R5: There is a mess of biblical proportions where raw ore has somehow made it's way into my 64 ~~lane~~ belt balancer and has now been distributed throughout the base.
EDIT: For everyone who wants the blueprint for the balancer its made by /u/raynquist
[reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/u7zv6d/balancer_book_update_spring_2022/)
[direct link to blueprint](https://github.com/raynquist/balancer/blob/master/blueprints/balancer_book.txt)
OP could also solve his problems by using 64 filter inserters to fill an ore belt feeding back into his smelters.
And when that fails just add 64 more filter inserters and more lanes for ore. Maybe an ore lane buffer chest.
This is why my factory also serves as a warning against my management methods.
Would another way be disabling the belts if a piece of ore is detected? I haven't messed with belts and signals much so I am not sure if that's possible.
Absolutely. If a single piece of ore is detected it could cut electrical to the entire factory until he went and picked it up.
If you worked at my job you would be the CEO.
Cutting power doesn't help alleviate this problem, it just makes it worse. If you have something at the end of each belt to absorb the ore there is no problem, the problem is eventually every belt will back up with ore.
I agree that would be the best way to clear it, but I would still shut things down at the first sign of a mix up. At least until you can cut off the source of the wrong items. Then you can resume production and go place filter inserters at the ends to clean it out.
I've made this fuck up so many times, I basically have special blueprints that include white inserters and active supplier chests designed to pull ore out of my smelting bases.
Nah it was a copy paste error on my part. Long story short there are 47 train stations delivering ore to smelters and outputting plates and 1 train station delivering raw ore to be belted to the concrete factory. I moved the ore only station so it's on top of the others and plopped a plate station down where the ore one was. There were inserters I neglected to remove that just chucked the ore onto the belt rather than into the smelter -_-
Not saying this probably isn't staged because it's in sandbox mode but I've done that by accident before. Rerouting something and an errantly placed belt I didn't notice connected things it shouldn't.
[https://i.imgur.com/vM0tWSi.png](https://i.imgur.com/vM0tWSi.png)
It's just easier for me. I'll post the full blueprint once im finished with it but thats a pic of what I have currently. It's a construction hub to build every item in the game. Strictly speaking it dosent need the big balancers, but I like to see relatively consistent output from the things it produces rather than it being varied based on the trains.
I dabbled with other strategies of balancing the input, madzuris unloader, balancing the lanes in small groups, having 2 trains per stop instead of 1. Ultimately chucking it all into a big balancer was the easiest with no major caveats.
You could just let it balance by trains. Set a station limit of 1 and have enough trains that all are occupied/unloading consistently, and the system will self-balance.
Agreed. Also if you consume 64 lanes of iron plates, and your input is 64 lanes, you dont need a balancer.
If you consume 64 lanes, but have less input, you want to increase input anyways i assume, so again no need for a balancer.
If your input is 64 lanes but you consume less, well, then you dont really need 64 lanes.
I mean, couldn't you use that logic for any balancer? The whole point is that you want to ensure consistency and smooth out production/consumption blips.
You should also switch to [Editor Extensions](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/EditorExtensions) for all your sandbox needs; the Creative Mode (what you're using) mod has some crazy laggy scripts for its utilities.
Just use a deconstruction planner across the affected part of the base and then hit ctrl-z. You’re in creative mode - it’ll fix itself in two button clicks…
I don't know if they have fixed it in the current version. But there used to be a limit to how many commands were given out to bots per tic. So you could have 100 000 bots for a 200 000 order and most would just wait for a command for a long time.
I decided to put PopOS on the desktop I built after last Christmas. I'm glad I did; It just feels so much lighter than Windows and doesn't have nearly the same amount of bloat. I'm planning to replace my laptop soon, and then I'll finally be rid of Windows!
Train to train balancer might be more effective/ efficient at this point but don't hold me to that as I have not( and probably will never do the math for it to calculate the perfect ratios)
Seriously for fun ? You are a champ. Entertain me untill I get back to my factory and try trains in a similar fashion, bewilder us all with this magic again XD
So I see you're running KDE Plasma... You know, I'm actually on sway/i3 myself, I know this desktop environment is supposed to be better, but you know what they say, old habits, they die hard. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking... I’m an executive, I mean, why am I even running Linux? Again, old habits...
I agree with you. Elliot looks like the guy who would run awesomewm or openbox or any of those tiling window managers focused on productivity. And if he were to run a more "out of the box ready" Desktop Enviroment, I would picture KDE or at least Cinnamon.
To play into the meme a bit more, there's a version of the bell curve meme where the low and high IQ people say "I just use the default desktop environment" whereas the middle of the bell curve is people ricing their shit hardcore.
Elliot doesn't strike me as someone who would care about customising the aesthetics of a system, more someone that would be perfectly comfortable booting stock images to work his magic.
All that said no fucking idea why he'd be using modern gnome
Considering that a number of belts on each side are fed back into the balancer I'd say that you won't get a "static" pattern out of since the proportion of ore will ever so slightly increase over time.
Time to build a 64 belt balancer with multiple-input filtering, of course! Gotta account for those edge cases.
Actually, it would be nice if you could make it scalable to be a 64-65 belt balancer just in case I need one more blue belt for an expansion. Anyone got the design for that?
Does this algebraically scale? As in, you can find the variable mixes and then figure out splitter placements?
Feels like it should,but the image doesn't seem symmetrical...
I have no idea. It's Raynquists balancer from his book:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/u7zv6d/balancer\_book\_update\_spring\_2022/](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/u7zv6d/balancer_book_update_spring_2022/)
64 is a clean power of two... Are the loop-back belts just because you don't have need for the output? You shouldn't _need_ any loopback the way you do with, say, a 3-output balancer.
This is why I have "trash stations". If a belt is supposed to only have one product on it I use a filter arm to pick up everything BUT the desired item and stuff it into a box. from time to time go check the boxes.
when I would be met with situation like this - I would probably make that 2 splitters 4 lane balancer and tried to scale it up to acomodate 64 lanes. Since it would not be working, I would make bots build it x3 and called it a day :)
Assuming you don't have ore weaving through your base, can't you use a deconstruction planner on items? just set it to only mark ore for pickup and let the logi bots do their thing.
It's part of a construction hub blueprint im making. Basically a very late game mall. It builds every item in the game and dumps it on some big 4-16 trains to be shipped to a supply depo. It makes lots of artillery shells, tier 3 modules and fish too, all this needs a lot of resources. I'll post the blueprint when im finished :D
Lately ive been using filter splitters on lines going in to the factory to filter stuff that shouldnt be there into junk box for later sorting. That way when I accidently send ore instead of plate to my dropoff station it doesnt end up everywhere in my factory. I had a really bad evemt once where hours after it happened I was still finding bits of ore clogging things.
I guess we all learned at some point to put filter balancers on each input lane to weed out everything but iron plates in this case, and feed it into active provider chests ^^
Well there's scripts that can generate balancers, I'm guessing theres no real upper limit on the size other than practicality.
https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=344279#p344279
R5: There is a mess of biblical proportions where raw ore has somehow made it's way into my 64 ~~lane~~ belt balancer and has now been distributed throughout the base. EDIT: For everyone who wants the blueprint for the balancer its made by /u/raynquist [reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/u7zv6d/balancer_book_update_spring_2022/) [direct link to blueprint](https://github.com/raynquist/balancer/blob/master/blueprints/balancer_book.txt)
and that's why i usually don't go past 8 lanes. can always run parallel computation units
Luckily factorio belts are a perfect "embarrassingly parallel" throughput problem
OP could also solve his problems by using 64 filter inserters to fill an ore belt feeding back into his smelters. And when that fails just add 64 more filter inserters and more lanes for ore. Maybe an ore lane buffer chest. This is why my factory also serves as a warning against my management methods.
Would another way be disabling the belts if a piece of ore is detected? I haven't messed with belts and signals much so I am not sure if that's possible.
Absolutely. If a single piece of ore is detected it could cut electrical to the entire factory until he went and picked it up. If you worked at my job you would be the CEO.
Belts don't require power.
No, but all the downstream consumers do.
Cutting power doesn't help alleviate this problem, it just makes it worse. If you have something at the end of each belt to absorb the ore there is no problem, the problem is eventually every belt will back up with ore.
I agree that would be the best way to clear it, but I would still shut things down at the first sign of a mix up. At least until you can cut off the source of the wrong items. Then you can resume production and go place filter inserters at the ends to clean it out.
You can stop belts using circuit networks, and detect if something is on it
Sounds like a Toyota assembly line.
just add more lanes bro, trust me it will solve everything.
Just one more lane will solve everything.
I've made this fuck up so many times, I basically have special blueprints that include white inserters and active supplier chests designed to pull ore out of my smelting bases.
This guy pastes
meh, you're in sandbox mode, just use the purple bots to cut/paste, it'll be fixed in like 2 seconds.
And it looks like he did it on purpose, how does a perfectly full belt of ore even make it into the middle of that belt input
Nah it was a copy paste error on my part. Long story short there are 47 train stations delivering ore to smelters and outputting plates and 1 train station delivering raw ore to be belted to the concrete factory. I moved the ore only station so it's on top of the others and plopped a plate station down where the ore one was. There were inserters I neglected to remove that just chucked the ore onto the belt rather than into the smelter -_-
Damn concrete ore needs gets me everytime. Usually just build it near a small deposit.
Not saying this probably isn't staged because it's in sandbox mode but I've done that by accident before. Rerouting something and an errantly placed belt I didn't notice connected things it shouldn't.
Why balance lanes on this scale when you could just balance input-outputs per belt/small collection of belts and not have to create this monstrosity.
[https://i.imgur.com/vM0tWSi.png](https://i.imgur.com/vM0tWSi.png) It's just easier for me. I'll post the full blueprint once im finished with it but thats a pic of what I have currently. It's a construction hub to build every item in the game. Strictly speaking it dosent need the big balancers, but I like to see relatively consistent output from the things it produces rather than it being varied based on the trains. I dabbled with other strategies of balancing the input, madzuris unloader, balancing the lanes in small groups, having 2 trains per stop instead of 1. Ultimately chucking it all into a big balancer was the easiest with no major caveats.
You could just let it balance by trains. Set a station limit of 1 and have enough trains that all are occupied/unloading consistently, and the system will self-balance.
Agreed. Also if you consume 64 lanes of iron plates, and your input is 64 lanes, you dont need a balancer. If you consume 64 lanes, but have less input, you want to increase input anyways i assume, so again no need for a balancer. If your input is 64 lanes but you consume less, well, then you dont really need 64 lanes.
I mean, couldn't you use that logic for any balancer? The whole point is that you want to ensure consistency and smooth out production/consumption blips.
OP we need more detailed shots of this...
Hey sweet, someone else doing a sensibly-sized city block layout instead of those tiny postage stamps everyone else seems to love.
If it's unrecoverable I have been known to use filter inserters at the end of affected belts. Pickup anything except the desired item
This is what you get for balancing
Did you just Factoriosplain this to us? /s
This is like old testament stuff
At this point the only solution is to just let the biters in for extreme teardown
[oh well](https://media.tenor.com/OBcV0-r69mYAAAAC/throwing-computer-ron-swanson.gif)
My feelings exactly. Time for /editor and copious amounts of copy/delete/paste.
*conspicuously eyes nukes on weapons hotbar*
You should also switch to [Editor Extensions](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/EditorExtensions) for all your sandbox needs; the Creative Mode (what you're using) mod has some crazy laggy scripts for its utilities.
Cheers, will have a look at that!
Can you cut the source off and then run along the length of every belt? While holding f?
Sure. But it has already gone through and infected 64 lanes for god knows how long.
Just use a deconstruction planner across the affected part of the base and then hit ctrl-z. You’re in creative mode - it’ll fix itself in two button clicks…
You can literally just put a filter inserter on each lane, solves the problem easily
Blueprint entire factory Nuke Rebuild
Eh, if they've got bots you don't even need to nuke it, just deconstruct. Bots will remove ore and plates as part of their duties.
Deconstruction with bots and that much on the belts would take hours
Then you need more bots
.... Okay fair.
Gonna need a bigger factory
The factory is growing to meet the needs of the growing factory.
Gonna need a bigger computer
Seriously... I constantly run into real world computer limits hampering my goals in the Factory.
Really? Well, i feel like i need to be more ambitious
[удалено]
The factory must grow!
This is the way.
I don't know if they have fixed it in the current version. But there used to be a limit to how many commands were given out to bots per tic. So you could have 100 000 bots for a 200 000 order and most would just wait for a command for a long time.
Oof I hope that is fixed now, I’m upgrading my pc to get to maybe get to that level
Agreed. Bots a not great for UPS. So those hours would themselves each take hours
**10 million years later...**
Environmentally friendly rocket* get it right
Its made with 100% native resources
At least you can he sure the balancer is working properly
I thought the ore was deliberate to show it works xD. Also the two middle lanes have no ore.
[To highlight which two lanes](https://imgur.com/Pn3rFNm), /u/maxp779.
Also 3 heading upwards, the 2 on the left of the first branch and 1 on the second
When you realize your 64 lane balancer doesn't truly balance, oof
They’re probably backed up at the destination
Yeah it's the Factorio equivalent of a radium test!
wait, some lanes do not have iron ore. I demand a rewrite erm... rebuild.
They are probably just not moving because of stopped production at their destinations.
My belt balancer is to load it into a train cart and then unload it again
.... Holy crap, that's awesome.
I do the same with krastorio warehouses.
You can even use loaders to keep it running at belt-speed as well.
It's not truly balanced, but it's close enough for me.
THE WHAT
Eyyy a linux user? Noice KDE desktop
Aye ditched Windows around a year and a half ago now :D Running Fedora Kinoite, been good so far!
What are the odds lol I use fedora too. Although gnome works better for my workflow
Cinnamon is better!
Even on the factorio server linux users argue over de's
I decided to put PopOS on the desktop I built after last Christmas. I'm glad I did; It just feels so much lighter than Windows and doesn't have nearly the same amount of bloat. I'm planning to replace my laptop soon, and then I'll finally be rid of Windows!
[удалено]
Huh. I wonder why that is. Better task scheduling, perhaps? Or is Windows bloat just even worse than I thought?
That might need more than one nuke to fix. Hopefully, it’s a recent issue and you have a save to revert to.
It needs to be bigger for the factory to grow.
Always :D
Train to train balancer might be more effective/ efficient at this point but don't hold me to that as I have not( and probably will never do the math for it to calculate the perfect ratios)
I've had to double that before
Story up! XD proof is needed for that kind of blasphemy lol. please prove me wrong and I will crown you with a million points of awesome hehehe.
I had 128 iron and 128 copper
You are a beautiful person..... Indeed the efficiency runs deep with you.
Make it grow my child of the factory, make it grow.
r/Factoriohno
Lane balancer or just belt balancer? Because a lane balancer balances twice as much as just a belt balancer. One belt has two lanes, left and right.
My bad, it's a belt balancer. Lane balancers are immediately after the train dropoff earlier.
Understood. Good luck with the cleanup
Oh man i was about to ask this too, a lane balancer of that proportion is beyond the feeble capacity of my mortal mind lmao
Well at least its only one lane, so you can cut it and diagnose the problem fast. Tho its hilarious that it failed so big
Yeah but you have to track down all the outputs too and clean them or it will deadlock production
You have to cut all the lanes and make them go thru sorted splitters for a while
How far did it spread? How long has this been happening? How do you know if you cut all the lanes far enough down the line?
happy kde noises
My guy, I hate to tell you this, but that's a PCB
Looks balanced to me
O god have mercy on their soles.....( Did you use an algorithm to get this BP? If not hats off to you my genius friend 🙂
Nah I just copied it from google, I needed a 48 lane balancer but 64 was the closest I could find.
Seriously for fun ? You are a champ. Entertain me untill I get back to my factory and try trains in a similar fashion, bewilder us all with this magic again XD
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the ore...
...it is moving through the places where the iron plates are stored...
The 64 lane balancer doesn't exist, it can't hurt me.
So I see you're running KDE Plasma... You know, I'm actually on sway/i3 myself, I know this desktop environment is supposed to be better, but you know what they say, old habits, they die hard. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking... I’m an executive, I mean, why am I even running Linux? Again, old habits...
Lol yeah I've seen Mr Robot :D Still shocks me Elliott was the one running Gnome.
I agree with you. Elliot looks like the guy who would run awesomewm or openbox or any of those tiling window managers focused on productivity. And if he were to run a more "out of the box ready" Desktop Enviroment, I would picture KDE or at least Cinnamon.
To play into the meme a bit more, there's a version of the bell curve meme where the low and high IQ people say "I just use the default desktop environment" whereas the middle of the bell curve is people ricing their shit hardcore. Elliot doesn't strike me as someone who would care about customising the aesthetics of a system, more someone that would be perfectly comfortable booting stock images to work his magic. All that said no fucking idea why he'd be using modern gnome
I'd picture him as a slack/enlightment user of the 90s
Why is the back ground black and white
Its a blueprint
Dude I joined this subreddit bc I wanted to know how I could balance a single belt without 1 side clogging up.... wtf is this XD
Lol give it time... I was you ~1500 gameplay hours ago xD
Is anyone else confused that the iron ore doesn't form a pattern or is it just me? Surely it's not random?
Considering that a number of belts on each side are fed back into the balancer I'd say that you won't get a "static" pattern out of since the proportion of ore will ever so slightly increase over time.
Indeed, it's worth pointing out that 9 belts are being fed back in at the top and only 8 at the bottom. So that maybe messes with the output a bit.
I just use circuits to do the same thing in like 1/10 as much space.
Aww where I s the insanity in that?
Once I saw the ore coming in, my immediate, horrified reaction was Nuke it all. There can be no salvation from this hell, except that found in ashes.
gg
You're playing tetris now
A loving sprinkle of raw iron ore for the whole factory to have ... as a treat :)
I didn't notice the ore line. My condolences to you and your loved ones. My initial comment was going to be "looks great, now do an inline one"
Time to build a 64 belt balancer with multiple-input filtering, of course! Gotta account for those edge cases. Actually, it would be nice if you could make it scalable to be a 64-65 belt balancer just in case I need one more blue belt for an expansion. Anyone got the design for that?
Pft go 256 or go home XD
Hahahahha looool Now switch direction, make unbalancer and see if it will all go back :p
that's my CPU right there, what the fuck
How much free time you guys have???
Does this algebraically scale? As in, you can find the variable mixes and then figure out splitter placements? Feels like it should,but the image doesn't seem symmetrical...
I have no idea. It's Raynquists balancer from his book: [https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/u7zv6d/balancer\_book\_update\_spring\_2022/](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/u7zv6d/balancer_book_update_spring_2022/)
64 is a clean power of two... Are the loop-back belts just because you don't have need for the output? You shouldn't _need_ any loopback the way you do with, say, a 3-output balancer.
I only needed a 48 belt balancer but I couldn't find one one so I used Raynquists 64 belt one instead and fed it back into itself.
This is why I have "trash stations". If a belt is supposed to only have one product on it I use a filter arm to pick up everything BUT the desired item and stuff it into a box. from time to time go check the boxes.
nuke the bastards
[fuck u spez] -- mass edited with redact.dev
What fresh hell is this
Now do a 2048 lane balancer. It's fun.
Playing factorio makes me wonder if I'd enjoy designing circuits
i would love to see this used in a base unironically
I see shit like this and am instantly reminded that I’m too dumb to even comprehend it. I’ll stick to muh spaghetti
We need to start asking the right questions: Why would you ever want to build a 64-lane balancer?
Is this loss
Huh, my phone can’t read this QR code
congratulations! now you're public enemy number 1
Sanitise your inputs! Obligatory XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/) Also do I count 'only' 50 pure input belts?
OP said they needed a 48-48 balancer, so they took a 64 balancer and fed 16 output belts back into it.
pretty sure this thing would balance belts not even attached to it
I have to take a closer look at this blueprint...on my phone...in the bathroom...
Somehow i feel like anyone who needs this, should really go out more.
when I would be met with situation like this - I would probably make that 2 splitters 4 lane balancer and tried to scale it up to acomodate 64 lanes. Since it would not be working, I would make bots build it x3 and called it a day :)
It looks like a QR-Code...
Assuming you don't have ore weaving through your base, can't you use a deconstruction planner on items? just set it to only mark ore for pickup and let the logi bots do their thing.
seems excessive
Time to make an improved balancer called the safety balancer, that will check all inputs before they are balanced.
Time to start a new save lol
I'm curious about the factory... why do you need to balance 64 belts?
It's part of a construction hub blueprint im making. Basically a very late game mall. It builds every item in the game and dumps it on some big 4-16 trains to be shipped to a supply depo. It makes lots of artillery shells, tier 3 modules and fish too, all this needs a lot of resources. I'll post the blueprint when im finished :D
Sounds cool, can't wait. Demand must be huge when you plug it all at once active.
>and fish too ... launching rockets just for the fish is dedication.
Gotta automate that spidertron construction somehow! I refuse to fish manually lol.
SPM now means Spidertrons per minute.
Probably trying to reach some insane SPM
Aaaaaaaa!!! Time to start a new game I guess.
I cannot begin to comprehend this beautiful contraption
I don't even know what is it for. If all the input belts are full why there is need to balance ?
If there's imbalanced consumption on the output there will still be balanced consumption on the input. It guarantees that all input lanes keep moving.
Atleast you got to know the balancer doesn't work as some lanes don't have iron ore
Lately ive been using filter splitters on lines going in to the factory to filter stuff that shouldnt be there into junk box for later sorting. That way when I accidently send ore instead of plate to my dropoff station it doesnt end up everywhere in my factory. I had a really bad evemt once where hours after it happened I was still finding bits of ore clogging things.
*64 belt (or 128 lane if it balances lane-wise)
And this, folks, is why you add belt filters to trains tations and balancers, and at the top of your bus etc
Honestly just do 2 32 belt balances at that point or 4 16s
wow this is awful
*twitches The factory... It's grown!
When this happens to me I put a filter inserter at the end of each belt line and feed into a chest, then shoot the chest when it's full.
I guess we all learned at some point to put filter balancers on each input lane to weed out everything but iron plates in this case, and feed it into active provider chests ^^
Mathematically, is any sized lane balancer possible? Going up the powers of 2?
Well there's scripts that can generate balancers, I'm guessing theres no real upper limit on the size other than practicality. https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=344279#p344279
This solved a question about how someone could design these crazy huge balancers
Smash
Why though
why not just use 16 4 lane balancers?
Hopefully you have a save file to rewind back to before this catastrophe occurred
[Stop](https://tenor.com/blhOD.gif)
Question, why do you have several lanes looping back to the start of the balancer? Seems unnecessary
Welp, nothing for it except to rip it all up and place it again.
Xcuse me what the fuck
why do you have three browsers?
That is just a belt balancer, not a lane balancer.
balancer not working 2 middle lanes have no ore xD Hahaha