Molten Balancer

Molten Balancer

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

Construction	8
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 four Molten Channel ports. Its serves two different but important roles: to allow for the balancing of molten flow between multiple inputs, multiple outputs, or both; and to give the capability to be able to input or output from a specific channel 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 balancer is round on one end while flat on the other and 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 channel 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 channels 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

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.