U-shape Balancer

U-shape Balancer

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

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

The U-shape Balancer is a transport with 8 U-shape Conveyor 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 evening out of the units units 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 U-shaped conveyor connecting to it.

The U-shape Balancer works as a balancer, without any options toggeled - it will try to balance any same level prioritized inputs and outputs. This may be useful, as the Connector does not balance belts and prefers the belt that happens to be the "first".

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 dislpays whether it's an input or output port. It is possible to prioritize none, one, two, ... , or even all 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 attempt to pull equally to from the number of connected inputs and push equally to the number of connected outputs.

Which means that if one of output ports is full (blocked) then there won't be any resources 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 set priorities for the ports.

Priority input or output

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

Example use cases

• Priority input: to ensure that a Loose Storage is emptied before accepting stock from a main conveyor line.
• Priority output: to ensure that sufficient Coal is used to continuously run a Boiler (Coal) making Electricity before allowing a Basic Distiller to be fed.
• Strictly even inputs: to ensure that Uranium Ore brought in from a Cargo Ship is pulled equally from multiple Loose Modules.
• Strictly even outputs: to ensure that PCBs from an Assembly (Electric) are equally fed into two of the same making Electronics.