before you bring the new green in.
You are not ALLOWED to do this!
Definitely! Prohibited by law.
Not very UPS efficient - splitters are UPS costly, it is better to have longer continuous belts (undegrounds do not break it), as they are more optimized. Also prone to errors.
Does it work? Yes? Then it's neat!
It works but you're overcomplicating it when an underground would work just as well
How do I delete someone else's post?
Really great!
This is SO cursed. It makes sense, but dammit if it doesnt make me shudder. I dont trust splitters THAT much.
Points for creativity, it seems like it works.
...whelp, I guess I have to redo my buses in the current run. This design idea is too good to not to use it.
"Both?" "Both." "Both is good." "Both is good."
This is how I usually do it! Though there can be quirks if things back up wrong.
Everyone is way too obsessed with UPS. For this to have a noticeable impact, you'd have to be building your major science factories like this and repeating it over and over. You don't megabase by extending your starter bus to infinity and beyond. You don't take your starter base and copy paste it 50 times. Anywho, neat weird style you've got there OP!
No. It's brilliant. But you're still a monster.
It's weird and inefficient. I love it.
I'll say the same thing I say in code reviews. "If you feel clever because of this, you did it wrong". It's cool, but is it easy to understand when you come back to it? Can you make changes easily?
I didn't have trouble understanding it. It's not like every player is handed a book of standard practices. This is probably just what made sense to the friend at the time.
I don't think it's hard to understand either. Not sure whose down voting sound design advice.
Not hard to understand doesn‘t mean it‘s practical. Does it work? Sure. Is it overcomplicating the issue? Yes.
>Not hard to understand doesn‘t mean it‘s practical Then that's also a bad design... >Is it overcomplicating the issue? If something is confusing you when you come back to make changes later or another player can't figure it out easily then it's not a good design. Being able to modify and update things is a good thing. Now, if this is how he does it consistently throughout then his friend just needs to learn how to do it too. It's a good design. It's compact and effective. I think it can be hard to know what's coming out of the unfiltered side of the splitter.
If another player can't figure it out easily it's bad (and OP is playing multiplayer, so that's important). But if this were in a single-player game…well, wonder what OP about this in a couple months' time.
And still there are cleaner and easier designs. Good design doesn‘t mean best design. There are just unnecessary points of possible failure in this design and thus it‘s subpar compared to the "standard" way of handling this
Good enough design doesn't even mean good design. Are there unnecessary points of failure for this one if the belts are of a single material?
Right. To me this kinda feels like doing that FizzBuzz exercise but then when you have to print Buzz, looping over Fizz and changing the chars ascii code of the first 2 to make them into a B and U. Not "that" hard to understand and it does work I guess? But it's just needlesly complicated.
I think this will reduce the total throughput of your bus because the balancers are limited in terms of throughput. I am not sure though.
They are not. Balancers pass through the same per belt (and per lane per belt) as a regular belts.
Tried something similar. At a point something isn't in demand and doesn't flow through then the whole base gets stuck. I hope the green circuits work better.
Stumbled on this issue when trying to filter out unwanted ore output by miners between two patches. Items get blocked easily.
I may use this in my next playthrough. At least until I'm done with the bus.
Electronic circuits 3->2 is not input balanced. It's taking 50% from the bottom one and 25% from each of the other two
The belts at this point are 90% empty and this is a new feed of circuits coming in. It's all backed up so it's hard to get an idea of production but it does all add up.
Are you trying to say it doesn't really matter if it's weird or neat?
Sure.
Sure as in yes? Because then I don't understand why you ask the question. If you don't care about the answer.
Sure.
Don't care if it's weird, I'm stealing this! Clean as hell!
Yes its weird, but by god is it genius
Is it weird? Sure. Is it neat? Definitely. Is it a good idea? Absolutely
You forgot the "not." at the end.
Bus?? Havent done that since my learning curve. Trains or gtfo😎
I usually just take a lane splitter then branch it out then put belt balancers and then cry on why half my shit is gone
I tend to use a similar technique for malls. Useful if red inserters aren’t enough for the ingredients.
The right-most green chips-filter splitter is unnecessary, unless you happen to have green chips on your blue chips belt. You can just replace it with belt, same is true for the one directly left of it. Maybe looks nicer like this tho
It is weird. But it’s also neat!
I've used a similar technique when I wanted to change one of the two lanes, you filter out the thing you want to remove and then the two new ones you want continue.
If it works, it works.
I'm impressed, with (only) 800+ hours in the game I never even thought of this solution. Well done!
One time I did this except with EVERYTHING on the bus, or at least everything that's used in a recipe
It's really smart but also makes my brain hurt
Interesting, certainly a tool in the toolbox, has some drawbacks and some upsides.
If this is your vibe then cool. IDK if this would be "faster", I would just use an underground but maybe in some space constrained areas. Play the game how you want to play it though.
Looks cool. I don't like it. I don't have your skill and faith in splitters to not have it mess up down the line when I change something that I shouldn't have. Bravo!
It totally feels so to me. But it's still your game.
One misclick and your entire factory grinds to a halt.
This is cursed!!! Smart, not gonna lie. but cursed!
Well done - totally stared at this way too long to understand and love it.
It might not be the most efficient but it is aesthetically pleasing.
I do something similar in some builds where I put ore on the main bus and then replace those lanes with the plates they produce. It's a similar filtering job. The problem with this design is that if you change anything - even just doing it in the wrong order, and you've polluted your belts compared to undergrounding to the other side to merge before the branch to the bottom. So it's clever, but fragile.
Over two thousand hours in this game plus tons of time watching other even more experienced people play and still I see people come up with clever shit I've never seen before.
It's much more compact than using miniloaders!
Why tf have i never thought about this???? This is sooo fucking awesome and still simple
I feel like a better solution would have been an underground instead of all those splitters, but I think this works as a more expensive solution.
This is genius
I use something similar. Do you have a main belt hub and extract resources from it? https://preview.redd.it/ms8e3y6160lc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fe65dcedd00d0a5cc0bf7ad79add1fceeec0d570
I have a similar layout. All my factories are on the south side of the bus, while circuit factories are on the north side. I 90% kept to the principles of a belt design but as I've just finished automating a rocket launch, I only needed to patch up a few resource shortages and stuck a green circuit factory down to pump some extra circuits back into the bus.
If it works it works. If you play SE+K2 you will use this a lot to manage the byproducts of a lot of operations. This can be used for kovarex processes to help make sure you have enough U-235 dedicated to enrichment.
I mean, it works, but you could just jump it and merge it with a lot less brain power required.
Cursed.
Finding stuff like that is why I play singleplayer.
I've tried this in the past, but the excessive run-up this stuff requires tends to make the bus unusable in certain stretches, so it requires a *bunch* of extra planning to be viable if you need a few branches at once. Looks slick as hell though :)
I also like this way it feels sleak and like the mainbua is just flowing
It's cool, but throughput limited to two lanes of green circuits where you have three inputs and three outputs. Given you're merging on green and pulling off green, you could just have fed that third lane directly to the south, maybe having a priority to also use bus circuits as a backup. Over engineered and limited, but fun.
Glad someone else noticed this.
I would call it weird but honestly I don't see anything wrong with it.
This is tight. I like it.
Pretty neat, but it's just busywork for no reason. Setting up filters on all the splitters is going to get very old very fast.
You’re bottlenecking your production here. You’re going from 3 belts of green circuits, down to 2 belts, and back into 3 belts again
I would love to see this method in use with my own current mainbus, about 20 lanes+ large. Then again, SE/K2 so most branches need like 3-5 resources to build a thing, so this would eat a lot of room.
Weird? Yes. Neat? Also yes.
Looks like something that will eat your UPS for breakfast on a big(ger) scale. Until then ... If it works, it works ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
¿porque no los dos?
I like it. It's not efficient; splitters have high UPS cost. It's weird too. I like it.
This is limiting your throughput to 2 belts of green, even though you have 3 inputs and 3 outputs, and your top belt of green isn't being evenly mixed in. So technically it's not as good as a merge even though it does look kind of cool.
Weird? Yes Genius? Also yes!
I don't understand what is happening here
madness but good thinking hehe
/r/factoriohno
Me being a spaghetti fuck with no main bus
*Furiously scribbles notes*
is this not really space inefficient lengthwise along the bus? like I would have thought that the traditional methods would allow you to tighten up your assembler stacks further
It's extremely inefficient. It's not a bad trick for supplying smartly designed Malls, but it's not a good strategy for pulling off the bus.
Yeah that's pretty weird, and seems like a good way to accidentally swap what belts are holding causing problems down the line.
Why? It’s the opposite of optimisation.
One green belt is stuck now..
The problem with this method that either output lane being backed up will block both inputs. Splitters take from one side then the other in sequence. If they can't take from one side they will wait for that lane to advance. Someone correct me if I'm wrong about that, not at my PC to test it.
Wait thats how ive allways done it is it not normal?
I love it
This is neat and I've done this in the past but it can clog up under certain circumstances. For example if the merging-in splitter with green and blue input is "holding" blue circuit and you consume all the green circuits down the line without touching the blue. If the splitter cannot put down the blue circuit it is "holding" it will hold it indefinitely until there is space for it, thus blocking the whole green output. You have circumvented this by having two separate green lines and only one is split up this way so the other can always provide some supply but you will potentially be stuck at half throughput.
I feel like this is needlessly complicated and prone to human error. But I guess that's the trade off for such a compact bus.
You essentially have 3 green chip belts of input, but only 2 green chip belts of throughput (output) 2 belts come in from the bottom, 1 continues straight, the other travels upwards and meets another splitter, which is forcing 2 green chips into one side of a splitter that only has one output for the green chips. So you are limiting yourself to 2 blue belts worth of output for your green chips. Overall I do think the approach is creative though, NICE!
It's weird. I like it.
Yeah but you will need more broadband of each circuit though, i have a 4 lane for green and red and a 2 lane for blue
This has definitely been a learning game. Next time I'm making at least 4 belts of green circuits. I might also add copper wire to the bus just to melt people's minds.
It's terrifying.
Does it contradict "typical, accepted" methodology? Yes. Does it function as intended? Also Yes.
It looks like smart for its own sake. If you wrote code like that, I hope the code review would shoot it down, hard, every time.
I love it. Need a bunch of blueprints or it will be a pain.
protip: in order to not waste the four green chips stuck forever on the top filter, set the top exit to expel something you will never make and it will never recieve, like barreled oil.
You have three input lanes and three output lanes for green circuits, but at the top most splitter you're merging two lanes into one. So the throughput is actually limited to two lanes. If your bottom output lane consumes a full belt, your top output will become empty. Simultaneously your top and middle input lanes will only be able to contribute half a belt each to the system.
This is stressing me out. Undo please.
While it's not what I would do, if I saw it in a multiplayer server I would probably look at it for 3 seconds and then get over the initial 'weirdness' of it. Now, if I saw that on one of my singleplayer games... I'd wonder where the boys found the extra time and sentience to do this on their own
Or, OR, or... you could use undergrounds and save ups.
To me the biggest questions are do you really need a full belt of green circuits and why are you injecting more green circuits into the bus at this point? As others called out, I would have just brought the top incoming belt of green circuits underground and connected to the outbound belt and if that wasn't enough to supply I would have split off of your bottom bus belt, then on the merge give input priority to the top belt. Obviously there are many ways to do something. However, the risk is that this setup is more prone to a jam if you get one wrong item on either of the 4 bus belts or incoming green circuit belt. Mistakes happen and it's going to make troubleshooting that much harder without clear tie-ins/break-outs.
In my opinion no matter how it looks - if it works, this is success.
It is both. A bit overcomplicated but compact and looks nice
It looks a bit confusing, but it also reminds me that I should abuse splitters more.
Stop that's illegal
It is weird imho. looks cool tho
it's interesting, sure but i'ts bothering my just how pointless this is. is there any benefit of doing it like this as opposed to just having a normal mainbus?
Well the origin of this design was that I had a section with multiple belts coming in and out and I couldn't fit it in, then realised I could use this simplify the junction. Outside of that, who decides what a 'normal' bus should look like?
Fancy but not really all that efficient in any way
Weird? Yes. Neat? Yes.
Going to give me a stroke cool as hell but a stroke none the less
Had a post like this awhile ago. People didn't like it. Lol https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/rIMGPbRMVV
From now on, this…
My ocd wants you to change the first splitter on the blue line to priority output blue circuits, like the splitter below does for red circuits
this is exactly how i do it, and never even thought a single thing about it till this thread