Logistics floors are especially helpful with machines that can have dry outputs and wet outputs both, like Refineries and Blenders. Although the complexity of implementing is a little higher, it makes a much better looking factory (for those of us who dislike spaghetti). Also, for manufacturers it REALLY helps organize the 4 inputs you need for alot of items you need to make. My manufacturers literally have four vertical belts popping up and connecting directly to the machine - Very clean looking. Below (on the logistics level) I use a "vertical bus" arrangement with splitters in the bus for direct connections to the risers to the machines. Very clean and organized helpful arrangement for connecting multiple manufacturers in a row. Good video! Thanks for this!!
Thank you for the descriptions, and the tip on logistics floors. I've seen communications lines ran on cable trays under the floor, hvac in the ceiling, and power on the walls of modern buildings so it all makes sense when compared to the real world.
Pro tip: If you want to save space when using lifts, first place the lift and then snap the splitter or merger to the lift. the splitter/merger will partially engulf the end of the lift in way I think looks cool and takes up less space. (Unless they have changed it in 1.0, as I haven't played yet)
This is really useful without spoiling anything, I've thought about ways to structure my factory, and this will really help in my first proper factory setup. Thank you
I mostly use manifolds because they are easier to scale up. Faster belts? Better Minders? Overclocked miners? Just add more buildings at the end of the line and scale up. This form of scaling up is easier but also visualises progress. "After upgrade your smelter line and belts, you can now run 3 manufacturors instead of 1."
I'm on phase 3 almost into 4 and never even considered manifolds. I probably wouldn't have to make all these spreadsheets to get the numbers right and perfectly underclock all my machines....
Manifolds are exceptionally efficient IF you bother to pre-load the upstream belts. Whenever I have, let's say, a 4 stage production line, I fill the first (input and output buffers), then fill the second, etc... It is the most efficient design with respect to space conservation and throughput, with the burden on the designer to "pre warm" each stage.
if its a small number of machines easy to load balance, i'll do that, otherwise i use manifolds. the "lag" to get started doesn't really matter longer term and they tend to look better for large builds (or rather, it's much easier to expand upon with it still being easy to look at)
@@ShiyeBig trouble is that balancers are not scalable. When you need to expand production, the whole system has to be reworked. With manifolds, simply upgrade the belt and extend the line.
Honestly I'm just lazy about math. The processes for uneven load balancers are such a pain that I just can't be bothered, frankly. Manifolds take two seconds, and work perfectly fine once the belts are charged.
@@tobeqz7065 I think it balances out in the end. The time spent calculating and building a load balancer would likely be similar to the time it takes for a manifold to fill up. Manifolds are even better if you have the spare resources to pre-fill machines or if you get them running as you're building. I had wanted to try manifolds because the layouts looked fancy but math is blurry to me and seems like there's not much of a benefit unless you're just a wizard at the game already.
@@Felsparx You don't actually have to calculate anything to do load balancing - start at the machines and put a splitter in the middle of each group of three - if you end up with less than three machines at the end, pretend there's three for now anyway. Do the same thing for the splitters that were just made, repeating each step until you end up with only one splitter (Last stage can be 1:2 instead of 1:3 if the second-to-last stage only had two splitters). Insert mergers on each line AFTER the 'single' splitter. Finally take all the 'excess' lines where there should have been output, combine them into one line and then split it into two or three parts (as needed) and fed into the mergers we put after the single splitter. It sounds far more complicated than it really is - after only doing a few of them, I can build them in roughly the same amount of time as a manifold, but it will start much faster than the manifold will. The only distinction to which one I'd actually use is whether or not I have enough room to put a balancer, if I'm dealing with radioactive components, or if I'm dealing with very slow production times on an input item (e.g mass producing fused modular frames, almost certainly load-balancing the heavy frame inputs). Manifolds are only ever 'fast' for near the start of the production chain when you're able to push nearly an entire full belt of items constantly.
@@aaronh678chapters do nothing if you don't interact with them, do you find it annoying that other people can use them to skip to the parts they are interested in?
It really depends on the look I'm going for at a given factory. Sometimes I use balancers, other times I use manifolds. Manifolds are easier and work fine once everything is filled up. There's no right or wrong way of playing the game. Do whichever you prefer. You can even prefill the belts and input before turning on machines so that manifold setups run at 100% efficiency from the start.
I typically set up factories with 3 floors. The ground floor is where all materials enter the building and make their way toward the machine that requires them. This floor is the busiest, often with many lines/pipes going all different directions. Organized, but busy. The second floor is where the resources make their way up to the machines on the top floor. I often try to arrange belts and lifts and pipes in ways that display the materials traveling on them on the second floor, I try to make things symmetrical and pleasing to the eye. The third floor is where all the machines are located. Once a part is made, it makes its way back down to the first floor where it travels to the next machine or out to storage.
for all the newbs out there, balancers are for early game and highly specific situations. manifolds are king and can be setup quite speedy when you have mk5 belts and power shards to speed up the satuaration process
Load balancing is also useful late game for low-production items. Who cares if you have mark5 belts when a mark 1 belt can supply 40 blenders with heavy modular frames to make fused modular frames? Manifold will take half an hour to fill up, load balancer will be virtually instant. Even if you're only doing a third of that, it still takes a manifold half an hour to saturate because while you're scaling back production, you probably also only have a scaled-back HMF production, and the numbers just get worse the further along in the production chain you go.
@SalamanderBSC easy fix for that is to store everything you build in containers so when you reach the next stage of production you have several stacks to prime the manifolds
@@kenneilwalters6821 The time it would take me to go over to where I'm storing those items could be just as easily spent building a load balancer and not having to bother with priming dozens (or possibly even hundreds) of buildings. Especially since I could just cram 8 blenders into a 6x6 blueprint, load balance them for the blueprint once, and then just load balance between 5 of those blueprints. Now I also have a blueprint for a "super blender" which is internally load balanced between 8 blenders that I can use for other tasks too, like encased uranium.
@@kenneilwalters6821 I wouldn't say it's an easy fix, you still need to have those containers nearby to have enough stuff with you to saturate big manifolds. I do agree that if you do have them on hand you can drop em in to speed up the process, I do that as well.
@@SalamanderBSC you saw the part where I said highly specific situations? Also, it makes life easier to have to carry only a few materials in large quantities. If you build a high output aluminum factory, you just need aluminum sheets and you can belt mk5s everywhere, all the time. it just makes things easier.
I have relearned that as long as your through put is able to push material faster than the machines can suck them up you typically won't have many problems. Just make sure the machines you build have around half a stack of material before you link them up with the next stage of your build so you have enough for saturation. Also load balancers and manafolds can be hidden under the machinery by using 1m foundations and leaving some space for you to work in.
There's a few comments here about balancing manifolds, and I'd like to posit this can be a very good compromise to get the best of both. What I do is underclock until the input of the machines fall into an easy factor of 60: 60, 30, 20, 15, 10. I then make localized balancers of 2, 3, 4, or 6, which can usually fit into a blueprint with that many machines fairly easily. From there I can place any number of copies of this blueprint and so long as I feed them with a mk1 belt they can be manifolded with any speed of belt and still run with the same level of efficiency
I do that sometimes too, I call it 'hybrid' balancing. Smelters are an especially obvious case of it - copper and iron are both 30/min input, pure aluminium is 60/min
Placing all of the splitters, mergers and belts on the floor this way makes it easy to learn how everything works, but it also it difficult to maneuver around the factory. My factories use conveyor lifts to eliminate this problem with the same results.
I started using vertical balancers this playthrough. Each layer has 3 machines, up to 3 layers get feed by a second order splitter. Those cubes get then underclocked to match the input. Makes for some great "Iron Tower" or "Copper Hill" factory.
Sushi belts work great if you turn of the first few machines and wait for the ones on the end to fill up. And with fuel generates lower the power on the first few so the ones in the back get more fuel and when they are full turn everything to normal.
I run a load balancer in exactly one place; train stations. Averaging the inputs or outputs ensures that one container backing up doesn't lead to imbalances down the line. Load balancers for standard machines is a fools errand most of the time. I incidentally let machines back up to the point where the feeds are saturated. I mean, it only takes 3 minutes...which is longer than it takes to make the next set of machines.
Just a note for a major point of frustratuion. If youre coming up from a floor hole directly into a splitter and into 2 machinces, offset the hole. The best way i can discribe it: Stand with machine on the left and right, enterences in line and spaced enough for a splitter. Floor hole will be in the center, one tick away from you. Lift exit will face towards you. Splitter should auto config and completely cover the lift. And you'll have a perfect split.
You can still balance a manifold. Idk why people seem to not like them. Multiple manifolds side by side can be done correctly with math. Just take the time to figure out the correct numbers
Just a small tip from me, if you like to build balancing delivery but only have place for manifold line.. place the last row of splitters first, front last on top of that etc.. till you got all the splitters in place, then connect everything with elevators.. and you have the balancer but vertical build. 😊
I just noticed that I build my factories exactly like a CPU. I have belts that are part of a manifold right with the machines, then I have a floor for local belts, then one for the belts going across the entire factory. The different distance belts get their own floors
Power wise, and with smart splitters, i find manifolds only sending overflow to the next one allows almost all to function fully, and an extra as an off/on extra for extra overflow. Built in way to overclock, get extra, increase efficiency and then take off overclock when done.
A really great example of where manifolds are inefficient is on the back end of production. If you have several machines making output and you merge them all together a manifold method of merging will cause one machine to purge it's backed up production at twice the rate of the second, and 4 times the rate of the third and so on, meaning in setups where your production lines might fill up and then when you build something need to refill your stores you will have actually slower total times to refill as your production machines will remain idle longer as it takes more time for your usage to empty the buffers on some machines as compared to others. The flip side is the difference is probably pretty small. The more you use the less this will tend to matter and if you don't use much at all your buffers will tend to stay full, so there is no real problem. But in any case on the backend this problem never goes away. On the incoming side once your machines are saturated with input the difference between a load balancer and a manifold go away, but on the output end the problem can reoccur over and over again.
The example you give shouldn't be that big an issue, if you need to refill your stores, the chances are all the constructors already have their buffers filled, and whilst they start to run, the manifold will be feeding through to the whole system, by the last in the line finish using their buffer it will most likely be being filled again. On the flip side if you run overflowing awesome sinks at your storage, then you'll never have an issue as the factory will run constantly
One thing I have not seen anyone mention, is slugs. Put a slug in a factory and you have just ruined your 'balanced' set up. If you had a manifold setup and you have excess input but no room to expand, you can either reduce the output of the feeding/supply factory (Why would you do that! You are wasting manufacturing time!) or you can add a slug into the last factory of the input line to 'gobble' up the excess input and increase your outflow at the same time. Win win!
additional tip: you can use every splitter or merger as an replacement for the input/output-head of vertical conveyors just place the splitter/merger directly on the input/output-head of your vertical conveyour
would love to see tips for making logistics as compact as possible, like when creating your own blueprints. for example, I only just realized how tightly you can connect conveyor lifts to splitters and mergers. normally when you connect them, the lift sticks out like 3-4 "nudges" worth of space, but if you do it right, you can have it almost merged entirely into the splitter/merger!
I use manifolds because you can incorporate as many different things as you like with a single line, it makes certain more complex factories much easier to build.
Even sexier logi floor: place the elevator bottoms at default ceiling height, then place a merger directly on it, which replaces the elevator head. It doesn’t even matter which way you face the elevator. It works and merges the stuff from above into the merge, then belt them all together in a line at ceiling height. You can do the same with splitter on the input side. I can walk around my logi floor.
the first time I played satisfactory and saw programmable splitters I was happy bcs I thought you can literally programm them and say I want x amount on that output the rest goes further but I was sorely disappointed :D this should really be a thing... I shouldnt have to cram large loadbalancers into tiny logistic floors/areas
The most disappointing thing about the programmable splitter is realising that putting the same item twice in one column and once in another does not actually give you a 2:1 split.
Please do a guide on how pipes work. I just can't seem to get the flow to be consistent. But also, thank you so much for your videos. I'm new to these type of games and your videos have helped make the gameplay less daunting!
Check the archives, he made this video 2 years ago. Look up McGalleon's guide. But never use fluid storage, not even with valves, as it will only introduce sloshing and kill flow. The only time to use a fluid buffer is with a pump going in one side, the buffer higher than other points in network, and a valve set to zero flow on the output. This will be your key pipe from which you distribute head lift.
You could've shown a timelapse of the container inventory filling up to show that, after initial startup time, the machines will produce at the same rate.
Cool, now I can do a challenge playthrough where everything is perfectly balanced, as all things should be. Seriously though, I think that it would be a very interesting logistic challenge having to completely load balance all the factories that are built in a world.
Once you figure out that fractions with primes, like 79/347, aren't so bad to achieve when you can only ever divide by 2 or 3 it's gravy! I certainly enjoy the challenge. And I enjoy and watching my never backed up belts.
Logistic floors are a gamechanger. You can make such nice layouts. Anyone who hasn't tried a build like that should do it asap. Keep in mind you can even use blueprints for logistic floors with all the necessary attachments by placing the foundations in the blueprints along with everything else. It's great.
I don't really see the point. Maybe I play the game differently than others, but I normally don't stroll through my factories. I set up a production line with a storage and a depot at the end, I encase the whole thing in walls and roofs, and from then on I'll never enter that building again.
After the first conveyor belt is full of raw material that overflows, the overflow continues and after a while it will do the same thing as the load balancer. I use a load balancer when, for example, I use coal generators, because in this case the most important thing is that it is used to the maximum. For example MkII miner Pure coal resources equals 16 coal generators because 15coal/min
For anything early game, I'd just drop a stop of the resource into each smelter before connecting and having them run. Manifold will work much quicker for all
Solid advice. My biggest problem was/is how to handle full storages from base resource PoV. Meaning: should I plan my factory (the very first one) to always produce x/m of every produce (plate, rod etc), store a certain amount and then sink the rest, or skip sinking the low level ones, and overload the base material line to produce other stuff?
For your first factory making plates/rods/etc I wouldn't stress it too much. Do it if you want to, or skip it if you feel like you've got enough else to think about already. Getting some early sink points to unlock some of the quality of life things from the store can be nice, but having a backed up plate/rod line probably won't cause any problems. In general I think sinking is a good habit to get into, though it isn't always essential. The cases where it's essential are those where a line getting clogged will cause production to halt. The sushi belt shown in this video is one example. Another is recipes which produce multiple outputs, since one resource's output buffer filling will cause production to pause even if the 100% of the other output resource is being consumed. Once you're using trains there's also an argument for sinking inputs to prevent trains from hauling around full freight carriages all the time.
Manafolds are also a lot easier to expand. So early game when you don't have the resources to build 8 smelters, and are using MK1 miners you can use manifolds to prepair a factory for expansion.
All you need to do when you start your factory is power the miner, let it fill up while you build your smelters. Then power the smelters and let them fill up while you build the constructors. Then power the constructors while you build the output. That way, your machines should have time to fill. Also, when the miner or smelters clog while you build, put the stacks in your inventory to manually fill the next machines. Load balancers are a pain in the ass when you want to upgrade the miners or overclock or add a few machines. With manifolds, all you have to do is keep a small space for a lift after your last splitter so you can send extra materials to another floor. You will have to expand so keep that in mind!
I would also like to add that manifolds are much more adaptable to future needs - once that Mk1 miner becomes a Mk2 or Mk3, or you discover you need to input more ore onto the belts (because you always need more screws), you just slap some more buildings to the manifold and voilà!
@@LancelotSwe Screw the screws, all my friends use stitched plating! No but seriously, the game becomes a different game once you find all the alt recipes to optimize screws out of existence.
@@entitledOne Yeah sure, although the steel beams - to screw isn’t that bad if you have the constructor infront of the machine you’re supplying, not having to belt a lot of screws.
I rarely see videos on manifolds point out you can simply change out the 1st and 2nd splitter conveyor to a L3 and the 2nd and 3rd to an L2. Splitters will give 1/5th to one output and 4/5th to the other (they balance based on belt speed). Compactness of a manifold but closer to a load balanced early start up.
How do you set up stairs between logistics floors/production floors when the current walkway/catwalk stair setups only accomodate the 4m high setups, when logistics/production floor combos require a 4+1m high setup?
Does it make sense to add a Mk. 2 conveyor belt at the first splitter going to the second smelter because when the first smelter's buffer is full, you will have 60 + 30 going to the second smelter?
I load balance everywhere, and avoid logistics floors. Complex but organized balancing and rate limiting are a core aesthetic of my factories. It encourages me to avoid factory layouts that are just, boring row after row of machines.
2:00 manafold problem is coused, because you used mk.1 belt after the first splitter. if You use mk.2 between spliters ore will build up in last furnance
I have a habit of somehow using both. I'll use load balancing when I'm setting up the smelting, but than I start using manifold for the middles stages of production lines. Unless the math is simple, like 120 into 3 lines. Lol
Hello ! I'm a beginner on this game and I love your video. Do you have one about the strategy for getting coupon ? Right now i manually put in alien dna from creature inkill and i have a screw line dedicated to be destroyed.
1. I put smart splitter with overflow to awesome sink before every storage of any components. 2. When i build megafactories, i prefer to make it by blocks (like iron parts, steel parts, oil refinery products etc). And before final launch, during next steps of building, i sink all production of this blocks
I started with a main bus feeding all factories and produced items gets added to main bus. Its really a easy mode gaming that way, just a bit work to build everything. Added owerfill for awesome sink etc so no factory will ever stop producing
I find they're pretty useful early to mid game but the scaling gets rather crazy later on. It's probably a little easier now we have tier 6 belts though.
@@TalesOfWar yeah i used AI to help with numbers and i do have to say the new belts help. Also i can basicly scale up production and belts indefenitely so looks like this is my way of playing. Going where the fence is lowest
Not trying to start anything but asking a math question. Wouldn’t the 1:4 splitter/merger setup actually be a 1:3 ratio since 1/4 of the product is being reintroduced to the original line? At 4:19
Only 1/6 of the original product is feeding back into the incoming line. One half (or 3/6) is going straight through. The other half is then being split 3 ways (into sixths, overall). The way it's set up, you have 1/6 going far left, 4/6 going forward, and 1/6 feeding back. As long as none of the lines saturate, everything that makes it through will be split in a 4:1 ratio.
The lines back up to the splitters on a manifold and the machine has a buffer of 100 items... So 120 radiated items or load balance with 1 radiated item has quite the difference
At the start of the game I like to balance things as well as I can because ratios are stupid easy But later later on I just say screw it and manifold everything to avoid a headache
I just manifold everything because it’s more compact than balancers and then I crank up the output of predecessor to manually fill up the far end constructors lol. Sure it’s additional work but manifolds save more space
There is a much easier way to use manifolds and get them working efficiently from the get go without all the stuffing around you mention. Just use different tier belts. For example, let's say you have 6 smelters near your extractor. Each requires 30 ore / minute. A tier 1 belt from each splitter will easily take care of that but the belt from the extractor to the splitters can be tier 3. Solved.
I used to load balance everything when I started but once I played more I abandoned that completely in favor of manifold. They will always even out automatically with time. Always. Turn it on, walk away, go start another project, and when you go back to it, it's running at 100% efficiency.
@henrysinclair5914 How about everyone looking to get offended at nothing these days? Calling out a new player is hostile? Pros balance almost everything and waste nothing. Its the meticulous side of Satisfactory, especially the endgame. Manifolds have their uses, but I prefer balancers whenever possible.
@henrysinclair5914 Dont need to load balance fluids. Blueprints and a logistics floor below refineries make it literally a snap. Good luck to you as well noob.
I use 8m logistic floors - I tried 6m but (a) conveyor lifts intended completely internal to the logistics floor will clip into the ceiling, and (b) how do you do walls when they seem to be all 4m high?
You should be able to avoid using lifts within the logistics floor by bringing belts in at the desired height by snapping them to the ceiling or to a vertically stacked splitter/merger. That will allow the floor to be more compact. And there is also a 1m wall which you can stack to build floors of different heights. It's unlocked at the same time as the 4m wall. Alternatively, you can use a mix of different heights of foundations.
I originally started with using balancers, maybe because I came from Factorio, but later I was like...why am I doing this? The manifold is so much easier in Satisfactory most of the time. The one possible exception is on really expensive to manufacture items and possibly radioactive items where letting queues build up in a manifold setup is less desirable.
So after I saw the alien technology tab in the MAM I stopped everything I was doing and immediately went and tapped every sam ore node i could get to and used my limited supply of mercer spheres to build dimensional storage on each of them. then I spent like 6 in game hours doing nothing but hunting mercer spheres (got a lot of hard drives and slugs at the same time as a bonus). I didn't do anything with phases, milestones, or expansion until i maxxed out the alien tech research. And I see zero reason to ever make a logistics depot now.
I can easily use manifolds with biomass generators because the warmup of those is way shorter than the time I need to actually build my factory and the same goes for coal generators, I always have a massive buffer for my stupidity
I think developers shoul give us ability to turn on the "manifold mode" inside the machines After turning on machine will only collect resources if it can't finish 2 or 3 production sequences (kinda like with manipulators in factorio)
Spaghetti is perfectly fine as long as you color the belts. The categories in the crafting bench are easy enough to reference. But that's for single player. Online co-op requires clear explanation with spaghetti.
@@TotalXclipse Probably the space restrictions? I just finished my first really compact solid steel blueprint and I just barely managed to squeeze in a 4m height logistics floor just on the base floor. So there is none between the floor 1 and floor 2 part. Especially hard on the tier 1 blueprint where you're more restricted. Thought if you're willing to split your blueprints into 2-4 blueprints with more space between them, it would work fine.
@@TotalXclipse To use floor holes you need to rely on foundations, but many machines don't align with foundations. Eg with Smelters you will end up with a cap, since you can't have the last smelters end with the foundation
@@TotalXclipse Hard to explain in Text let me try again. To use logistic floors you want to use floor holes. To use those you need to have your maschines on foundations with floor holes and connect them, since you don't want to place all the machines, holes and connections manually. You want your blueprint to be tileable. So the maschines can be right next to each other. With constructors for example this is simple 4 foundations equals 4 constructors. When you put multiple blueprints of it next to each other there won't be a gap. Now the same with Smelters. Smelters are 5m wide. A foundation is 8 m wide You would need 40m to ensure the blueprint is properly tileable. The MK1 Blueprint Designer only has 32m though. Since i don't want to use Blueprints only after the MK2 or rebuild the majority i gave up on the idea of logistic floors
I don't feel that you should mention later game stuff in a beginner marked vid. Your comment on radiation was a spoiler to me, as a new player. Didn't know that was a thing. Now I'm just expecting it to happen.
i just watched this, and there is another reason to use Load Balancers over manifolds. if your inputs are exactly what you need it to be, and your belts aren't fast enough to supply your structures over the short distance between splitters, load balancers keep machines running at 100% run time over a manifold which can't let them run since theres a wait period. i did this recently in a world with a friend when i started coal power. only had enough for a few coal generators, but 2 of the 4 i built didn't run all the time due to the small distance. used a load balancer and got power up and running long enough i could upgrade things to where i could swap to a manifold
Logistics floors are especially helpful with machines that can have dry outputs and wet outputs both, like Refineries and Blenders. Although the complexity of implementing is a little higher, it makes a much better looking factory (for those of us who dislike spaghetti).
Also, for manufacturers it REALLY helps organize the 4 inputs you need for alot of items you need to make. My manufacturers literally have four vertical belts popping up and connecting directly to the machine - Very clean looking. Below (on the logistics level) I use a "vertical bus" arrangement with splitters in the bus for direct connections to the risers to the machines. Very clean and organized helpful arrangement for connecting multiple manufacturers in a row.
Good video! Thanks for this!!
Thank you for the descriptions, and the tip on logistics floors. I've seen communications lines ran on cable trays under the floor, hvac in the ceiling, and power on the walls of modern buildings so it all makes sense when compared to the real world.
Pro tip: If you want to save space when using lifts, first place the lift and then snap the splitter or merger to the lift. the splitter/merger will partially engulf the end of the lift in way I think looks cool and takes up less space. (Unless they have changed it in 1.0, as I haven't played yet)
good tip, still a thing in 1.0
looks horrendous imo xd but saves space
@@vlodek69 You're entitled to your opinion... Even if it's objectively wrong lol. :-p
This is really useful without spoiling anything, I've thought about ways to structure my factory, and this will really help in my first proper factory setup. Thank you
I mostly use manifolds because they are easier to scale up. Faster belts? Better Minders? Overclocked miners? Just add more buildings at the end of the line and scale up.
This form of scaling up is easier but also visualises progress. "After upgrade your smelter line and belts, you can now run 3 manufacturors instead of 1."
I'm on phase 3 almost into 4 and never even considered manifolds. I probably wouldn't have to make all these spreadsheets to get the numbers right and perfectly underclock all my machines....
Manifolds are exceptionally efficient IF you bother to pre-load the upstream belts. Whenever I have, let's say, a 4 stage production line, I fill the first (input and output buffers), then fill the second, etc... It is the most efficient design with respect to space conservation and throughput, with the burden on the designer to "pre warm" each stage.
if its a small number of machines easy to load balance, i'll do that, otherwise i use manifolds. the "lag" to get started doesn't really matter longer term and they tend to look better for large builds (or rather, it's much easier to expand upon with it still being easy to look at)
once did a run where i used load balancer to balance everything 100%. Was a nightmare
now i'm back to manifold for everything
Why would you ever consider doing that to yourself 😭
@@onefinelad6263 it was an experiment... cant recommend doing it
I did that thinking this is normal :(
but load balancer is logically better???
@@ShiyeBig trouble is that balancers are not scalable. When you need to expand production, the whole system has to be reworked. With manifolds, simply upgrade the belt and extend the line.
Honestly I'm just lazy about math. The processes for uneven load balancers are such a pain that I just can't be bothered, frankly. Manifolds take two seconds, and work perfectly fine once the belts are charged.
I'm lazy about math until I know it's going to take 2 hours to reach full efficiency lol
@@tobeqz7065 typically you dont sit there watching it
@@henrysinclair5914 Time is precious for those who are only able to play by using "GeForce Now" (like me)
@@tobeqz7065 I think it balances out in the end. The time spent calculating and building a load balancer would likely be similar to the time it takes for a manifold to fill up.
Manifolds are even better if you have the spare resources to pre-fill machines or if you get them running as you're building. I had wanted to try manifolds because the layouts looked fancy but math is blurry to me and seems like there's not much of a benefit unless you're just a wizard at the game already.
@@Felsparx You don't actually have to calculate anything to do load balancing - start at the machines and put a splitter in the middle of each group of three - if you end up with less than three machines at the end, pretend there's three for now anyway.
Do the same thing for the splitters that were just made, repeating each step until you end up with only one splitter (Last stage can be 1:2 instead of 1:3 if the second-to-last stage only had two splitters).
Insert mergers on each line AFTER the 'single' splitter. Finally take all the 'excess' lines where there should have been output, combine them into one line and then split it into two or three parts (as needed) and fed into the mergers we put after the single splitter.
It sounds far more complicated than it really is - after only doing a few of them, I can build them in roughly the same amount of time as a manifold, but it will start much faster than the manifold will.
The only distinction to which one I'd actually use is whether or not I have enough room to put a balancer, if I'm dealing with radioactive components, or if I'm dealing with very slow production times on an input item (e.g mass producing fused modular frames, almost certainly load-balancing the heavy frame inputs).
Manifolds are only ever 'fast' for near the start of the production chain when you're able to push nearly an entire full belt of items constantly.
Please start putting chapter markers in your videos! I love your videos, but the lack of chapter markers is very frustrating!
Why? I find chapters frustrating lol. Videos are fine without, I find personally. I get annoyed when I see chapters.
@@aaronh678 incredible take.
@@aaronh678chapters do nothing if you don't interact with them, do you find it annoying that other people can use them to skip to the parts they are interested in?
@@aaronh678 how are they frustrating? All they do is just provide little markers in the progress bar
Kind of odd that a guy so obsessed with organization in factory games doesn't put time stamps and chapters on his videos.
It really depends on the look I'm going for at a given factory. Sometimes I use balancers, other times I use manifolds. Manifolds are easier and work fine once everything is filled up. There's no right or wrong way of playing the game. Do whichever you prefer.
You can even prefill the belts and input before turning on machines so that manifold setups run at 100% efficiency from the start.
I typically set up factories with 3 floors. The ground floor is where all materials enter the building and make their way toward the machine that requires them. This floor is the busiest, often with many lines/pipes going all different directions. Organized, but busy. The second floor is where the resources make their way up to the machines on the top floor. I often try to arrange belts and lifts and pipes in ways that display the materials traveling on them on the second floor, I try to make things symmetrical and pleasing to the eye. The third floor is where all the machines are located. Once a part is made, it makes its way back down to the first floor where it travels to the next machine or out to storage.
for all the newbs out there, balancers are for early game and highly specific situations. manifolds are king and can be setup quite speedy when you have mk5 belts and power shards to speed up the satuaration process
Load balancing is also useful late game for low-production items. Who cares if you have mark5 belts when a mark 1 belt can supply 40 blenders with heavy modular frames to make fused modular frames?
Manifold will take half an hour to fill up, load balancer will be virtually instant.
Even if you're only doing a third of that, it still takes a manifold half an hour to saturate because while you're scaling back production, you probably also only have a scaled-back HMF production, and the numbers just get worse the further along in the production chain you go.
@SalamanderBSC easy fix for that is to store everything you build in containers so when you reach the next stage of production you have several stacks to prime the manifolds
@@kenneilwalters6821 The time it would take me to go over to where I'm storing those items could be just as easily spent building a load balancer and not having to bother with priming dozens (or possibly even hundreds) of buildings.
Especially since I could just cram 8 blenders into a 6x6 blueprint, load balance them for the blueprint once, and then just load balance between 5 of those blueprints.
Now I also have a blueprint for a "super blender" which is internally load balanced between 8 blenders that I can use for other tasks too, like encased uranium.
@@kenneilwalters6821 I wouldn't say it's an easy fix, you still need to have those containers nearby to have enough stuff with you to saturate big manifolds. I do agree that if you do have them on hand you can drop em in to speed up the process, I do that as well.
@@SalamanderBSC you saw the part where I said highly specific situations? Also, it makes life easier to have to carry only a few materials in large quantities. If you build a high output aluminum factory, you just need aluminum sheets and you can belt mk5s everywhere, all the time. it just makes things easier.
I have relearned that as long as your through put is able to push material faster than the machines can suck them up you typically won't have many problems. Just make sure the machines you build have around half a stack of material before you link them up with the next stage of your build so you have enough for saturation.
Also load balancers and manafolds can be hidden under the machinery by using 1m foundations and leaving some space for you to work in.
There's a few comments here about balancing manifolds, and I'd like to posit this can be a very good compromise to get the best of both.
What I do is underclock until the input of the machines fall into an easy factor of 60: 60, 30, 20, 15, 10.
I then make localized balancers of 2, 3, 4, or 6, which can usually fit into a blueprint with that many machines fairly easily. From there I can place any number of copies of this blueprint and so long as I feed them with a mk1 belt they can be manifolded with any speed of belt and still run with the same level of efficiency
I do that sometimes too, I call it 'hybrid' balancing.
Smelters are an especially obvious case of it - copper and iron are both 30/min input, pure aluminium is 60/min
Placing all of the splitters, mergers and belts on the floor this way makes it easy to learn how everything works, but it also it difficult to maneuver around the factory. My factories use conveyor lifts to eliminate this problem with the same results.
I started using vertical balancers this playthrough. Each layer has 3 machines, up to 3 layers get feed by a second order splitter. Those cubes get then underclocked to match the input. Makes for some great "Iron Tower" or "Copper Hill" factory.
Sushi belts work great if you turn of the first few machines and wait for the ones on the end to fill up.
And with fuel generates lower the power on the first few so the ones in the back get more fuel and when they are full turn everything to normal.
I run a load balancer in exactly one place; train stations. Averaging the inputs or outputs ensures that one container backing up doesn't lead to imbalances down the line. Load balancers for standard machines is a fools errand most of the time. I incidentally let machines back up to the point where the feeds are saturated. I mean, it only takes 3 minutes...which is longer than it takes to make the next set of machines.
Just a note for a major point of frustratuion. If youre coming up from a floor hole directly into a splitter and into 2 machinces, offset the hole. The best way i can discribe it:
Stand with machine on the left and right, enterences in line and spaced enough for a splitter.
Floor hole will be in the center, one tick away from you.
Lift exit will face towards you.
Splitter should auto config and completely cover the lift.
And you'll have a perfect split.
You can still balance a manifold. Idk why people seem to not like them. Multiple manifolds side by side can be done correctly with math. Just take the time to figure out the correct numbers
Just a small tip from me, if you like to build balancing delivery but only have place for manifold line.. place the last row of splitters first, front last on top of that etc.. till you got all the splitters in place, then connect everything with elevators.. and you have the balancer but vertical build. 😊
I just noticed that I build my factories exactly like a CPU. I have belts that are part of a manifold right with the machines, then I have a floor for local belts, then one for the belts going across the entire factory. The different distance belts get their own floors
Power wise, and with smart splitters, i find manifolds only sending overflow to the next one allows almost all to function fully, and an extra as an off/on extra for extra overflow. Built in way to overclock, get extra, increase efficiency and then take off overclock when done.
I've been mostly a manifold builder for previous playthroughs, but now that I'm in 1.0 I've created balancer blueprints.
A really great example of where manifolds are inefficient is on the back end of production. If you have several machines making output and you merge them all together a manifold method of merging will cause one machine to purge it's backed up production at twice the rate of the second, and 4 times the rate of the third and so on, meaning in setups where your production lines might fill up and then when you build something need to refill your stores you will have actually slower total times to refill as your production machines will remain idle longer as it takes more time for your usage to empty the buffers on some machines as compared to others. The flip side is the difference is probably pretty small. The more you use the less this will tend to matter and if you don't use much at all your buffers will tend to stay full, so there is no real problem. But in any case on the backend this problem never goes away. On the incoming side once your machines are saturated with input the difference between a load balancer and a manifold go away, but on the output end the problem can reoccur over and over again.
The example you give shouldn't be that big an issue, if you need to refill your stores, the chances are all the constructors already have their buffers filled, and whilst they start to run, the manifold will be feeding through to the whole system, by the last in the line finish using their buffer it will most likely be being filled again. On the flip side if you run overflowing awesome sinks at your storage, then you'll never have an issue as the factory will run constantly
One thing I have not seen anyone mention, is slugs. Put a slug in a factory and you have just ruined your 'balanced' set up. If you had a manifold setup and you have excess input but no room to expand, you can either reduce the output of the feeding/supply factory (Why would you do that! You are wasting manufacturing time!) or you can add a slug into the last factory of the input line to 'gobble' up the excess input and increase your outflow at the same time. Win win!
additional tip: you can use every splitter or merger as an replacement for the input/output-head of vertical conveyors
just place the splitter/merger directly on the input/output-head of your vertical conveyour
this video is EXACTLY what ive been looking for. Thanks a lot
would love to see tips for making logistics as compact as possible, like when creating your own blueprints. for example, I only just realized how tightly you can connect conveyor lifts to splitters and mergers. normally when you connect them, the lift sticks out like 3-4 "nudges" worth of space, but if you do it right, you can have it almost merged entirely into the splitter/merger!
I use manifolds because you can incorporate as many different things as you like with a single line, it makes certain more complex factories much easier to build.
Even sexier logi floor: place the elevator bottoms at default ceiling height, then place a merger directly on it, which replaces the elevator head. It doesn’t even matter which way you face the elevator. It works and merges the stuff from above into the merge, then belt them all together in a line at ceiling height. You can do the same with splitter on the input side. I can walk around my logi floor.
You uploaded it in the most perfect time!!
the first time I played satisfactory and saw programmable splitters I was happy bcs I thought you can literally programm them and say I want x amount on that output the rest goes further but I was sorely disappointed :D
this should really be a thing... I shouldnt have to cram large loadbalancers into tiny logistic floors/areas
you really dont have to, the manifold is 100% effective and takes much less room. load balancing is only required if you're LARP'ing satisfactory
I'm pretty sure there was a mod that makes them do exactly that. Not sure when we'll get such things back lol. They all seem to be broken right now.
The most disappointing thing about the programmable splitter is realising that putting the same item twice in one column and once in another does not actually give you a 2:1 split.
Please do a guide on how pipes work. I just can't seem to get the flow to be consistent.
But also, thank you so much for your videos. I'm new to these type of games and your videos have helped make the gameplay less daunting!
Check the archives, he made this video 2 years ago. Look up McGalleon's guide. But never use fluid storage, not even with valves, as it will only introduce sloshing and kill flow. The only time to use a fluid buffer is with a pump going in one side, the buffer higher than other points in network, and a valve set to zero flow on the output. This will be your key pipe from which you distribute head lift.
You could've shown a timelapse of the container inventory filling up to show that, after initial startup time, the machines will produce at the same rate.
Cool, now I can do a challenge playthrough where everything is perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
Seriously though, I think that it would be a very interesting logistic challenge having to completely load balance all the factories that are built in a world.
Once you figure out that fractions with primes, like 79/347, aren't so bad to achieve when you can only ever divide by 2 or 3 it's gravy! I certainly enjoy the challenge. And I enjoy and watching my never backed up belts.
Logistic floors are a gamechanger. You can make such nice layouts. Anyone who hasn't tried a build like that should do it asap. Keep in mind you can even use blueprints for logistic floors with all the necessary attachments by placing the foundations in the blueprints along with everything else. It's great.
I don't really see the point. Maybe I play the game differently than others, but I normally don't stroll through my factories. I set up a production line with a storage and a depot at the end, I encase the whole thing in walls and roofs, and from then on I'll never enter that building again.
After the first conveyor belt is full of raw material that overflows, the overflow continues and after a while it will do the same thing as the load balancer. I use a load balancer when, for example, I use coal generators, because in this case the most important thing is that it is used to the maximum. For example MkII miner Pure coal resources equals 16 coal generators because 15coal/min
For anything early game, I'd just drop a stop of the resource into each smelter before connecting and having them run. Manifold will work much quicker for all
Solid advice. My biggest problem was/is how to handle full storages from base resource PoV. Meaning: should I plan my factory (the very first one) to always produce x/m of every produce (plate, rod etc), store a certain amount and then sink the rest, or skip sinking the low level ones, and overload the base material line to produce other stuff?
For your first factory making plates/rods/etc I wouldn't stress it too much. Do it if you want to, or skip it if you feel like you've got enough else to think about already. Getting some early sink points to unlock some of the quality of life things from the store can be nice, but having a backed up plate/rod line probably won't cause any problems.
In general I think sinking is a good habit to get into, though it isn't always essential. The cases where it's essential are those where a line getting clogged will cause production to halt. The sushi belt shown in this video is one example. Another is recipes which produce multiple outputs, since one resource's output buffer filling will cause production to pause even if the 100% of the other output resource is being consumed. Once you're using trains there's also an argument for sinking inputs to prevent trains from hauling around full freight carriages all the time.
Manafolds are also a lot easier to expand. So early game when you don't have the resources to build 8 smelters, and are using MK1 miners you can use manifolds to prepair a factory for expansion.
If using manifolds, just fill your inventory with resources being fed and manually load the end machines to help it fill quick.
All you need to do when you start your factory is power the miner, let it fill up while you build your smelters. Then power the smelters and let them fill up while you build the constructors. Then power the constructors while you build the output.
That way, your machines should have time to fill. Also, when the miner or smelters clog while you build, put the stacks in your inventory to manually fill the next machines.
Load balancers are a pain in the ass when you want to upgrade the miners or overclock or add a few machines. With manifolds, all you have to do is keep a small space for a lift after your last splitter so you can send extra materials to another floor. You will have to expand so keep that in mind!
I would also like to add that manifolds are much more adaptable to future needs - once that Mk1 miner becomes a Mk2 or Mk3, or you discover you need to input more ore onto the belts (because you always need more screws), you just slap some more buildings to the manifold and voilà!
You always need more screws until you stop using them.
@@LancelotSwe Screw the screws, all my friends use stitched plating! No but seriously, the game becomes a different game once you find all the alt recipes to optimize screws out of existence.
@@entitledOne Yeah sure, although the steel beams - to screw isn’t that bad if you have the constructor infront of the machine you’re supplying, not having to belt a lot of screws.
This is so helpful! Thank you!
Excellent beginner’s guide!
I rarely see videos on manifolds point out you can simply change out the 1st and 2nd splitter conveyor to a L3 and the 2nd and 3rd to an L2. Splitters will give 1/5th to one output and 4/5th to the other (they balance based on belt speed). Compactness of a manifold but closer to a load balanced early start up.
How do you set up stairs between logistics floors/production floors when the current walkway/catwalk stair setups only accomodate the 4m high setups, when logistics/production floor combos require a 4+1m high setup?
Does it make sense to add a Mk. 2 conveyor belt at the first splitter going to the second smelter because when the first smelter's buffer is full, you will have 60 + 30 going to the second smelter?
I load balance everywhere, and avoid logistics floors. Complex but organized balancing and rate limiting are a core aesthetic of my factories. It encourages me to avoid factory layouts that are just, boring row after row of machines.
100 constructors in rows looks pretty damn sick of you ask me lol. Not boring at all. Looks way more organised as well.
2:00 manafold problem is coused, because you used mk.1 belt after the first splitter. if You use mk.2 between spliters ore will build up in last furnance
When do you get the stairs?
Does the same logic work for pipe junctions ?
I definitely prefer manifolds, especially for power setups
How do you get nice corner on your belts?
I have a habit of somehow using both. I'll use load balancing when I'm setting up the smelting, but than I start using manifold for the middles stages of production lines. Unless the math is simple, like 120 into 3 lines. Lol
Hello ! I'm a beginner on this game and I love your video. Do you have one about the strategy for getting coupon ? Right now i manually put in alien dna from creature inkill and i have a screw line dedicated to be destroyed.
1. I put smart splitter with overflow to awesome sink before every storage of any components.
2. When i build megafactories, i prefer to make it by blocks (like iron parts, steel parts, oil refinery products etc). And before final launch, during next steps of building, i sink all production of this blocks
Get doggos, chuck in all the high tier stuff. You'll get 100+ tickets easily.
I started with a main bus feeding all factories and produced items gets added to main bus. Its really a easy mode gaming that way, just a bit work to build everything.
Added owerfill for awesome sink etc so no factory will ever stop producing
I find they're pretty useful early to mid game but the scaling gets rather crazy later on. It's probably a little easier now we have tier 6 belts though.
@@TalesOfWar yeah i used AI to help with numbers and i do have to say the new belts help. Also i can basicly scale up production and belts indefenitely so looks like this is my way of playing.
Going where the fence is lowest
In the beginning, isn't it better to just use 2 assemblers if the process rate is 60 for each assembler (60 + 60 = 120)?
i know load balancers take up more space, but I just love the way it looks. :)
Fair ☺️
Not trying to start anything but asking a math question. Wouldn’t the 1:4 splitter/merger setup actually be a 1:3 ratio since 1/4 of the product is being reintroduced to the original line? At 4:19
Only 1/6 of the original product is feeding back into the incoming line. One half (or 3/6) is going straight through. The other half is then being split 3 ways (into sixths, overall). The way it's set up, you have 1/6 going far left, 4/6 going forward, and 1/6 feeding back. As long as none of the lines saturate, everything that makes it through will be split in a 4:1 ratio.
I use load balancer if there’s room and it’s no more than 6 inputs. Otherwise manifold works great.
How is it that I put in 30 ore and fe I have a smelter taking exactly that 30 ore it will still built up on the conveyor
Why would manifold cause backed up lines for nuclear? Wouldn’t the equivalent amount of radiation be flowing through at the same rates?
The lines back up to the splitters on a manifold and the machine has a buffer of 100 items... So 120 radiated items or load balance with 1 radiated item has quite the difference
At the start of the game I like to balance things as well as I can because ratios are stupid easy
But later later on I just say screw it and manifold everything to avoid a headache
I just manifold everything because it’s more compact than balancers and then I crank up the output of predecessor to manually fill up the far end constructors lol. Sure it’s additional work but manifolds save more space
There is a much easier way to use manifolds and get them working efficiently from the get go without all the stuffing around you mention. Just use different tier belts.
For example, let's say you have 6 smelters near your extractor. Each requires 30 ore / minute. A tier 1 belt from each splitter will easily take care of that but the belt from the extractor to the splitters can be tier 3. Solved.
I used to load balance everything when I started but once I played more I abandoned that completely in favor of manifold. They will always even out automatically with time. Always. Turn it on, walk away, go start another project, and when you go back to it, it's running at 100% efficiency.
if you can load balance everything your factory is too small
Such a noob statement.
@@phillipcurrey6961 the hostility in this community has been rather surprising
@henrysinclair5914 How about everyone looking to get offended at nothing these days?
Calling out a new player is hostile? Pros balance almost everything and waste nothing. Its the meticulous side of Satisfactory, especially the endgame.
Manifolds have their uses, but I prefer balancers whenever possible.
@@phillipcurrey6961 lol calling out a new player, thats cute. you likely wear blade runners dont you? GL load balancing your 500+ refineries
@henrysinclair5914 Dont need to load balance fluids. Blueprints and a logistics floor below refineries make it literally a snap. Good luck to you as well noob.
Nothing wrong with filling up your buildings at the end of the manifold by manually dumping the resources in them (especially for start up).
I use 8m logistic floors - I tried 6m but (a) conveyor lifts intended completely internal to the logistics floor will clip into the ceiling, and (b) how do you do walls when they seem to be all 4m high?
You should be able to avoid using lifts within the logistics floor by bringing belts in at the desired height by snapping them to the ceiling or to a vertically stacked splitter/merger. That will allow the floor to be more compact.
And there is also a 1m wall which you can stack to build floors of different heights. It's unlocked at the same time as the 4m wall. Alternatively, you can use a mix of different heights of foundations.
Love the videos!
I originally started with using balancers, maybe because I came from Factorio, but later I was like...why am I doing this? The manifold is so much easier in Satisfactory most of the time. The one possible exception is on really expensive to manufacture items and possibly radioactive items where letting queues build up in a manifold setup is less desirable.
So after I saw the alien technology tab in the MAM I stopped everything I was doing and immediately went and tapped every sam ore node i could get to and used my limited supply of mercer spheres to build dimensional storage on each of them. then I spent like 6 in game hours doing nothing but hunting mercer spheres (got a lot of hard drives and slugs at the same time as a bonus). I didn't do anything with phases, milestones, or expansion until i maxxed out the alien tech research. And I see zero reason to ever make a logistics depot now.
I can easily use manifolds with biomass generators because the warmup of those is way shorter than the time I need to actually build my factory and the same goes for coal generators, I always have a massive buffer for my stupidity
I came from Factorio and was like "It's fine, I can just balance the belts on my bus after splitting them all off". OH BOY was that a mistake.
the invisible hand of the factory will aways balance itself, the in and outs just need to be right
I think developers shoul give us ability to turn on the "manifold mode" inside the machines
After turning on machine will only collect resources if it can't finish 2 or 3 production sequences (kinda like with manipulators in factorio)
Spaghetti is perfectly fine as long as you color the belts. The categories in the crafting bench are easy enough to reference.
But that's for single player. Online co-op requires clear explanation with spaghetti.
Nearly had a nuclear disaster because I forgot to prime the processing with waste to get the manifloded machines ready
I tried using logicstic floors but moved away from them mainly because the aren't blueprint friendly and quite cumbersome to setup
Why aren't they blueprint friendly?
@@TotalXclipse Probably the space restrictions? I just finished my first really compact solid steel blueprint and I just barely managed to squeeze in a 4m height logistics floor just on the base floor. So there is none between the floor 1 and floor 2 part. Especially hard on the tier 1 blueprint where you're more restricted. Thought if you're willing to split your blueprints into 2-4 blueprints with more space between them, it would work fine.
@@TotalXclipse To use floor holes you need to rely on foundations, but many machines don't align with foundations.
Eg with Smelters you will end up with a cap, since you can't have the last smelters end with the foundation
@@Matthew1234567890m I'm confused - All buildings align with foundations?
@@TotalXclipse Hard to explain in Text let me try again.
To use logistic floors you want to use floor holes.
To use those you need to have your maschines on foundations with floor holes and connect them, since you don't want to place all the machines, holes and connections manually.
You want your blueprint to be tileable. So the maschines can be right next to each other.
With constructors for example this is simple 4 foundations equals 4 constructors. When you put multiple blueprints of it next to each other there won't be a gap.
Now the same with Smelters. Smelters are 5m wide. A foundation is 8 m wide
You would need 40m to ensure the blueprint is properly tileable.
The MK1 Blueprint Designer only has 32m though.
Since i don't want to use Blueprints only after the MK2 or rebuild the majority i gave up on the idea of logistic floors
Idk, my factory is a maze of conveyors spaghettied all over the place. But I'm at end game now so it doesn't matter 😂
In the presented case the balancer would actually be smaller if done well.
But anything other dividing by 2 or 3 is really annoying.
why chose i load balance my manifolds
I love your videos! 🫶
I’m so confused at the start you said split among 4 constructors but those are smelters with plates coming out at the end…… I’m new btw
this game MIGHT be over my head
I wish someone would write a book "mathisfactory" cause this is basic stuff i just struggle with haha
There is a website called satisfactory calculator where you can fill in the output per minute and it will automatically do all the math for you!
amazing video
Are you using mods in this video or is this all vanilla?
just combine pleasures. make an imperfect balance, and let the machines sort the rest.
I use a manifold system for my coal generators
you left the bass boost on your mic. there's more bass in your voice than james earl jones.
I call it 'injecting' instead of 'priming of lines'
To I want to expand it later? Then we manifold.
I don't feel that you should mention later game stuff in a beginner marked vid. Your comment on radiation was a spoiler to me, as a new player. Didn't know that was a thing. Now I'm just expecting it to happen.
i just watched this, and there is another reason to use Load Balancers over manifolds.
if your inputs are exactly what you need it to be, and your belts aren't fast enough to supply your structures over the short distance between splitters, load balancers keep machines running at 100% run time over a manifold which can't let them run since theres a wait period. i did this recently in a world with a friend when i started coal power. only had enough for a few coal generators, but 2 of the 4 i built didn't run all the time due to the small distance. used a load balancer and got power up and running long enough i could upgrade things to where i could swap to a manifold
TL;DR: The correct answer is manifold.
Also, to prime the manifold: temporarily overclock the source.
I balance my manifolds sir.