Balancer

Load Balancer
Load Balancer refers to a type of building style where Splitters are built in a nested way, such that all downstream buildings receives equal amount of material, regardless if the supply belt is providing sufficient input. Factory built this way tends to start up faster, as there is no need to wait for the internal storage to pile up. The size of balancer grows polynomially (n = 2) as the number of building increases.

Construction

 * A Splitter has a single belt input that can split into 2 or 3 outputs.
 * To make 1:4 or 1:8 balancer, simply nest the 1:2 balancers. To make 1:9 or 1:27 balancer, simply nest the 1:3 balancers.
 * Similar to above, any balancer that can be made from multiplications of 2 and 3 can be built. Example, 6, 12, 18, 24, etc.
 * Balancer with other numbers can be built with simple loop-back. This loopback will consumes some of the belt capacity, reducing the overall throughput. Loop-backs of this sort are necessary for producing fractional splits with denominators that have a prime number composition of values other than 2 or 3. This topic is discussed in detail at Tutorial:Prime splitter arrays.
 * Round up the number and build the nearest perfect balancer, then loop back all the unused output.
 * In some cases, there may be more than 1 unused output. Use mergers to combine them into a single belt before loopback.
 * To maintain the throughput, the loopback can be split and distributed evenly among the splitted outputs, using additional splitters and mergers.
 * All the above principles apply to balanced Mergers. Just flip the entire setup vertically and swap all the splitters and mergers.

Belt balancer
A Belt balancer

Construction
A belt balancer can be built by interlacing multiple equal splitters such that they have multiple input and multiple output.
 * To maintain the throughput, make sure no segment of the belt can have the item flow higher than the capacity of the belt.
 * As such, always split before merge.

External link

 * https://satisfactory-calculator.com/en/balancers by EDSM / Anthor
 * https://satisfactory.tash.fyi/ more balancer design.