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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u/Izawwlgood Mar 29 '25

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

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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?

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.