I was trying to come up with a compact design mini factories that I could blue print and wanted to see how many manufacturers I could squeeze into a mk3. Along the way, the solutuon I came up with ended up being load balanced. Now that I post-end game, and some of the final products can be really slow, I certainly appreciate being able to not have wait for a manifold to fill.

I started the design with what I am calling a “center feed” pair of manufacturers. Instead of resources coming from the left or right in a manifold, they are fed in between the 2.

I had a similar design before for a 3 input version, but didn’t have to solve what to do when splitters on the head of the lifts are too close together. This time around, I just pulled further back and removed the splitters on the lifts.

Next was simply mirroring 2 more manufacturers and feeding the inputs in again from the middle (above the outputs). Now I had a balanced design for 4x. It could also trivially be extended to 6x, although it wouldn’t fit in a blueprint.

The final step was to link 3 floors together. The inputs are routed via lifts up the middle floor, and there are split 3 ways. One output goes directly out the back the feed the machines on that floor. The right output goes to the top floor via lifts (easiest to see here), and the left goes the bottom floor also via lifts. The key to getting this to work is to stagger the lifts, and to not care that I we re-ordering which input was “on top” etc. Staggering the lifts usually needed me to build a splitter, nudge it in location, build the lift, delete the splitter, and then connect the lift via belt.

All of the outputs for the top two floors are routed back away from the inputs lifts, and then down to be merged with the ground floor mergers. They were pretty easy to route since there was a lot of room beneath the input splitters.