Satisfactory – High Throughput Belting Using Belt Compressor Units

Guide to High Throughput Belting

By ZyRaNex.

What is a Belt Compressing Unit

A Belt Compressing Unit (BCU) is made up of multiple Belt Compressors. They take two inputs and fill up the bottom line before overflowing to the overflow line.

• For example 2×500 in would result in 780 and 220 on the overflow line.

If the any line is however restricted, more will be send to the overflow.

• For example 2×500 in but any restricted to 600 would send 400 to the overflow.

(This also means that the 780 limit is not an issue as with lower framerate more will just be send to the overflow line):

Now we chain those Belt Compressors together to form a Belt Compressor Unit:

This will take multiple inputs and output multiple 780 lines and an overall overflow.

• For example 3x 700 in will result in 2x 780 and 540. And again if the any lines are restricted the extra will overflow. So 3x 700 In but the first any line is restricted to 600 will result in 600/780/720.

This allows for very easy logistics with multiple belts.

Different Designs

The Design fundamentally depends on whether the belts should be stacked vertically or horizontally. I usually use vertically stacked belts for the same item, so i have put more effort into minimizing the blueprint of the BCU for this so the vertically design might be improved.

The final design i came up with looks like this:

One Belt Compressor here is like this, with the left smart splitter set to center overflow, any right and the right smart splitter set to center any, left overflow.

By spreading out the splitters and mergers like this the overflow line can be made the input of the next Belt Compressor. Note that this already has a smart splitter, set to any right, at the start for an outgoing belt to a factory. More on this later.

A design for horizontal belts would look like this:

But again this can probably be improved.

How to Use This

Imagine you’re producing 4×700 of an Item. The total 2800 of that wont fit on a mk5 belt, so you have to use multiple. Now say we want to supply multiple factories with this item, the first of which takes in 600/min. Ordinally you would then split the 700 line to overflow to 600. However if you now add multiple factories with strange numbers such as 573.6 input/min the process of planning out when to merge/split the lines can become quite hard. Especially if it’s not just 4 belts but more.

This is where we put the BCU to good use:

First we merge the 4 production factories to our 780 … 780 / overflow format.

Now if the take of 600/min from the lowest belt and add another BCU the format will still be 780…780 / overflow. And that’s the beauty of this design, no matter how strange the numbers you split off, the lowest belts will always have 780/min ready to be split off to another factory.

It gets even better if we look at higher demands for factories:

By repurposing two of our output lines as factory inputs we can split off multiple belts and the BCU will still format the outgoing lines to 780…780/overflow.

This works because the overflow of the Belt Compressors will just carry the extra 180/min to the next layer. This works as long as the overflow line is under 780 so in our case 180+180+180 = 540 so we are good. Of course if we split off 2x 300 this wouldnt work, but then again those could be combined to split off 600.

Real World Example

Let’s look at a real world example: 4632 Quickwire going to 19.2 Caterium Computers (2016 Quickwire) to 16.16 AI limiters (1616 Quickwire) and finally 13.33 Infused Uranium Cells (1000 Quickwire). To get to the desired Quickwire amount we will build factories of 8 fused Quickwire assemblers each producing 8*90 = 720/min.

We need 7 of those and an additional 4 Assemblers for the total of 4680 Quickwire.

For the first factory (19.2 Caterium Computers) we need 2016 Quickwire in total, with each Manufacturer taking 105/min Quickwire. 

So we split it into factories of 7 Manufacturers taking 735 Quickwire each.

Now we need 1616 Quickwire for 16.16 AI Limiter Assemblers, with each taking 100/min. So we split into 216/700/700.

And finally we are left with 1048 Quickwire for our final 1000/min Quickwire Infused Uranium Cell factory:

So the total chain is:

In Game this looks like this. 52 Assemblers making 4680 Quickwire.

The BCU merging the 720 lines:

The Computer factory:

The BCU for the Computer factory:

Ai Limiters:

And finally Infused Uranium Cells: