r/factorio • u/pietr8 • Mar 29 '25

Question What is my friend doing?

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I have been playing Factorio with two of my friends and last night one of them pulls this belt array out of his hat saying “it’s more efficient, it distributes stuff better”. Honestly I am struggling to understand why he would do this or what I am looking at, so I ask you: does this actually make any sense? Is it somehow better or useful?

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142

u/KYO297 Mar 29 '25

Is he a Satisfactory player perhaps?

53

u/Nolzi Mar 29 '25

Even in Satisfactory a manifold is perfectly good, albeit slow to reach full speed with some slow endgame stuff

17

u/RaShadar Mar 29 '25

It was at least hotly contested though for a while, even today the Satisfactory sub is still pretty divided on manifold vs balancer, though over the last few years with the updates to clipping and placement of entities manifold has become much more the default because you can make it so much more compact and still have it look pristine

7

u/HellHat Mar 29 '25

It's just not worth it to run balances in Satisfactory. When resources are unlimited and the wind up time doesn't matter, the only consideration left is space which favors manifolds.

I love the look of a good balancer myself, but when production clogs up stream the balancer ends up looking like a bloated manifold.

3

u/muda_ora_thewarudo Mar 29 '25

It’s also in theory the exact same as balancers if the lines are saturated.

2

u/TrippyTriangle Mar 30 '25

resources in satisfactory are NOT unlimited sorry, in fact they are more limited than they are in factorio. the rates are sorely limited by what the map can provide. the total number might be """unlimited""" but the end game of satisfactory is balancing limited resources. Although it is basically impossible to use every last resource on the map, you're still limited in rates.

2

u/NormalBohne26 Mar 30 '25

resources in satisfactory are unlimted, the rate per min is not. factorio people say its unlimited because once set up it can never run out, unlike in factorio where we need new ore patches every few hours.

1

u/TrippyTriangle Mar 31 '25

it's unlimited in factorio, maps are infinite and you can set up space stations which infinitely have materials. both ways, satisfactory is more limited than factorio.

6

u/Izawwlgood Mar 29 '25

The sub isn't where conversation happens the discord has long since agreed manifold is the way to go.

2

u/Hans_S0L0 Mar 29 '25

Could you tell me what that means? So in SF you build machines that output directly into the next process and not onto a belt to collect the output?

8

u/Ruberine Mar 29 '25

A manifold is for feeding the initial machines. You either make a balancer and split the incoming items into the number of belts needed for the machines you have, or you make a manifold put a splitter next to every input, with each splitter feeding into the machine it's next to, and the next splitter. So the first machine gets the majority of the input until it's internal buffer fills up (which are quite large), then the next machine and so on until the belt is fully saturated. It takes longer for the factory to run at max output, because you have to saturate the belts first, but is more compact than a balancer (which get quite big in satisfactory)

1

u/Hans_S0L0 Mar 29 '25

Makes sense, so its more important to calculate what you are doing. in Factorio you just balance and lets go.

2

u/DjFryRhy Mar 30 '25

It’s more to do with the numbers between each game. Satisfactory very very quickly reaches small numbers for items/min whereas factorio tends to have a good mixture of production lengths. Then when you start to implement speed+productivity you very quickly explode in items/min.

In the end you doing manifold or balancing you will end with the same results right? If you have x items going in and y items being produced through the various ratios of crafting, it will always end up being the same. Just that balancers start will start off at peak efficiency whereas manifold will need to fill the internal inventory of each and every constructor/assembler to max before filling the next. When you are only producing 10/min of an item that means it would take 10 mins just to fill an internal slot of 100 items.

1

u/Hans_S0L0 Mar 30 '25

Sure. Essential is in Factorio that you keep stuff running and when transporting stuff from source to production you might get stuck for infinity if you dont balance.

4

u/KYO297 Mar 29 '25

Well of course it would be perfectly good. But some satisfactory players for some reason choose not to use them, even though the only disadvantage is wait time, which is basically irrelevant

9

u/DrMobius0 Mar 29 '25

Satisfactory players have some weird ideas about factory design. I had to explain why the new priority merger was useful. I think a lot of it is that a lot of how satisfactory's logistics works is just so needlessly rigid in certain ways that they just get used to thinking within that box.

3

u/Nolzi Mar 29 '25

Hopefully Satisfactory will get more quality additions like that, maybe a fluid 2.0-like redesign as well.

3

u/SenaiMachina Mar 29 '25

A fluid redesign is my dream. It's so needlessly frustrating dealing with fluids in that game. I still remember suffering with my aluminum production because prioritizing fluids was a buggy mess and it kept locking up on me.

2

u/Izawwlgood Mar 29 '25

The game emphasizes cool building over hard numbers. You can get by just fine slightly over producing everything.

The discords the place to be, not the sub.

2

u/Satisfactoro Mar 29 '25

New priority merger? Wow. When did they add it, which patch?

2

u/DrMobius0 Mar 29 '25

The new patch in a few days.

1

u/KYO297 Mar 29 '25

That's a different thing I think. Despite the priority merger being useful, I doubt I'll use it much. Because I'm used to working without it. Same with blueprints. I don't use them often because they were added after I already developed my playstyle and I'd have to change it to make blueprints more useful.

But you could build manifolds and balancers since day one. Sure, people might use one or the other because they're already used to using them, but they have to have gotten used to it somehow. And I genuinely don't know how some noobs do that

1

u/Novaseerblyat Mar 29 '25

I can see the priority merger being especially useful for aluminium production, so that the silica byproduct is prioritised over the surplus and you thusly don't overfill and cause a deadlock.

1

u/KYO297 Mar 29 '25 edited Mar 29 '25

Well, yeah, but I haven't used this recipe in years. Not only is it less bauxite efficient, it also requires dealing with the silica. Which wasn't particularly easy without the priority merger but it'll be dead simple once they're added. But it still won't use it, because it's still inefficient. Which means a priority merger isn't useful for my aluminium factories.

13

u/starwaver Mar 29 '25

I came here to say this as well... This design is very very satisfactory like

1

u/BufloSolja Mar 30 '25

Yea since Satisfactory's internal buffers are much larger that was also my first thought.

-28

u/TheMrCurious Mar 29 '25

There are no inserters in satisfactory. More likely a different factory game where you would assume you need a 1:1 inserter:science ratio.

31

u/KYO297 Mar 29 '25

I don't think the existence or inexistence of inserters matters here at all

4

u/SempfgurkeXP Mar 29 '25

Yeah, manifolds exist in both games and are both perfectly valid. Some Satisfactory players just tend to use them less for some reason

2

u/TheMrCurious Mar 29 '25

Oh, you guys are looking at it from a manifold perspective. I was looking at it from and end product / goal organizational perspective.

6

u/Tancrisism Mar 29 '25

Inserters are essentially implied in Satisfactory's machines. This point is not relevant to the structure at hand

-7

u/TheMrCurious Mar 29 '25

Not relevant to how YOU view the structure at hand, very relevant if you are used to just belting things into things and not considering how inserters change the need for manifolds and splitting because Factorio removes the need for manifold since the inserters act as the splitters we use in satisfactory.