Ever struggle trying to figure out how you will balance the right amount of resources down to each individual machine? Well, you're not alone. In today's video, we are diving into the nitty gritty of manifolds and load balancers and uncovering how to effectively use each one for peak efficiency in your factory. But that's not all. Stick around until the end, where I'll be sharing tips and custom blueprints to help you build your factories with confidence. Let's jump into it. Now to make a manifold system is fairly easy. You just place a line of splitters all facing the same way one after the next, and they all feed into buildings, typically in parallel to those splitters. So in our case here, we have 120 iron ore per minute coming into the first splitter. Then that splitter splits the line between a smelter on its left and continuing down to a second splitter, and so on and so forth, until the very last smelter. And as you can see, sending up manifold lines have a lot of advantages to them. One, they're easy to set up. They're more compact of a building style. And so generally you'll have a smaller footprint for your factory. And they're super easily scalable too. As you can see here, scaling from four smelters to 26 is just a matter of adding more smelters and splitters and mergers. And you went from a mach two line to a mach five like that. But there is a downside to those manifold systems, and I'll get back to that later on. First, let's talk about load balancers. Manifolds can take a while to get up to a max efficiency. That means depending on how complex and long your manifolds are, they might take, even in some cases up to 30 minutes in order to work at 100% efficiency. But given enough time, they will get there. And this is thanks to how splitters work. So in this case here we have a mach two belt doing 120 iron ore per minute. That 120 hits the first splitter, and the first splitter splits it evenly 6060. Now what happens is, because the furnace or smelter only needs 30 per minute, and we're feeding at 60 per minute, it will fill up and once its full, we'll actually overflow the extra 30 per minute down the line to the next splitter. And as you can see here, it'll back up that line and the overflow will move on to the next splitter. Same thing will happen on this splitter now. Now we're receiving 90 per minute total and we're splitting that into 4545. And because that smelter only needs 30, we're supplying in an extra 15 per minute. So it will eventually fill up. To be fair, this one won't fill up as fast as the first one, but it will still fill up once its full. That extra 15 per minute overflows into that third splitter. And finally, once that overflow is done, we have an equal 30 per minute on each one of the last two smelters. Typically, if you provide exactly enough resources for all of the smelters or machines to run at 100% efficiency down the main manifold line, what will happen is the last two machines of that manifold line will never fill up, and they'll just receive exactly enough for it to run at 100% efficiency. But that process does take time, and I'll go over some ways you can mitigate that later down in this video. Now this is a simple load balancer system. In this case, contrary to the way a manifold works where the splitters are all in a row. This one you're splitting one belt in a way where all the machines get an equal amount of items going into them. And when we say equal, we don't necessarily mean they all get 30 per minute, although in this case it is the case. It could also mean, given a certain input of items, they will split those items equally so that all the machines get what they need in order to work at 100% efficiency right off the bat. So as you can see here, our first machine needs 15, the second needs 11 to 5, the third 3.75, and the last 130. They all receive exactly enough for them to function at 100% efficiency right off the bat. But there are downsides to the load balancer. The load balancer does take more space. Not in this example necessarily. But if you were to, let's say, scale it way up high like we did with the manifold, you can see how much more complex bigger the footprint is. And to make matters worse, here, we only have 24 smelters in this example in order to balance perfectly. Instead of the 26 that we have utilizing the entire Mark five belts of the manifold system, and to scale a manifold system, all you have to do is add more smelters. In this case and extend the manifold of splitters and mergers, and you're done. But things aren't so quite as easy with the load balancer, and in some cases, you might even have to completely destroy your load balancing setup and restart from scratch, depending again on what your goals are. And the reason for that is load balancers work good when they are in multiples of 2 or 3. And the reason for that is because a splitter has up to three outputs. Once you start dealing with prime numbers, everything is thrown out the window and complexity skyrockets. There is some tricks to mitigate that problem. And again I'll go over those later in this video. So here you can see we have a multiple of two with four smelters. And we have here a multiple of three with six smelters. The load balancer does have certain advantages. And other uses. Now before we go over the uses of the load balancer, let's talk about another advantage. Balancing this requires a little bit of math and calculus options, along with more room and a bigger footprint than the manifold counterpart. And the reason for that is one of the main advantages of the manifolds in my mind, and that is being able to add multiple different items and multiple different overclocking speeds on a different machines on the same manifold line. That is where the manifold shines, because as long as you just provide for input, the total amount of items required for all those machines, everything will work perfectly fine. Whereas things get a little bit more dicey when it comes to that same setup with load balancers, because then you have to start really thinking of how you split the lines up in order to get exactly 3.75 worth. And another fun advantage of load balancing is you'll start receiving exactly enough to run your machines. So in this case here we're pivoting between 8 and 9, eight and nine. Right. And that's because we're receiving one. We're using one right off the bat. But just like the manifold has it's advantages, the load balancer also has their advantages. Let's take for instance this setup. This set up we're creating ten reinforced iron plates per minute. We're needing 120 iron ingots for input in order to produce those ten reinforced iron plates. And here we can see that we're load balancing everything between the iron plates constructors and the iron rod constructors. And then we're doing the same with the screws constructors and then the same with the assemblers. You might not have access to 120 iron ingots per minute right now. Or maybe something happened and you lost half of that. This is where the load balancer shines. Here we're getting 60. As for the input now, but that's 60 is split in a way where every machine can run at 50% efficiency. And that way we are still producing an average of five reinforced iron plates per minute. Now it says six here. Because of the way that mod works, sometimes it gets six, sometimes it gets four. So averages up to five. You'll see five. Sometimes it just all depends on when you catch it. But you can see here that both of these assemblers are running at 50%, which means a total of five per minute. And so even though you're not sending in enough, you're still producing a stable amount of reinforced iron plates. The same cannot be said about the manifold setup of this system. The manifold setup works perfectly fine when it's given exactly 120 iron ore for input. What will happen once you only receive 60 per minute in this case, is most of them will be going into the first three constructors where we're going be creating a lot more reinforced iron plates. Now eventually those reinforced iron plates will fill up and then they'll will head into the assembler and all that will back up. And then you'll still be creating a little bit of reinforced iron plates. And once those iron plates are full, then everything will overflow into the iron rods. The iron rods will then start working and then go into the screws. The screws will start working and then send them into the reinforced iron plates that will kick start the reinforced iron plates. Production. But it will run out of screws. And what will happen is because you're lowering the iron plates. And you can see here that because of the way the manifold works, it's going to be fluctuating. Sometimes you'll get the five per minute and but most of the time you won't. And that's because there'll be a constant balancing act between the iron plates and the rod screws. So the manifold really only really works if you provide it enough items. Hello. Balancer can also be useful for just load balancing. Some belts. You don't necessarily need to load balance the actual machines. In our case here they're just belts, which could be useful if you're receiving all sorts of different types of or from different inputs from across the map, and then you want to balance these into equal lines in this case, here we have what's called a three by three balancer. We're receiving an input of 3060 and 120. The 30 comes from an impure node the 60 from a normal node and 120 from a pure node. After it goes through this load balancer system, the end result is three belts of 70. And here's another example. This one is a 4x4 balancer. Here we're getting 6122 40 and 720 lines. And we're going through this 4x4 balancer. And it balances it all to 285 in each belt. Now there are ways to do these more compact. But because I'm one for loving no clipping. You know me and my no clipping rule. This is what a 4x4 no clipping would look like. And I just so happen to have a couple of load balancer blueprints like that 4x4 that you can use if you ever need it. And you can find all of these in the link down below. There is another advantage to the load balancing system though, and that is when it comes to nuclear. Now when dealing with nuclear power, you typically don't want to have fuel rods just sitting on the belt like the manifold system does. And the reason for that is because the more the rods sit on the belt and fill up the machines. So if we go look here, these are full. So the more that are in the machines and the more that are in the belt, the more radiation is being produced. And since most people who do nuclear do gigantic factories of nuclear, you don't want to have all this radiation just sitting there in one gigantic area for that. A load balancer is much better because then you're feeding into the machines exactly enough, and there's not that many on the same line at the same time. Let's talk now about strategies. When dealing with load balancers, you'll often need to separate lines so that they make sense. And one way to do that is just to use the different levels of Mach lines. Like for instance here we're receiving 110 cables on a marked two belt. Now the 110 cables is a weird number, I agree, but let's let's not worry about that. This is an example. Now in this example, what we can do here is use a smart splitter and we can send everything down the mark one belt first. And so that creates a 60 belt line. And then you overflow everything down the center. So that leaves us with a line of 60 and a line of 50. And then you can go from there. So in our case what we're doing here is using a smart splitter to fill up the Mach one belt to make it a 60 line. And then we overflow all the extra down the other line to create our 50 wires per minute. This is one strategy, another issue you're going to deal with load balancers a lot is dealing with prime numbers, but you can use something like a splitter array to help with that scenario, where you end up removing one belt worth of items from the equation. So in our case here we have 75 iron ingots. And we're trying to create five constructors of iron rods each one needs 15 iron ingots per minute. So in our case here this splitter array will take out 15 and then will give us another belt of 60. So the 60 belt you can then split into four. And then you'll just add that extra belt into the fifth constructor. Pretty much how this one works is it'll add one belt worth at the end, and then do a loop back into a merger at the beginning of the of the loop. The downside to that is the belt between the merger and the first splitter needs to have enough wiggle room in there for you to accommodate that extra amount. So in our case, we're using a mark two belt and we're only using 75 in that Mark two belt. So we have room for that extra 15. But if we only had a mark two belt with 120, you couldn't fit a 135 on it. And so it would not work. So it doesn't work for everything. So you need to make sure you have enough empty spots on your belt. But if you want more example of the splitter array, you can go to the wiki. I'll put a link down below and you'll see more information on different types of splitter arrays. Let's talk about my overall recommendation. If you can stomach the efficiency loss for a little bit until everything gets filled up and then becomes 100% efficient, then manifold is the way to go for pretty much everything. Okay, the only time I would ever use a load balancer is for something like a simple solution at the early game, or when I'm dealing with nuclear when I'm actually trying to load balance belts, and this is more useful when dealing with trains. You'll typically want to load balance your output of your trains in order to keep things efficient. More about that in an upcoming train guide. But for now, these are the only times I ever use load balancers for everything else. Manifolds work flawless. They take less space, they're easy to do, and they're a lot more versatile, like I mentioned. And if you're new to satisfactory or looking to improve, check out my new Ultimate Beginner's Guide series to satisfactory.
