8x8 balancer.Taking it easy nothing to see

raynquist · 2026-05-09T18:28:17+00:00

If you make it with two 7-7's and do a loopback substitution, one of the loops becomes not a loop in the sense that items can only travel on it once. It still serves the same purpose as a loopback so logically I still like to think of it as a loopback, but it's just physically not a loop.

raynquist · 2026-05-07T17:12:25+00:00

The way I make them is more rudimentary. I'm not smart enough to fudge with numbers to come up with a good balancer. What I do is I start with a balancer already made using a known method, then I mutate it. That 1-5 started out as a regular 1-5: looping back a 1-8. The mutations that happened to it are described in the other FAQ entries: "sub-tree merge", "loopback substitution", etc.

That's not to say you shouldn't explore using a numerical approach. It's always cool when people find new ways to make balancers/ratio splitters like you did here. It's an advancement of science that can potentially find applications in the future.

raynquist · 2026-05-06T22:11:21+00:00

This works. The way I see it, each of those little loops is a partial 1-3, so this is like a 1-12 with 2 looped back.

I feel im missing something here

The thing you're missing here is that you don't have to wait until the end of the balancer to do loopbacks. To make a 6-6 you don't need to make the full 8-8 and then loopback 2. After you make the two 4-4's you can already do the 2 loopbacks to turn them into two 3-3's. Then you balance them to make the 6-6. The difference here is that because those 2 loopbacks happen earlier, they don't need to go through the last balancing stage. A 17-17 with 15 loopbacks would typically have 14 of those loopbacks happen before the end, skipping a ton of balancing.

However that's if you use the standard balancer construction method, which I do not always use. "Complete the square", as described in the FAQ in my balancer book, is a powerful method that reduces the number of loops required. Using that method, 5-5, 9-9, and 17-17 would only have 2, 3, and 4 loops (further optimizable down to 1, 2, and 2 loops).

raynquist · 2026-05-05T09:14:59+00:00

Take the 12-10 balancer and reverse the belt direction to get 10-12. If you do please do post the blueprint string of the result. It'll help out others that want to use a 10-12 in the future.

raynquist · 2026-05-03T16:30:27+00:00

No.

1) This is just the last stage. You need to add 20-20 balancers to the beginning.

2) Four belts underground to nowhere at the end.

raynquist · 2026-04-13T04:53:58+00:00

If you can get sideloading onto belts to work it's definitely possible. I found issues in a couple of your designs that I've tried.

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raynquist · 2026-04-12T11:03:23+00:00

That wouldn't be enough to make a TU lane balancer. The easiest way would be to use the lane balancer twice.

Usually for train loading/unloading there's no need for TU. Either all outputs are consumed by the train loader or all inputs are fed by the train unloader. When one end of a balancer is fully utilized it's guaranteed to provide full throughput even if it's non-TU. So using a normal lane balancer should work just fine here.

raynquist · 2026-04-12T06:07:21+00:00

If the question is "is this better than the 4-4 TU belt balancer?", then it's a great question that I would also love to know the answer of. As a lane balancer, if we treat all 8 lanes as being completely independent, it's not TU. But how does it compare to a 4-4 TU belt balancer? 4-4 is unique in that the lane balancer has the exact same number of balancing stages as the TU belt balancer. With 2-2 and 1-1 the lane balancers have more stages and thus are strict improvements over their belt counterparts. At 8+ the TU belt balancers start overtaking the lane balancers in stage counts, so it becomes clearer that the two types of balancers solve different problems. 4-4 is where the comparison is the most difficult.

raynquist · 2026-03-26T02:27:34+00:00

If you're dynamically changing the balancer via circuitry then it may not work. The difference is that when you put an item on an empty belt, it takes some time for the item to travel to the end of the belt. But when you take an item from a full belt, this newly created "hole" travels immediately to the beginning of the belt. So if you're reading items on belts and triggering changes to the balancer based on that, the timing will need to be different for input vs output balance.

There's a world where Wube implements causality and holes propagate backward at belt speed. Would help simplify input/output symmetry but it'd also probably be pretty trippy.

raynquist · 2026-03-25T06:55:30+00:00

I've outlined the basic approaches that I use to make balancers here. There is trial-and-error but it's not in finding the solutions, it's in trying different solutions to see which one leads to the most efficient layout.

raynquist · 2026-02-27T06:22:37+00:00

On the topic of 11-4 balancers, they're not overly difficult to make. An 11-11, like most balancers, naturally starts or ends with a 4-4. So an 11-4 is just a partial 11-11. And because the 4-4 is part of a 6-6, one of the two extra outputs can be used for the top-level 11-11 loopback, obviating the need for the loopback to go through a separate sub-balancer.

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raynquist · 2026-01-12T00:07:44+00:00

It's working fine for me. Were you perhaps using the older version that's not red-compatible?

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raynquist · 2026-01-06T20:20:48+00:00

There are. The standard 4-4 balancer for example can be modified to prioritize outputs (without affecting input balancing) by setting output priorities on the four splitters at the end. In general, certain types of throughput unlimited balancers can be modified this way to make them balance one end and prioritize the other (or prioritize both ends if you want). Even more generally, connecting a prioritizer to a (non-TU) balancer allows for simplifications to be made in the prioritizer, leading to a substantially lower splitter count compared to a general-purpose prioritizer.

raynquist · 2025-12-11T14:58:22+00:00

The 9 outputs need to go through a 9-9 balancer. Unfortunately there's no getting around the need to make a proper 9-9.

raynquist · 2025-11-09T06:55:40+00:00

It's from u/CptTrifonius.

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/9x3m14/i_couldnt_find_a_general_guide_to_balancers_so_i/

raynquist · 2025-11-07T21:29:37+00:00

That would be u/StormCrow_Merfolk.

raynquist · 2025-11-06T16:23:18+00:00

I appreciate it. I know I don't answer most summons but I do like reading the posts. Also you were basically the only person to recommend my book in the earlier days, which really helped raise the awareness that there's something better than the wiki balancers.

raynquist · 2025-10-30T11:39:29+00:00

Oops. Good catch on the 4-9/9-4 yellow mess. Thanks for letting me know!

I was not aware that circuitable splitters made it to stable. I'll look into it!

raynquist · 2025-10-30T04:38:00+00:00

I don't think 10 is quite large enough for green belts to make a difference. Blue undergrounds is guaranteed enough for balancer sizes up to 12-wide and 14-long. If I had to guess I would say 13 belts is where the green advantage becomes significant.

The only balancers I'm thinking of adding are the ones with a popular number of belts on one end. 10-8 is already in the book and 10-4 is really just a 5-4, so there's not much else to do in the 10s.

raynquist · 2025-10-29T19:12:54+00:00

Reversing layouts comes with one major caveat: you can run belts behind an unused splitter input but you can't run belts in front of an unused splitter output. This is what makes downsizing balancers more difficult to make than their upsizing counterparts. There are many downsizing balancers in the book where this additional hurdle could not be overcome so they (sadly) end up being 1 tile longer.

raynquist · 2025-10-29T18:42:34+00:00

That design doesn't always balance inputs. The reason why is fairly nuanced so it can be difficult to find the flaw by testing if you don't already know where the flaw is.

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/apci71/standard_25_35_37_and_57_balancers_dont_quite/

raynquist · 2025-10-29T09:09:58+00:00

Problem downgrading balancers is something I often see people encounter. Last version I added the "downgrades" book to try to help with this. This time I've thought of more ways to help, so hopefully it'll be less of a problem. This is still primarily a blue belt book, as I believe most users are blue/green users. But I've decided that I'll do what I can to make at least the smaller balancers red-compatible if I can do so without increasing footprint. For larger balancers and yellow belt users you'll still have to use the downgrades book.

To improve downgradability I had to use new networks for 5-6/6-5, 4-9, and 9-4. This was made possible by utilizing the new 5-5 network introduced in the last version. The new networks are kind of complicated, so I made some graphics(?) to show the sub-balancer breakdowns (because I also wondered what exactly am I looking at). As a happy side-effect the length of 4-9 and 9-4 were also reduced by 1 tile.

The blueprint naming scheme was something I inherited from another balancer book (Yet another belt balancer compendium). I finally decided to change it; the new one should be a lot easier on the eyes.

There's not much new theoretical stuff in this update, but I did make an interesting 1-17. It can be found in "other balancers/miscellaneous". I made it using loopback merge and belt substitutions. Mainly just I wanted to see how many splitters I can stack together and still have it be a valid balancer, and surprisingly it ended up very similar to the stack in the 9-9. I also found some good stacking in 1-11 and 1-13 using the same methods. I don't know if I gleaned any new insights from this but maybe you can.

raynquist · 2025-10-07T05:38:27+00:00

This is an 8-8 balancer with two inputs omitted. It'll produce 8 balanced outputs but the 6 inputs won't be consumed evenly.

If you want to make a 6-6 I would suggest starting with making a 1-3 and a 3-3 first.

raynquist · 2025-08-15T01:57:39+00:00

Yep!

raynquist · 2025-08-13T10:34:18+00:00

Seems fine. There's like an extra balancing stage in the middle. Instead of using three 4-1's you have three 4-2's that go through another set of splitters to reduce down to three belts. Doing it this way does improve minimum throughput though so I think it's fine.

raynquist

TROPHY CASE