Pipe Balancer

Pipe Balancer

Allows distributing and prioritizing products using any of its two input and output ports.

Construction	8
Electricity	5 KW
Footprint	2x2
Cargo	Category:Fluid products
Required Research	Transports Balancing
Designation	Transports
Variants	Flat Balancer Molten Balancer U-shape Balancer

The Pipe Balancer is a transport with four liquid ports. Its serves two different but important roles: to allow for the balancing of liquid flow between multiple inputs, multiple outputs, or both; and to give the capability to be able to input or output from a specific pipe connection.

On one side, one port is marked X while the other port is marked O. The same is true likewise on the other side but with reversed coloring. While the in-game description would seem to indicate that two must be inputs and two must be outputs, any of the 4 connections can operate as either inputs or outputs, there cannot be four input or four outputs at the same time. Input or output determination is done automatically using the flow direction of the pipe attached to that port. Thus, rotating the balancer 180 degrees only has the effect of switching which side the X and O letters appear on the transport graphically and rotating the balancer 90 or 270 degrees only serves to change which colors the port labels are on any given end.

Balancer UI

The player can open the balancer's UI by clicking on the transport. Three toggles are available:

• Prioritize incoming products to port marked X
• Prioritize outgoing products from ports marked X
• Use alternative priority ports (O) instead of default (X)

In other words, the first toggle is provided to mark the incoming X port as the one receiving input priority. The second toggle does the same for the outgoing X port. The third toggle changes all instances of the letter X to O on the UI and applies the equivalent logic to balancer. It is possible to enable one, two, or even all three toggles simultaneously depending on the desired use case.

Balancing inputs or outputs

If neither the first nor second toggle are activated, the transport will attempt to pull equally to from the number of connected inputs and push equally to the number of connected outputs. In this case, the third toggle has no impact whether set to on or off. This means that that a single balancer can act as a perfect "1-to-2", "2-to-1", "2-to-2", "1-to-3", or "3-to-1" balancer simply by connecting pipes with the desired direction of flow.

Priority input or output

The only limitation is when both priority input and priority output are desired at the same time and there are two inputs and two outputs connected. In this case, the priority choices can be only be "from X to X" or "from O to O" as the the third toggle swaps the letters of both ports at the same time. This limitation can be bypassed by swapping the two input pipes or two output pipes physically and is typically not an issue except in very compact builds.

Example use cases

• Priority input: to ensure that a Fluid Storage is emptied before accepting stock from a main pipeline
• Priority output: to ensure that a storage or machine receives as much input as it can handle and any excess is flared or dumped
• Balancing inputs: to ensure that two or three dock Fluid Modules are pulled from equally
• Balancing outputs: to ensure that High-pressure Turbines receive equal amounts of steam from a Nuclear Reactor