@ericounderdown6110
I agree with the mindset of designing for guaranteed flow, but I completely disagree with the idea that 'avoiding balancers' is the way to achieve that. The balanced belt example at 2:50 gives 8 belts of variable output. Your method at 5:00 to manually cluster and balance etc, gives 5 belts of guaranteed flow. It's not the fact that you avoided the balancers that's important, it's the fact that you're only trying to extract 5 belts of output. If you had just used an "8 to 5" balancer to compress on the first setup you would get the same 5 belts of guaranteed flow. Less manual work trying to cluster things. Less worry about lane 1 having too many edge miners running out. No 'Spare' miners that aren't capable of outputting. Using the balancer is less work with more time of guaranteed flow because you'd only fall below 5 belts of output when the entire ore patch is incapable of providing the 5 belts of output. In your manual setup you could have belt 1 running at 95% throughput because it happened to have two edge miners that stopped earlier than the rest. Especially because in your example the 'spare' miners you don't use could have been looped into the balancer to provide input when others start failing.
@Klarid
What you are doing achieves what a balancer will achieve, only with more effort, thought, time, and variability. In your example ore patch, you are linking a specific set of miners on the outside of the patch to a specific smelting column. If you link that specific smelting column to a specific green circuit build, then, when those miners inevitably run dry before the center ones, your specific green circuit build will run dry. It's possible that the rest of the miners will be sitting idle, since the rest of your iron might depend on those green circuits to be flowing in order to be used. If you used a balancer, then all miners will be supporting all furnaces. When some run dry, it won't matter, especially if you apply your "gut feeling" system to the entire ore patch. Your ore patch has 292 miners available as a maximum. This is 4.2 blue belts or 6.3 red belts. I tend to stick with red belts for a much longer time than I should, and you're using them in this video, so I'll use those as my example. Feeding these 8 belts containing a total throughput of 6.32 red belts into an 8-to-6 balancer will give you 6 fully compressed red belts for at least a little while. This is what you're doing, only this abstracts the whole patch into those 6 belts rather than connecting specific rows of miners to specific belts. Even better, use an 8-to-4 balancer and have a guaranteed 4 red belts of iron for a long time. That's what I do. (Also, I included the 16 miners you very fairly labeled "annoying." You asked someone else how they'd handle an odd numbered belt. With this, I'd just lane balance it (your "scrambling widgets") and add it to all 8 belts one at a time, or combine it with the lane of 32 next to it, since all total that would be 31/s ore put on the 30/s belt, which is fine imo) For me, balancers are all about the abstraction. I don't want specific production chains tied to specific miners. I would rather 1 production line using iron products draw from all iron sources equally. It's the difference between having everything slow down as a patch depletes vs having entire sections stop, potentially causing the entire base to stop. On top of that, I don't want to care that a specific row has 36 miners and comes out at a rate of 23.4/s. I just make sure there isn't a far bigger (You don't seem to want to discuss trains, but I'm gonna add this in, since trains are the highest frequency use-case for balancers. Trains don't add "variability" if used properly. Using them the way you described does. But given a proper buffer and enough trains, there is no "travel time". A train should leave with items in the buffer and a new one should come in before the buffer depletes. This gives a very consistent output rate without the hassle of routing belts everywhere. It also allows for abstraction between ore patches, not just within.)
@Quiczor
Wait but, your idea here as you are saying is to get rid of variability, but your method leads to the base having variability as the miners turn off at about the same rate that the balancers do if not maybe slightly faster since they cannot help for/account for each other. Though your way uses less resources in avoiding the balancer. Also you can use a balancer that goes from higher inputs to lower outputs if you want to guarantee the consistency that you are looking for ^-^ Also if you use blue belts on the miners you could split it off into multiple red belts to really get the max mining at all times I just realized.
@Pystro
You seem to be overlooking a factor in that "designing for maximum flow" argument. (At least when ore trains come into play.) You are correct in that the act of balancing won't solve the variability of the mines, only compression (i.e. overbuilding miners) will. Which also means that if you belt directly from mine to factory, then you can't use an 8-to-8 or 4-to-4 balancer (to solve that problem). Because as soon as a single one of the input belts drops below a full belt of throughput, the output belts can never be full. The presence or absence of a balancer can't change that. In that situation you need a 12-to-8 or 10-to-8 or 8-to-4 balancer to guarantee that your belts are compressed (or more than 46 miners on EVERY belt). But the trains make the difference: If you look at one outpost with an 8-to-8 balancer that loads into 8 wagons, then you can deduce that you'll almost never get the full 8 belt throughput going into the train. At first glance this looks just as bad as directly belting ore from miners into the factory through an 8-to-8 balancer. But even if the train doesn't load at it's full 8 belts, it can still unload at a full 8 belts. That's where the depletion of ore patches comes in to save us. Since players know that their ore patches will deplete, they tend to future proof by connecting more ore patches than they need at the moment. But that also means that more trains are loading (at under 8 belts throughput) than are unloading. In total, this usually increases the rate at which ore can flow into trains to above the rate at which the dropoff stations take ore from the trains. (And if the input rate is lower than the consumption rate, we call that "I need to add more mines".) This overbuilding (more ore patches into the dropoff stations) provides the same compression as a 12-to-8 belt balancer in ore-patch-to-factory belts, or as if more than 46 miners are connected to one belt. The main difference is that if you overbuild ore patches, and if you use balancers that compress down, like 12-to-8 balancers, then you will have a balancer between the ore patch and the train, but not with the "connect 56 miners to one belt" strategy. And with any balancer there, even an ore patch where only a single belt still carries ore can contribute to that input flow rate. Otherwise the train won't be able to fill all of its wagons.
@janbx
For me just always use buffers everywhere, i know its not really what this video is about, but by buffering you cancel out those times where your patch "overproduces" so you just have to worry about "is my buffer full" if yes, the factory works on 100%. This also kills the uncertainty about trains, if you unload a train into some chests, the chests will always unload at the given speed while my train network can be chaotic
@marshallc6215
5:30 ...that's belt balancing. You're just doing it on the design side, which requires a very aesthetically unpleasant spaghetti of random belts connecting one or two machines here with one group waaaaay over there, rather than on the transportation side after you leave the mine. Imagine if you have two separate mines. Personally, I'd say "minimize the belts used to get the raw ore to the factory, then balance it so I can build a grid of equal size." If you decide to add belts to your design, you have to potentially entirely overhaul your belt network. If you balance, you just add another saturated belt. I don't even play factorio - I play satisfactory, but the idea is the same. It's kind of like the question of manifolds vs load balancing. Factorio doesn't have that choice as much, but would you run a belt to each machine because it guarantees throughout? Nope. Manifolds are waaaay simpler to design, build, and expand. As for all the stuff you're describing at 7:00, just reduce the post-balanced factory size by 20 or 30%. Or let it peak output early and slowly peter out, maybe saying "this section will be permanent but after the miners deplete, everything after this market will be starved so it can go"
@SlimThrull
5:27 So... You're just pre-balancing them, right?
@kaeto
This video is just... wrong. You don't use balancers to maximize output. Maybe at mining stations, but balancers are used at train unload stations because of the simple fact that it's virtually impossible to draw exactly evenly from the numerous belts coming out of your train. You are creating the inconsistency problem you are trying to avoid by refusing to use balancers.
@alexlowe2054
Interesting video. But this hasn't resolved the issue of depletion, it's only delayed how long it takes for you to feel the effects. You'll still have miners that dry out and slow down the production of random components in your factory. It's very interesting that you point out how trains introduce variability in flow rates, since that's precisely where most people are using belt balancers. But I think you have the logic backwards. Trains are an additional source of variability, but they also are the best way to solve the main problem, which is miners that don't remain consistent. Trains allow you to dramatically overbuild mining outposts, which solves the problem at a different level. Use balancers to evenly extract from multiple mining outposts at the maximum rate locally, and overbuild mining outposts with train systems to ensure a consistent flow globally. Using maximum extraction rates locally guarantees that your trains remain balanced, while giving you the largest amount of buffer to keep flow rates stable at a global level. The best part is, you can measure the entire system globally to ensure that you've got ample time to be alerted and set up new outposts before your excess capacity leads to down time inside the factory. Use a giant train stacker to simultaneously buffer full trains, and measure how many full trains you have using circuit networks. If the number of full trains starts dropping below some critical level because trains are waiting idle at outposts to pick up more ore, you know it's time to build more outposts. With your system, there's no builtin way to realize that miners have depleted, without noticing low production at some part of your factory. You could measure the belts directly with circuit networks, but by the time you hear an alarm, it's already too late to add more miners to get 100% flow rate. Plus, I don't see how you handle ore patches that are so depleted that they can't supply a single belt. At some point you have to start combining the output of multiple mining patches. Trains are just a really convenient way to do that. Trains solve the problem at a higher level, by taking advantage of their capacity to move far more material than belts. While you could still dramatically overbuild mining capacity without proper belt balancers, the miners will deplete highly unevenly because miners stay inactive when the belts are full, which leads to the same resource patch becoming irregular faster than if you're using balancers and trains to buffer the output. At the diagram at 10:00, the middle of the blue miners will take dramatically longer to mine up all the ore than all of the combined purple miners will, because the middle blue miners aren't going to start working until some of the other blue miners deplete, but they're sitting on the most sense patch of ore. If you built two similar mines and used balancers to evenly deplete the ore patch, and chests and trains to buffer the output, those two outposts would produce an even flow rate for much longer than two of your outposts would, because of uneven miner depletion. Still, this is all pedantic. There's no "wrong" way to build a factory. People love watching DoshDoshington because he often does crazy and weird things that look stupid, because he's playing by the rules of some nonsense challenges. I enjoy watching his challenges because each one of his bases is usually much different, because he hates doing the same thing twice. People love your factories because they're all very regular, almost like mathematical art, and there's a sense of predictability to everything. Some people like large trains, some people like smaller trains. Some people don't even use trains at all, and prefer to use belts. It all comes down to personal preference.
@NaoyaYami
But isn't the role of buffers to even out the flow with variable inputs? Train might deliver it's cargo in burst but the overall length of time it takes for a round trip is roughly the same. Thus you use buffers to accept all of it's cargo as fast as you can which you can then slowly distribute at even flow rate to the destination. Only issue is when your buffers become empty but all that means you need to increase input.
@angeldude101
It's probably less of a concern in the very late game with very rich ore patches and high mining productivity, but no matter what you do, the ore patch will deplete. You will need to eventually build more mining outposts eventually and your existing patches won't be able to support the desired throughput. This is why I generally don't factor in ore rate into my calculations and just try to mine more than I need. There's also the matter of an uneven consumption rate. Ideally, consumption rate is much more easy to control than ore production rate, but it is still possible to have variable consumption rate. The most common example is in the mall. You generally don't consume resources making building that aren't being placed, and the buildings will only get made, and hence consume resources, when you're actively expanding the factory, or when it's building back up the buffer consumed in a recent expansion. There's also the possibility of uneven usage in the science path, but there using a balancer is little more than a way to hide the problem rather than an actual solution. The actual solution is to fix your ratios and builds.
@Hawk7886
I absolutely LOVE how the end message for orefield setups regarding "fixed, guaranteed flow" is literally "it's basically gut feel." I totally get what you're saying. When I first played the game, I remember seeing posts regarding the maxim, "overproduce far upstream, it's way too stressful when you run out of source materials." I've always found that true, for better or for worst. It can be super rewarding to play with absolute ratios 100% of the time, but I still have the most fun in factories where I suck up everything I can and work out the magic in the middle of the base.
@naroxo3067
this woud be a problem for me for like the first 1-2 hours of a playthrou. The moment i have Trains, 100% of my new ore patches are coming in by train and if i don't balance the belts bevore going into the buffer chest, they will forever be uneven and the train pickup time will be limited by those slower filling chests
@mathus3311
this is where seablock is great. you build your factory with just the water, so no ore patches to add the variability
@illadiel6049
This reminds me of how it's preferable in starcraft to be undermining multiple bases at a time, rather than oversaturating a single base
@hbg8418
I might be a bit too new to the game, but this just does not make sense in any way. how does this balance your output, when this doesn't do basically anything? You get basically the same thing, but better with balancers. What am I missing here?
@pfqniet
Personally I use balancers on my ore patches more to compress the input down. Sure the ore patch may have 8 lanes of mining drills, but some of those will have less output and will deplete sooner, so typically I will compress it down to 4 belts. If I need more than 4 belts I'll go find another ore patch; there's plenty of them! With a well-designed train system you can reasonably reliably know how long a train journey will take with only occasional traffic issues (and this'll be even easier with the expansion's elevated rails!) and use this to judge a suitable buffer size to compensate for the intermittent times. I very rarely use balancers outside of the mining outposts. Might use one or two in my main bus just to rebalance or compress belts down as resources are consumed (for example I'll compress my 8 copper belts down to 4 after the green circuit section) but otherwise I just rely on the fact that balanced belts in = balanced belts out! A full train unloading 4 belts of materials will unload the same amount of materials onto each belt, so there's no need to ever balance that. The output of that block will likewise be evenly split. Just... don't mess with it by hand-feeding some machines XD
@nezunskyfire292
I LOVE your furnace stack design, I think I'll try building them in my next playthrough
@dragonturtle2703
Sorry if I'm missing something obvious, but why not just set up an ore buffer near the smelting columns, and send out trains to mining outposts as needed to top off that ore buffer. The trains then just have a condition to stay until emptied. Do the same thing at the outposts to minimize unnecessary downtime for the miners (if you have something larger than chests, maybe even enough to empty the patch), and you have a constant rate without carefully sectioning off your miners. Especially since they will start being depleted eventually anyway.
@Lithane97