Manifold
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This article is about the Conveyor fill method. For the Pipeline arrangement, see Pipeline manifold. |
Manifold refers to a fill method where Conveyor Splitters or Conveyor Mergers are aligned in a series (that is, one after another), usually parallel to the arrangement of buildings. The setup is compact and can be expanded easily.
Manifolds work because full machines consume only what they need. Once a machine fills up, it cannot accept any more resources, and thus everything ends up where it needs to be. They may appear counter-intuitive at first, but they save you from having to do math to split a belt perfectly.
It is the opposite fill method to the balancer.
Principles
- Due to the mechanisms of splitters, the machines closer to the source will fill up faster and start running, the machines at the end of the line will have to wait for the resource to fill up the preceding machines first before their input resource is prioritized. This also applies to mergers in the same configuration on the output side of the machines.
- If one or more outputs of a splitter are saturated with items, all the remaining items will automatically overflow to the remaining connected outputs.
- Given enough time, all machines in a manifold will run at 100%, provided the input and output item rates are sufficient and the item speed is not limited by conveyor throughput.
- If conveyor throughput is a limiting factor, consider using an 'injected manifold', where supplementary supply belt/s are merged at places lacking feed throughput.
- Injected manifolds allow you to supply more resources than what a single belt can. They require Smart Splitters before each merge to avoid throughput loss.
- An injected manifold can have as many injected conveyors as desired. For optimal results, merge conveyors to have fewer but fuller belts that don't exceed the throughput limit.
- Each Smart Splitter has to be set to "Any" for its machine output and "Overflow" for its other output.
- While Smart Splitters can be omitted, doing so can lead to potential throughput loss from oversupplied mergers. Smart Splitters can be unlocked very early on (as soon as Assemblers are unlocked), so there is little reason not to use them.
External links
- satisfactory.greeny.dev - A calculator for calculating machine fill time in a manifold
- Reddit - /r/SatisfactoryGame/ - Detailed article about balancers vs manifolds
See also
Gallery
A few examples of manifold arrangements.
A Solid Steel Ingot production area in-game. Iron Ores from top left, Coal from bottom left, Two belts of Steel Ingots exit at the bottom.
A more square alternative to manifolds involving constructors or smelters, trading length for width. Take note, this may require a slightly larger area per machine.
A large-scale setup of Heavy Modular Frames featuring manifold fill.
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