Molten Balancer

Molten Balancer

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

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

The Molten Balancer is a transport with 8 Molten Channel ports. Its serves two different but important roles: To allow you to pick priority Input(s) and Output(s) of the balancer and to allow for the (strict) evening out of the resources between multiple inputs, multiple outputs, or both.

Each of the 8 ports can be either input or output (or neither). The direction of the port is determined by the direction of the Moltend channel connecting to it.

The Molten Balancer works as a balancer, without any options toggeled - it will balance any inputs and outputs (with the same level of priority), effectivly acting as an (double) OR Gate. This may be useful, as the Molten Connector does not balance belts and prefers one of the input/output belts randomly(?).

The Molten Balancer can only be connected to Molten Channels, it can not be connected directly to buildings.

Balancer UI

The player can open the balancer's UI by clicking on the transport.

Two toggles are available under "Even I/O ratios":

• Enforce strictly even inputs
• Enforce strictly even outputs

Under "Prioritization" each port can be prioritized and it also displays whether it's an input or output port. It is possible to prioritize none, one, two, ... , or even all of the ports simultaneously, depending on the desired use case.

On the right side of the UI is "Priority", which sets the power/manpower/maintenance priority for this building. It is advised to keep this fairly high for any of the balancers, as they will severely damage any resource chains when out of order and they do not actually consume any of manpower nor maintenance, only 5kW of power.

Strictly Even inputs or outputs

If both the first and the second toggles are activated, the transport will only pull equally from connected input ports and push equally to connected output ports, effectivly acting as an (double) AND Gate.

Which means that if one of the output ports is full (blocked) then any resources won't be sent through any other output ports either.

Similiarily when an input port is lacking resources, no resources are brought in from any other input ports.

Enforcing strictly even inputs/outputs resets any priorities set for the ports.

Priority input or output

Any prioritized port is prioritized over a nonprioritized port. All nonprioritized ports are equal, all prioritized ports are equal.

Example use cases

The number of practical uses cases for this balancer are low. For Molten Iron and Molten Copper, the output rates from Blast Furnace, Blast Furnace II, and Arc Furnace II are perfect multiple of the throughputs of the Metal Caster and Metal Caster II. The same holds true in the case of Molten Steel for the output the previously mentioned furnaces and the input of Oxygen Furnace or Oxygen Furnace II with an identical case of their outputs to Cooled Caster and Cooled Caster II. Molten Glass and Molten Silicon ratios are all equal ratios as well to the Glass Maker or Glass Maker II and Silicon Reactor, respectively.

Molten Channel cannot operate at an incline nor a decline so this further limits potential uses for the balancer.