You Don't Want Precise Splitters in Satisfactory 

Similarly, it blew my mind that coffeestain tried to make trucks only pick up the fuel they should need for a round trip of the route they are running. They will only ever *use* what they need and absolutely no more, so when would it ever matter how much they actually pick up as long as it's enough?

I never needed such splitter, but it would be nice to have a priority merger.

I am a programmer. You are way off-base about the difficulty of making a ratio splitter. You can implement them a lot like normal splitters. If the splitter is set to 2:1:1, then it just outputs in the pattern AABC on repeat. 5:3:7 can naively be done in the same way as AAAAABBBCCCCCCC, but you can do round-robin dropping the outputs that have reached their value to get a much more even result: ABCABCABCACACCC (2:1:1 just becomes ABCA, which is the same pattern starting at a different time) "It can be done other ways" is not a very strong argument. Those other ways have other factors beyond "they get the right item amounts". I have *never* used load balancers outside of the basic 1:2, 1:3, 1:4, and even then only in my starter setups. Load balancers eat so much space that they have always been out of the question. I use manifolds because they're compact, but I do it begrudgingly since in their current form, they take *forever* to prime unless I'm manually inserting items into machine inputs, and I need the manifold to be primed before I can check my work and see if I built this one corner of the factory correctly. Similarly, while I have started to warm up to underclocking a little bit after 5 *years* of owning the game, but I still feel the lost space pretty intensely. I don't like to make flying buildings, so I'm often running into space constraints. And I don't tend to go power slug hunting much, so underclocked/overclocked pairs are especially obnoxious as solutions. People want to have ratio splitters because we don't *enjoy* trying to use those other techniques.

One big improvement you can make to a manifold is using different tiered belts. For example, if you have a manifold receiving 300 items per minute, so you will need to use a Mk.4 or Mk.5 belt for the main belt. However, don't use this belt on the belt that goes into the production building. Instead use a Mk.1 or Mk.2 belt to limit the speed. It's not an exact rate limiter, but it gets you the right order of magnitude. Now you don't have to wait for the production building to saturate, but only need to wait for the lower tiered belts to saturate, which happens a lot faster.

Honestly I feel like 99% of convery belt issues in the game would be solved if we could set machines to have a max self-inventory size, or just reduce it from one full stack to say 1x the amount it needs per cycle. If my machine only needs 6 steel beams per minute, I don't need it to fill up to 200 steel beams before it starts overflowing the belt. Just let it max at 6.

Players:"We want to just plug in numbers." Satisfactory: "Lol do math, nerd."

A much better improvement would be to have belts not fill up machines all the way and instead limit the input slot to like 2-3 items. That's how Factorio does it and everyone uses manifolds (unless they're doing trains, then balancers to split between wagons). As a bonus, it means much less inventory clutter when you deconstruct things.

Yeah, I totally want to have to build 20 more splitters to get the ratios right for that recipe that has .125 in it instead of overclocking and slooping 60 other machines to output exactly what that one obscure recipe needs. I want precision, I don't want excess machines to do a simple job.

I haven't payed much attention to the community, but from everything I've seen when people talk about precise splitters, they mean ratio splitters. And people absolutely do want ratio splitters, which is what a load balancer is, just with out the complex mess of normal splitters.

It's funny, I have played 100's of hours of Satisfactory and always felt it is missing something. I recently picked up Foundry and fell in love with it. It has whatever the hell is missing from Satisfactory for me. So now whenever I watch videos on Satisfactory it just makes me want to go play Foundry more. :P

You're using early game things like steel beams as examples when you're talking about small numbers, but the endgame is where small numbers are important. Nuclear power for example. You aren't making fuel rods in bulk and precise delivery would be nicer than waiting *days* for buffers to fill so your power is all online. Basically anywhere you want a load balancer instead of a manifold and have a weird number of outputs, a ratio splitter would be beneficial.

0:32 - Implementation of a precise splitter shouldn't be difficult. Regular splitters follow an ABAB or ABCABC pattern; for a precise splitter, it could simply follow the defined pattern. For example, a 2:3:1 splitter could go AABBBC, or follow a more consistent "heijunka" sequence such as CBABAB. The ratios could be calculated based on the requested items speeds, i.e. a 80:120:40 splitter would translate to 2:3:1. 2:44 - This solution becomes less attractive when you have items going long distances. Say you have a 100/min belt that you want to split into 20, 50, and 30/min, while all still going to the same factory/area. Sure, you can underclock machines to produce at these ratios, but this means that you also now need three separate lines of item transfer. Therefore you would need triple-stacked conveyor belts or triple the train cars since you now need to keep these flow rates separated. It's much more clean and flexible to transfer one item stream and split it appropriately once you need to. 4:02 - This is a great point! I think I and many players often worry about 100% resource usage (not to be confused with 100% efficiency). There are in fact almost always more resource nodes, and if not, you can optionally overclock one of your existing miners and split off of that. 6:03 - I don't think precise splitters would make expansion more complicated -- we already have to re-balance and allocate resources each time we expand a factory. Having a precise splitter would only simply change this process from creating a new splitter array to just changing the numbers in the splitter settings. All this said, I understand the devs' perspective; splitter arrays and ratio balancing is a huge part of this game, and adding a precise splitter would eliminate that puzzle element entirely. In general, I think the best course of action is only using manifolds near machines (so it doesn't look like factories are clogged up), and creating splitter arrays and sinking excess materials elsewhere.

It would help fasten the "overflow" type of splitting, so it would be more of a QoL change than a game fixing one

While I do agree that you do not need precise splitters at all, implementing them is not that big of a hassle. I actually got a piece if code running already that perfectly splits up values in any arbitrary ratios while basically shuffling the output orders in a consistent matter. Just using some modulo and gcd maths, it's pretty good.

An intelligent precise splitter shouldn't be too complicated to program. I am using a MOD called "Throughput Counter and Limiter". Problem solved. It adds a conveyor belt attachment that counts and displays the actual item throughput per minute and can optionally limit the number of items allowed per minute. It is unlocked via a Tier 2 Milestone in the HUB.

Preface: I agree with you, it'll eventually even out, but I wanna answer this 1:00, programmer here. There are for sure 1000 ways to solve this, how I would approach is: define the output ratios, in this case 1:3 (30/30 : 90/30), for three output it could be 1:2:4, for example. Create a "bucket" for each output (note: does not withhold items, only counts them). Each time an item goes into the splitter, chose an empty bucket in a round-robin fashion and add one item into the bucket. Do this always skipping full buckets. When you receive an item and all buckets are full, empty them all and start over. Problem with this approach: towards the end, the 1 belt will receive no items, easy to solve: choose the bucket with the least % filled instead of round-robbin. Here's how'd it go: 0 (1) 0 (3) Item Input 1 (1) 0 (3) Item Input 1 (1) 1 (3) Item Input 1 (1) 2 (3) Item Input 1 (1) 3 (3) RESET 0 (1) 0 (3) Item Input 1 (1) 0 (3) ... You get the idea

A percentile splitter would be enormously handy.

I make all of my factories at 100 percent efficiency. Every building, even the miners. I have thought about this kind of thing before, and I still agree with what you said. The overclocking and underclocking help a lot. The only use I could have for this is when I need a weird number like 96 ( I needed this in a versitial framework factory the other day) and when I set a miner to make 96 items per minute, it becomes really difficult to is this node for anything else, because splitting 96 off from another number would be very difficult. That’s about the only use I would have for it, but I think that they could accomplish just about the same thing with variable speed belts. Say I set one belt out of a splitter to have a limit of 96 and the other to a limit of like 60 if I needed that for something. If the splitter did it have the total amount of material coming into it, it would work more like a normal splitter. Anyways that’s just my idea, it would be cool if they added variable speed belts in like caterium elctronocs in the mam with smart splitters and that stuff.

And not only underclocking and overclocking would be a possible way. You can also use different kind of Belts (Mk.1, Mk.2 etc. etc.), which have different kind of speed.

I prefer the items on belts to never stop, only matters for visual aesthetic, therefore I would still want the precision splitter. These things "can" be done technically but CSS prefers to make the toilet flush..

There have been multiple mods that have done this, and they can be quite satisfying, also. Just because you don't see their value doesn't mean they shouldn't exist. Heck, there's someone that's trying a biomass-only run, is that wrong because there's other tools in the game to do better?

Advanced logistics mod already handles all of this perfectly by specifying the ratios. I don't use the splitter much, but i love the merger.

Precise Splitters might not be a good idea; but what about belt limiters? The splitter does not need to care about ratios. We could limit it by effective belt speed. Actually underclocking all the belts would be a PITA too, but a simple splitter-format building with just one input and one output and a slider for max items/min could solve quite a lot of problems some people would want to use precise splitters for.

Isnt the only reason you really need to worry about precise splitting is belt efficiency? In the early game, time is basically your biggest obstacle. You can't mass produce the resources you need to make more efficient technology, so belting your machines efficiently cuts down that time immensely. But once you have belts that can handle more resources than your machines need per minute, you can eventually outgrow your production until you need resources elsewhere.

Rather than a precise splitter what if we could get precise conveyor belts instead? A smart belt where you can lower the speed of it to be exact in how many items it can transport every minute

There is one case where you definitely want precise numbers: Radioactives. Having a blender with 200 units of uranium waiting for processing creates enormous radioactive zone. I managed a small plutonium setup where you had to climb onto or lean against the machines to get irradiated as it never held any backlog of radioactives, everything balanced and timed perfectly to provide power non-stop and never back up.

I don't worry about perfect splits or 100% efficiency. I tend to build more machines than I actually have materials to feed them with. This way the source node can be maxed out, but the downstream production machines are never maxed out under any circumstances. This way, I will always have excess production capacity, but my power demand tends to fluctuate all the time.

It's actually not that hard. a phone game about factories actually did it, except instead of doing items per minute, you had a fixed count it reached until it swapped. This means it will go in a direction as long as it takes to reach the count meaning left in scenario 0:55 could take 30 seconds and right could take a minute and a half to reach. This means it falls onto the player to further refine the output and make this work. In the game i played, there was no max amount a conveyor could handle, so i actually found myself in need of this type of splitter often since in that game space was a big premium. In satisfactory space isn't nearly as expensive to have, so it's not nearly as big of a problem using multiple conveyors instead of one super conveyor that splits on specific time to allow for cheaper "smart splitters" which is essentially how i used count splitters.

Ill always recommend building for your current miner tier. Because as soon as you unlock a new one you should have gained considerable experience making any new factory far better than the old ones

I think the most important argument against ratio splitters in the base game is the fact that you can build it yourself. Honestly its quite an interesting challenge to make a blueprint for some weird splitting ratios like 5 or 7, and then even cooler would be to make it an adaptive one (i.e. a splitter with 16 output to which you connect howewer belts you want and it splits evenly). So yeah, adding ratio splitters is just a shortcut that you can make yourself already

I feel like the "how should it work" would be that it effectively counts the items coming in and then sorts them in a given direction based on where it is in its count. As an example, if the splitter is set to 10-20-30, then it would do 1 on the left, then it would alternate middle and right along the lines of m-r-m-r, then repeat the right output before splitting the next to the left. The whole sequence would go something like l-m-r-m-r-r-l... My opinion on ratios on programmable splitters is that it gives them a reason to exist. For a lot of people, sushi belts are already just not something that's used very often, and it's even less common that you need to split one sushi belt into two or three outside of big central storages (which I personally never used in early access despite beating it, and had never considered since it never seemed worth the hassle). As such, programmable splitters are basically just more expensive smart splitters to me, and I already basically only use smart splitters for overflow purposes and extremely small hand fed setups like converting plants into biomass or remains into protein. As such, being able to program ratios into a splitter would be something I could make use of, rather than it just being an additional buildable I cycle through when placing down splitters and mergers.

It would be better for clean builds and could make load balancing have the structure of a manifold. Perfect efficiency without the startup time

my issue is you're looking at it too small, if I need 512.7 going one way, and 207.3 shipped of to a different factory, building more machines will take up too much space and a manifold will never fill enough to be efficient

Counterpoint: Biofuel. These are limited in the sense that you only get more as you collect more, so I don't want to just wait for a manifold to fill up, because there's not an unlimited amount coming in. So a system where I can say... have 1 in 100 remain as solid biofuel for my chainsaw, while 99% of it goes towards liquid biofuel for my jetpack is actually a good idea. I could build this with a bunch of splitters and mergers, but a precise splitter would do it so much better.

In terms of computer science based on containers and their respective algorithms, we can think of various types such as vector arrays, lists, stacks, queues, etc. The actual algorithms that can be performed on them themselves aren't the main focal point. It pertains more towards the nature of the data structure itself. We only really need to consider one specific type of container, dispenser and that is the priority queue. Not exactly the same because within programming, a priority queue is basically a list of elements where each element has a specific priority value and depending on implementation but typically those with the highest priority are sent first. We can use this as soft of an analogy with smart or programmable splitters and by setting specific outputs to have priority. With that we can direct the flow of material based on priority. Outside of computer science itself but more towards hardware engineering, this is akin to the properties and uses of Decoders, Multiplexers, Demultiplexers, and comparators. We can determine which bit line or bus becomes the active input or output based on a control signal. The only difference here within Satisfactory that I think is missing that if it was present would allow Satisfactory to be considered Turing Complete is the ability to toggle or control these priorities from an outside source. We can set them during construction within their properties, but these are predetermined default fixed values. This is more comparable to ROM than it is RAM. We do not have a mechanism to change this dynamically from some kind of logic distribution or control center. For me, it's not really a necessity or must have for this to be a complete polished and enjoyable game. Yet I do feel that either adding or having this ability would change the entire playing field opening up a lot more creativity and flexibility throughout the community and all of their amazing builds and creations. It would really be interesting to see such a mechanism implemented. I'm not necessarily referring to controlling exactly how many items can go in or out of a splitter or merger. By design and intent, they take on the rate of the belt that is attached to its inputs and outputs respectively. I don't mind this and I don't think this needs to be changed. However, when using Smart or Programmable Splitters and possibly Smart or Programmable Mergers while already being able to set a specific lane as a priority, another as an arbitrary or don't care output, and the last as an overflow is a static system. With adding in the extra capabilities to change these from elsewhere remotely should in theory allow pioneers / engineers to build a remote-control center, a logic distribution center to where they can turn on and off various factories or supply lines instead of having to travel to that factory directly and changing each device manually. I think this would be more useful, beneficial and practical. I don't need exactly 1 item to go left while 99 go right. What I do need is to control when or not this line pushes through or not depending on on-demand needs and requirements.

It's actually trivial to program, just alternate outputs as it currently does but have it stay on each output for some number of items.

Thank you... oh my lord THANK YOU. Now I can link this every single time someone keeps asking and bringing up their 'own idea' of such a setup. As if typing this one such request came up not 5 mins ago on the qna site. What I find mind numbing is people cant grasp is its not just 'send X amount of items' you're working in items per minute, it needs a constant flow just as the default game gives us already without ever needing to tell a splitter such. As is, once I got to the stage of the game of unlocking 480 belts and such, I used smart splitters to future prof my builds. As in I start building and calculating all my production lines to account for when I unlock 780 belts and Mk 3 miners. And I use a smart splitter at the section of this production line that could account for current 480 flow rates set to overflow, so resources wont pass it and try to fill machines that the belt speed don't yet support. This way when I go unlock 780 belts all the machine are already in place and resources will flow fully just by upgrading belts and miners.

*_No, YOU don't want Precise Splitters. Don't speak for me._*

Ratio splitter makes perfecf sense to me. The current splitters already work this way with the ratio just being 50/50 or 1/3 each. Just allow us to choose the ratio of the outputs. Would be cool if they just added it to the programmable splitter to give it a bit more use.

In terms of programming, implementing a ratio splitter actually doesn't differ that much from a normal splitter, but you're right with stating that we don't need and probably also don't want them :) (Normal splitters clearly store data to check what output was used last time and use the other one, so for ratio splitters, we'd just have to store some more data and round here and there - not difficult, but yeah, also not practical)

I would like two things to help with "debugging" issues, that comes from merge and splitting belts. 1 a little gate you can set over the conveyour to monitor the actual throughput on the belt, like the valve can monitor for you. This will help greatly when debugging a factory. And a small change to the valve, make it show the average of the past minute instead of only actual numbers, they almost constantly change making it less usefull to monitor :)

I agree with the priority merger person in the comments. But to speak to the ratio splitter idea: this item already exists in a mod called "Throughput Counter and Limiter." It works pretty well, too. Has over 2.5M views and 114K downloads as of this comment. You use splitters for each machine in a manifold setup as usual, and before each item input, attach a throughput limiter. Set the items / min, and forget it. When you need to update it, update it. I used it for my computer factory, and it worked pretty well (default recipe). It's a handy item for speeding up manifold saturation time. Because of that mod, (in update 8) I no longer had any issues with manifold setups, and 100% prefer them to load balancers. You say it's probably difficult to implement, but one person already did it.

For my vanilla playthroughs, I use both load balancing and manifolds depending on the situation. Any excess resources go straight into a sink, which is why there is always at least one sink in every factory. In my modded playthroughs, I use a mod which adds in ratio splitters for two key reasons, the first being that it keeps everything nice and neat. Sure I could split easily into 16 by having 4 rows of splitters going into 2 outputs per splitter, or I could just have one line with the ratio splitters with ratios such as 15:1, 14:1 etc. Keeping everything looking nice and tidy. The second reason is that it stops me from going overboard with production setups, as sometimes you'll need an obscure number, and rather than overproducing something to reduce one or two of the outputs later on, I can just ratio where I need to. Overall, the most important thing is that everyone can play this game how they want. If you don't want ratio splitters, don't download the mod. If you do, add the mod to your game. So long as you're having fun with the game, it doesn't really matter. As I've mentioned, I do both modded and unmodded, so I know that things can be done without ratio splitters, I just like to keep my factories looking clean and tidy. Again though, it's up to you how you choose to play the game, choose what's best for you and go with it.

The way to implement this is obvious. Right now splitters have a certain order. Left, middle, right, left, etc. All you need is the ability to edit that order. So I could make a splitter go left, left, middle, left, right, repeat, if I wanted. That would not only solve the issue of the splitter not knowing the future, but it would be a more interesting and hands-on approach that would be more fun to work out. Of course, it's still not really needed.

1:22 you can make it put an amount of items to 1 side and then an amount of items tot he other side (example: it puts first 2 items to the left, and then 3 items to the right as soon as they enter it)

While i do agree that we have ways to already do this ingame and this feature is more of a "shortcut", i do want to defend how it can be implemented (as an actuall programmer). As you mentioned earlier, the spliter goes in a round robin sequence (A->B->C->repeat). If an output is blocked by items, the output is skipped, so if B is clogged, it will skip it and check C, which isn't cloged, so, output there. Now, my solution wouldn't really redo what is already made, this system works and there are also propably events that the belts call when they free up, and the end of the algorythm is perfect. What i instead suggest is changing the begining, which the end can handle. Each output is set to a certain intager. Lets say A = 1, B = 0 and C = 2. From this, we can now construct a sequence: A C C. Or A = 3, B = 1 and C = 1 to AAABC. The algorythm will now use this new sequence to iterate over, which in theory, should make the spliter behave as desired. It works for any input rate, as it is based on item handeling, doesn't change the mechanic and would be fairly easy to use.

It is realy simple: Just make a belt valve. You can set a smart splitter in front of it, and call it a day.

The system I have theorized and want to try is using a manifold with say a 480 belt, but each output belt is only a mark 1 belt. So if a construcor takes 60 items per minute the mark 1 belts will automatically lower each constrctor to 60, so everything is perfectly load balanced, but it's designed like a manifold taking up less space. And even if it's like 45 the mark 1 belts will still help reduce the wait (or for 30 you could do a manifold into a 2 way splitter)

I use the Advanced logistics splitter and merger mod. Can't play with out it now.. Just place your splitters, set the amount / ratio and your factory works at 100% and looks clean.

I get around needing to split anything by just having dozens if not hundreds of belts of that item XD

1:00 this is the way it would do it, it can’t predict the future but it can know the past. It simply takes a count of what it has already sent through and it sends the next item accordingly. Say it knows it already has sent three through the right so it will know to send the next one to the left. That’s how it would work.

The reason it would be immensely useful to have this is so that you can set up manifold style splitters and not have to wait for the first machines in the line to "fill up" before the remaining machines get product. You could just set the splitter to output what its machine needs and leave it at that. It's really not any more complicated than this.

It's easy to code one. The devs just want folks to make load balancing setups to get their desired ratios. What i want is logic systems. This throughput based system drives me nuts when it comes to anything being shipped where i have only the clunkiest tools possible to manage how much goes were. The lack of any automated control at a higher level than throughputs and overflows just drives me batty after creating smart train systems in factorio where stuff only gets delivered if it's actually needed.

I find it interesting that people use balancers in this game, if you need a certain amount coming off a belt, I just use either a manifold manually saturated, or just using a bunch of splitters/mergers to get the exact amount if I can be bothered, I literally have never used a 3-2 splitter or anything because I don’t ever see a need for it

I'm currently making a max coal factory (12000MW) But I'm scared of the coal not arriving to the last machine due needing to be a manifold system. 600 coal going into 40 machines on a row where they consume 15 each should mathematically work.

About the only times I really wanted to be precise with inputs has usually been regarding power systems. Waiting for coal plant #1 to fill up when I need the power from #2 and #3 to keep the factory running in order to give the plants time to fill up. There was a pre-1.0 mod I used that allowed it without much issue as long as you remembered to set it right. If I had 5 plants I needed running, then splitter one was set to 1:4, the next was set to 1:3, then 1:2, then 1:1. This let me load balance on a single feed line without going through the mathematical logistics or needed a 3x5 foundation space to work the load balancing. Outside of power plants, I'm fine with overflow manifolds as I usually make mini-factories bent toward producing a specific output.

No. Ficsit does not waste. Splitters just alternate between outputs round-robin, like dealing cards. A rate limiting splitter would work by simply "dealing" more than one item to a given output port. Instead of giving 33% to each by counting 1 2 3, counting 1 1 2 3 would mean that the outputs are now split 50%/25%/25%. It would be so easy to implement, and it would make load balancers more compact. You could get a ratio of 1 to 5 with only two splitters and without needing a loopback, for instance - just count 1 1 1 2 3 and split 1 three ways. Boom.

I understand what you say but for a lot of end game recipes it’s not as easy as you make it out to be. But after having played with a mod that ads precise splitters i can say it’s handy in some cases but not necessary most of the time. Like you said just let it run and if you really want a machine to run more turn of the other machine until it’s filled up. Btw the way the mod did precise splitters is you could specify a number on each side and it would split that exact amount of items then move to the next. For example if you had 60 coming in then set it to split 90 and 30 it would first put 90 items on the first belt then 30 once it was done with the 90 which worked fine in my opinion.

I think it would be cool to have some 2 story splitters and merges that allow for up to 7 splits/merges. Adding a few more primes and starting with 2,3,5,7 would be super nice for setting up blueprints, and I think it's much more in line with what the game is trying to do. And because they are 2 stories high, they still have a trade off which means they wouldn't just immediately replace all of your current splitters/mergers as a pure upgrade (plus I'd assume they would require more advanced parts)

This is why I only use manifolds for all my production lines. It takes less time to set up, takes up less space, and all the machines work at 100% just fine once the belts get saturated. In the meantime while I wait for production to get to 100%, I can add details to the build or continue the factory if it isn't complete yet. Also I turn on parts of the factory that I just completed and then they are ready by the time I finish the next part of production.

I'm on the fence about this because people who actually want to use items like this, will actually use them and apperciate the addition. Also, they wouldn't be difficult to implement, just difficult to learn to use optimally. However, what makes me sit on the fence about it is that I feel like it would be overwhelming or daunting to a lot of people. It would probably create a situation for a lot of people where they feel like they have to or should be using them. I think this is something better left to the hands of modders. Those interested enough to use them will most likely be willing to mod their game to get the desired effect, while keeping more casual players from feeling like they're not playing as efficiently as they should be or becoming overwhelmed.

Personally, I would like a smart splitter that allows for Priority. The best example I have atm is storage. In a basic Smart Splitter storage I use frequently, I have 3 destinations: Dimension Depot, Container, and Sink. Currently I need 2 smart splitters, 1 to send to Depot then overflows into a second that sends to container which overflows into my Sink line. What I would like is to set a primary output, then overflow, then a secondary overflow. This way I can utilize all 3 outbound ports, and also reduce the complexity of my footprint.

Do you know what I would like? An elementary thing. So that the drawings are connected to each other during installation. For example, I put the conveyor sequentially through the drawing. And he became whole. And it did not consist of separate pieces. Now, I am building a tire and between the installation of a new tire drawing, I need about 48 conveyor lines to connect with each other and 18 pipes. IT DESTROYS THE DESIRE TO PLAY. Or, for example, I put two buildings in a row and the drawings touch the walls. As a result, one wall is inside another wall. PS. Off topic, but it's a pain)

I like to use manifolds. I always make sure the first machine loaded is the last to unload on the exiting manifold. Helps keep all the machines buffered withhold the last machine starving for materials

I agree, precision splitters are not a solution and i also see no need for them. However, what we need is precise speed for parts injection, especially from buffers / containers. Even more, when we work with sushi belts. You can do something with lower tier belt, splitter/merger constructs. But this is limited. There is a mod that provides exactly this - a valve for belts: Throughput Counter and Limiter. And i use it a lot! ... B.t.w., what i also would like to have: - limiting the available slots of a container - pre-assigning truck/train/drone slots to a specific item (when you want to run mixed transport of items) - as train schedules have load / unload item type only already, add a max amount value to those items. Imagine, you have a factory for AI Limters and Control Rods. One train car is more than enough for volume. Train Shedule like this: - 1st station unload max 1 stack rod, 1 stack limiter - 2nd station unload only 2 stack limiter - and so on ... this would be efficient. ... I not even ask for precise numbers, precise to a stack (or cargo slot count) would already be a win.

In my builds I mostly use manifolds. There's only a few situations or occasions where manifolds aren't the better option. The only two cases that I can think of is with specific aluminum builds where you do have to manage or handle byproducts and more importantly in nuclear builds, where saturated belts with radioactive materials leak into the environment radiating everything. Other than that, manifolds are easier, faster to setup, require less trouble shooting and are very modular, very repeatable and scalable. They also require a significantly smaller footprint in terms of area helping to make your factories more compact. I would be more concerned with how this game handles fluid flow with its bidirectional implementation and requirements of head lift in conjunction with backflow and sloshing than I would with belt balancing. Now there is a third technique that is soft of a hybrid of the two. It is still a manifold at its core where you do have a main source line that is being divided by splitters and partially down the line just add in a merger to that main line before the next series of splitters. You may have to either introduce another supply line coming in from the outside world, or you could take the end of the line and feed it back into the merger for any materials that went past the line. These hybrid types can help to reduce or minimize the accordion trickle effect that basic manifolds exhibit. I also incorporate buffer storages before and after each production line. This way if there happens to be less of a demand for a given product, the pre storage buffer will back fill and continue to do so all the way back to the original source even back to the miners themselves. When the demand picks up and the storage buffers are full for that line, there's less of a need to wait for any previous or intermediate staged production times. The materials are already there waiting to be used. It's sort of the same kind of concept when it comes to train stations with their cargo loaders / unloaders and having a buffer storage before and after it so that the loading and unloading of the materials appears to be seamless. Cool video by the way!

As a computer programmer myself, I would think that it would be pretty easy to make a ratio splitter. ie. if you set output 1 to 33.33% and output 2 to 66.67%, the splitter would repeat putting 1 item in output 1, then 2 items in output 2. Although, I could see the problem with setting very precise percentages, as then, the splitter would put a ton of items through one output before slightly more or slightly less through the other.

Honestly, the only interesting thing you say in this video is showing how you can actually programme outputs by programming the machines rather than the splitter itself. It amounts to literally exactly the same thing, I would personally find it easier to be done on the splitter rather than down the line, but basically the option is there. A quick note: I don’t particularly care for a programmable splitter, I never had them in any other game, so there. But it is absolutely TRIVIAL to code in. This is more about restrictions breeding creativity than any difficulty to implement.

Personally i'd like to have something to regulate the exact rate on a conveyor belt, mostly because it would help understanding how a system it supposed to operate if you ever run into problems, but i understand that other people disagree. What i really would like to havr though is a statistics interface for splitters and mergers, or at least for smart and/or programmable splitters. This would tell you the average rate over the last x time and maybe even show a graph. It would help you optimise factories because you can see how much of something you're actually getting

One extra point to add to this Only time ive found myself wishing for things like this has been my early game reinforced plates + rotors from 1 iron node factories. Only takes a couple of slugs to unlock underclocking, and underclocking my assemblers allowed for the oerfect ratios i needed. In other words, by the timr players would actually unlock such a machine, theyve likely grown out of the need for it

I would want a dynamic entrance splitter, so you can change output to input gate

Honestly, yes, I absolutely do want that. For transport. Putting things into a drone or truck or train, let's say I'm making 40 heatsinks per minute and need 30 for a manufacturer at the same site and need 10 somewhere I need to drone it over to. Let's say the drone is already carrying another small quantity of something else. In this scenario, I cannot simply let the small end saturate and have it balance out, I need to either put in a sink at the far end to keep the two items from locking the other out or run two drones. Now, if I go with two drones, I could allow it to saturate, but that's quite a bit of overkill on the drones, doubling the fuel requirement. As it stands, I either need to up my production to 60/m on the heatsinks and kiss away 20/m to the AWESOME sink, or set up a load balancer so I can run both productions from the existing source. Now, that's a fairly easy load balancer, but wouldn't it be simpler if I could put in a rate limiter instead? Something like a fluid valve but for belts? Maybe a belt brake? I only want this belt to run at 10/m instead of 60/m...this solves my issue cleanly, and honestly it makes no sense whatsoever that we don't have this option at all without convoluted splitter/merger tricks that you'll probably forget about when you ramp production and wonder why you can't use the extra 10/m you just added to the line, not realizing you're sending 2.5 of them to a sink halfway across the map until you find and remember the load balancer you set up. Anyway...I guess my point, at the end of the day, though, is why are people so against having options that they won't use? If you won't use it, it doesn't affect you, but if you will, then it'll be a big benefit to you. Like trucks, and jump pads, and stun rebar, and gas noblisks, someone finds them useful (okay, maybe not gas nobs, those things are completely pointless and terrible, but if you like them I'm glad you have them...just, why? the animals are immune to gas as far as I can tell...), just not me. Why can't this be like that? Something that some like and use, and others don't bother with. Hell, plenty of people think programmable splitters are useless...we still have them and some people find good uses for them. Let us have belt brakes, dammit.

There are mods that allow this if you want to do it. It works pretty well but I mostly don't bother because it requires a lot of programming each individual splitter

Ficsit does not waste! 4:29

I think maybe adding the option on advanced splitters not to set a ratio but limit the max output on one side to specific numbers maximum could be nice to have for aesthetic purposes

I think what people want isn't a precise splitter, but a quantity filter or gate we can put on storage containers

My entire approach is just to optimise the design & construction of the factory to be easier & faster. I'll literally drop down stacks of 18 constructors and ask later if I actually needed that many. Like sure, they'll turn on & off and that means you need a bit more power, but you ALWAYS need more power because the factory is always growing, and why waste time making it perfect when it's already... um... Satisfactory. I'd far rather spend my effort making more machines. Humanity is counting on me. Anyway point being it's nice to hear someone say that overproducing is fine actually. The only time I optimise for exact throughput is with fuel power generators, when I've maxed out the local oil wells.

It never occurred to me I didn't need to use precise splitters. I waste so much space and mental effort splitting and merging lines to get the exact right ratios (or as close as reasonable) and then I saw your example of a filled up line and the rest going where it needs to and I feel so dumb lol. Honestly at this point the time saving of not needing one line to fill up is completely offset by the time I spend setting up significantly more complex lines.

I agree, the that splitter isn't necessary. A lot of issues that come from not having a splitter like gets fixed by oversaturating like you said. If you really care about ratios, you could use lower tier conveyor belts. As for coding a precise splitter, it wouldn't be difficult to do.

I started playing Satisfactory a few weeks ago and a programmable splitter is not something that ever occurred to me. What I instead found lacking in the game was a more advanced calculator and a better note-taking system to keep track of all the math and project requirements. There’s plenty of 3rd party apps, but I still find myself writing down basic schematics on paper. Also, being able to re-visit saved notes would be immensely helpful when updating/rebuilding a factory.

I fully agree with your video; I don't want ratio splitters (because "the hard way" is fun) and CSS aren't going to give it to me anyway, as you pointed out BUT, being a programmer, I think I know how they would work 😉 and the exisiting splitters already kinda do: Each splitter remembers which output is to get the next item, even if the last item was ages ago. One would merely have to extend this with a little counting: A 1:3 splitter would output one item to the left, the next three to the right and then internally reset the counter.

What I would like though is smart mergers. Prioritize taking in items on one line and only take them in from another if there's extra belt throughput available.

The only logistics thing that is actually missing is smart/priority mergers - and even those don't have many applications. The only place they matter is with the few resources that can't be automatically collected. Like if you make a liquid biofuel setup for jetpack use, you might want to pull from a container fed by leaves+wood biofuel and only turn your alien remains into biofuel when that's empty - otherwise turn the alien remains into DNA and tickets. It's the one piece of logistics missing compared to Factorio, where ironically you don't even need a building to do it - it's just the thing that happens when you feed a belt into another belt in Factorio. And alien remains is one of the only things you might want it for.

I have to disagree - A ratio splitter would be useful and have a purpose. If people use it ineffectively that's no different to people building inefficiently as the game currently is. A ratio splitter has a perfect use when you have a line of inputs, one example here would be nuclear power stations. Lets say you have a row of 5 of them, you would series the splitter accordingly... Splitter 1: Input: 5, Output A = 1, Output B = 4 - what this would mean is 4 items must pass through Output B before Output A is given an item. Splitter 2: Input: 4, Output A = 1, Output B = 3 Splitter 3: Input: 3, Output A = 1, Output B = 2 Splitter 4: Input: 2, Output A = 1, Output B = 1 Thus providing perfectly even distribution of the resource from a single neatly placed belt. I'm not saying this can't be achieved in other ways by doing all sorts of crazy other things, but some players like myself, would like the ability to do this for tidy builds. Having a single line of input with variable quantity output points along the way. The other benefit of this is scalability. If you were to build a crazy contraption of conveyors and splitters to allocate the 5... what would happen if you want to add a 6th station - your contraption would have to be rebuilt... whereas with a ratio splitter you could just visit each one really quick and adjust the Output B value. Edit You could improve the flexibility of such an idea and make a Pattern Splitter instead. Specify a pattern as a string of characters (A,B,C) to achieve whatever ratio or cooky patterns you want. So my use case could have the pattern ABBBB, and the splitter simply starts back again from the beginning of the string once parsed.

Funny enough, modders have done this more or less. Not that I use them, particularly since 1.0 still isn't mod supported. That being said, I at least agree that it wouldn't make sense for being IN the base game. I think what a lot of people forget is accessibility in gameplay. Making a game have overwhelming niche tools makes it harder for some people to get into a game, and this game is already FEELS more complicated than it actually is by default. Now, the fact that I have to download a mod for functional elevators, that is something I'll never forgive them for. /j

the only change I want is for the programable splitter to have a "double output" rule. that rule would cause the splitter not to change its output destination the first time it outputs through that path each cycle. if the current item doesn't satisfy that paths other rules then it skips the double output. this would let you create something like a 2,1,2 splitter by having both sides do double outputs. and would more or less solve most splitter shenanigans you have to do for wierd splits. it's effectively a ratio splitter, but without actually being a set ratio

Industrial storage can having dual in and dual out is really useful for levelling supply/demand.

When I know I'm over feeding a manifold and want those extra parts somewhere else I will put a smart splitter at the end of the manifold to output any overflow.

This video summed up "it's not a problem for me so it's not a problem for you"

Imho blueprints handily solve the issue. If you want to load balance, you can make some generic load balancers ahead of time, then when you need them, use them.

Syncing excess is always a part of my plan even if I’m trying to make an efficient factory. Ficsit has made it very clear to us this is the way by the ridiculously hard to achieve awards in the awesome shop. 😂

What I do is put the max resources in the lower production machine and than set up a smart splitter so the overflow goes to that lower machine and the higher is always running at peak.

I disagree. What you describe as "just waiting" is the entire point. Think about how long it might take to fill up the entire input buffer on a nuclear power plant with that super slow processing speed. If you appropriately ratio items, then you can (optionally) design systems where all machines start up simultaneously. Or you can build a factory where you reserve items for building vs production. Another use is to provide prioritization between two hungry factories which are never going to be satisfied, and won't back up. A ratio splitter is not a tool for new players (I would recommend incorporating this into the programmable splitter), but provides flexibility and low latency in production responsiveness for advanced players. Although there is usually a load balancing splitter layout that allows you to accomplish what you want, it's always ugly, overcomplicated, and takes up way too much space. Also we would benefit from a priority merger, and I would like to be able to manipulate liquid/gas pipe input/output in the same way.

There were mods for ratio splitters before there were conveyor lifts. You could also simply have a splitter have a max throughput on each side. So in your 60 into 30/90 example, it would go 30/30 (in the same way that putting 270 into 120/480 would go 120/150).

We have blueprints now so we can make our own ratio splitters if we really want them.

We can absolutely balance splitters with just balancer builds. *But they're too god damn confusing and annoying.* But thankfully you can do this with a smart splitter, VERY easily. Lets say you want 24 beam going right and 6 going left. "Right - Steel Beam | Left - Overflow". The left side will fill up quickly, and eventually back up because you only need 6. The rest will eventually hit "Overflow", and head right, balancing the belt the way you want. It's a placebo effect, for sure. But it works to quell anxiety.

What we actually need is the ability for trains to recalculate their route so we can have parallel queues of trains

Would just like splitters that aren't HUGE.. A smaller two-way splitter that looks like a train track router or an airport luggage router would go a long way.

I've found that the 'little bit of time' that manifolds need can be quite a long time. And that means the machines at the end start and stop, spiking power usage, etc. I prefer a load balanced solution if possible. As for using a plain splitter and letting the one side back up when full- that will (severely) under-feed the other side until the first side fills. This may not seem like it matters much, if you are splitting the source and immediately feeding into a machine. But if you have a long belt after the split, that entire belt must fill up, from the machine all the way back to the splitter, before the other side 'overflows' to it's correct capacity. And if you are using the part produced from that side and combining it later with the piece produces on the other side, this means the factory will take forever to settle down into constant production.

Pretty sure someone has already created a mod that does just that. An adjustable splitter or merger that sends/take X amt of items going to one direction. It's actually useful in filling up a manifold because I can send the exact amount to all of my machines in one go. Like if I have 4 prod building and it's being fed by a manifold, I can do a 1 to 3 split. Where the one goes to the first building then the rest will go down the line quite nicely. Although after the setting cpy & paste feature came out and this mod not updated to that, this mod became tedious and I ended up not using that anymore and just like my manifolds fill up. Then I discovered the modular balancer mod and it is awesome! One could say that you really should need mods, but then Coffee Stain themselves would rather let the amazing modding scene handle that while they tackle for bigger things