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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

Is belt balancing really that important in Factorio?

I've played Factorio, but only launched the rocket once and I think have about 100 hours in it. I never bothered with belt balancing, and simply had many rows of belts traveling east, with splitters moving things to columns of assemblers which then go to another belt to the east.

As I expanded the factory to build new products, I'd play whack-a-mole with fixing bottle necks in materials. Heck, I never even used trains or any sort of drone.

Have I just never built a factory big enough to need balancing? What does it really accomplish versus just overproducing source materials and allowing the factory to back up a little?

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Belt balancing is necessary when unloading trains, as otherwise uneven consumption can lead to some chests/wagons running out of resources but the train doesn't leave because other wagons are still full.

For mining outputs, it can also be nice to avoid the outpost getting slow/stuck (never able to fill a train) when ore runs out for the outer lanes of miners.

Anywhere else, balancers are unnecessary and just serve to obfuscate a lack of resources.

(But if you really want to play without any balancers at all, that's quite possible: the train problems can also be solved by letting trains leave on a schedule independent of cargo status. All remaining balancers, including those on mining outposts, can be replaced with priority splitters.)

> Belt balancing is necessary when unloading trains, as otherwise uneven consumption can lead to some chests/wagons running out of resources

Not in general, actually. If you standardize on N-wagon trains, and build assemblers (et al) in groups of N, each assembler can take inputs from one wagon in lockstep with N-1 other assemblers taking from the N-1 other wagons, and since productivity is deterministic[0], they'll also produce outputs in lockstep.

This means that as long as all your input trains are balanced (they should be, by being completely full), all your output trains will also be balanced. Science labs are same as any other machine, just without output, and trains feeding a logistics network can unload into active provider chests.

In practice I pretty much only use balancers for a: mining outposts, or b: random kludges, at least when and if I'm using trains as my main transport mechanism.

0: Ask me about quality once 2.0 drops; for now I just special-case uranium processing.

It is even easier if you standardize on power-of-2-sized trains.

Strictly speaking it hardly ever actually matters, but yeah I usually use N=8 just so I don't have to care.

It should definitely be a even number so that if your machine layout doesn't work modulo 7 tiles (=1 wagon-length), you can group up pairs and use 14 tiles, but it might be helpful to use N=6 or N=12, and sometimes build modulo 21 tiles. (I haven't needed/tryed that so far, so I can't comment on how well it works.)

You could also solve uneven train unloading by just having the train leave after a certain ammount of time or empty.

The common method of playing factorio is to maximize throughput, nothing wrong with that, But I don't enjoy it much. I always play trying to create minimal belt, back pressure driven kanban type systems, heavy on logic, light on throughput. While I get the distinct feeling I am "playing it wrong" I enjoy setting up logic more than balancing belts.

It ensures that your X belt input blueprint and your X belt output blueprint are actually using X belts and not bottlenecked on one somewhere. At a certain point it stops being necessary except for loading and unloading trains, unless you use circuits.

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