You Don't Want Precise Splitters in Satisfactory

One of the oldest requests for Satisfactory is a precise splitter or a ratio splitter. But in this video, I'm going to tell you that we don't need those, and that we can already solve all of our problems with the tools in the game.

0:00 The problem
1:40 Manifold saturation
2:49 Under/Over clocking
4:02 Think bigger
5:57 Just like, chill, bro

[flamyf]

The author has been roasted in the comments for 7 months and still believes in his arguments, this is just comical amount of copium

[Pest]

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?

[jandor]

Developer: "That is the huge part of our game, that you do ratio calculations"

Players: "Manifolds go brrrr..."

[YanniCooper]

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

[K]

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

[MarkBiesheuvel]

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.

[scpWyatt]

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.

[DisProveMeWrong]

Players:"We want to just plug in numbers."

Satisfactory: "Lol do math, nerd."

[klikkolee]

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 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.

[Lil_Puppy]

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.

[kyleoconnor]

I didn't find this very convincing. Programming a splitter like this seems simple to me; standard splitters already are "ratio splitters", just with a 1:1:1 ratio.

Consider late game nuclear power plants. A power plant consumes .2 fuel rods per minute, and an overclocked blender can produce 1 fuel rod per minute. Ideally this one blender can power 5 plants.

With your proposed solutions we can:

(1) keep the plants turned off until the belts have 'loaded', which in this case will take hours because we are only producing 1 fuel rod per minute and each plant has a buffer of 50.

(2) build additional blenders and underclock them such that each plant gets .2 fuel rods per minute directly

Both of these seem much more complicated/wasteful, then what would be proposed with a "ratio splitter":

(1) build a single manifold lane with each splitter set to a 1:5:0 ratio.

[fictitiousnightmares]

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

[Goodgu]

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.

[Redstones]

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.

[stevenspencer]

If the game had precise splitters, I think I'd actually use manifolds. But since they don't, I use load balancers. I just hate stopped items on belts.

[phunkydroid]

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.

[BirdMoose]

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.

[echomande]

A percentile splitter would be enormously handy.

[NorbertM.]

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.

[zain]

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.