Hiya. I’ve seen a few threads where people have asked for a dedicated splitter, rather than automatic splitter placement and I’ve seen some dev responses to the effect of “it’s planned for a future update”.

I just wanted to make the suggestion to make your splitters modular, such that if you place multiple splitters next to each other, they form a ‘splitter group’ that load balances all the inputs into any of them with all the outputs of all of them. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I’ll link to the excellent Satisfactory mod, Modular Load Balancers:

https://ficsit.app/mod/LoadBalancers

Bonus points If you also allow the splitters to filter on specific resources, and alternatively filter for overflow, so a sushi belt can go in, and neatly split resources can each come out of a different connected splitter, and never back up just because all the outputs are full. The Modular load balancers mod accomplishes these things by way of a ‘filter module’ and an ‘overflow module’, but I can’t really see a reason this functionality wouldn’t be baked directly into the main splitter entity.

Just for context, this is one of the most downloaded Satisfactory mods, and it gets suggested constantly on the forums to roll its functionality into the base game, but the Satisfactory devs have previously replied that they have no intention to, on account of a disagreement over its design philosophy.

In their mind, building complex load balancers out of dumb splitters and finding space for them (since they’re very space consuming) is logistical challenge that’s integral to their vision for the vanilla game. Obviously, I disagree, or else I wouldn’t be making this post. I think it’s tedious and ugly and I think load balancer groups can lead to some really elegant ‘sorting depot’ designs at train station exits.

I figured I’d gauge your guys’ opinion on this idea, and see if it’s in line for your vision of the game.

Oh, and just fyi, Factorio has this exact same mod too, though with how easy copy-pasting and blueprinting is in Factorio, throwing down complex load balancers isn’t as big of an issue there as it would be in a 3D game:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/belt-balancer

Either way, thanks a bunch for all your hard work 🙂