Logistics: Belts, Splitters, and Manifolds
How solid items move: belt tiers, splitters, mergers, and lifts, and the manifold-versus-balancer decision that shapes every production line.
Logistics is the connective tissue of a Satisfactory factory. Machines do the work, but belts decide whether the work flows. Conveyor belts move solid items from one machine to the next, and the patterns you use to split those belts across rows of machines determine how cleanly a line runs and how easily it grows. Get the logistics layout right early and your factory expands by extension. Get it wrong and you rebuild. The two decisions that matter most are which belt tier carries your throughput and whether you feed a row of machines with a manifold or a balancer.
Belts, splitters, mergers, and lifts
Belts come in tiers, Mk.1 through Mk.6, each carrying progressively more items per minute. The higher tiers unlock across the milestone tree, with Belt Mk.6 sitting all the way up in Tier 9. The three core distribution buildings unlock early, in Tier 1 Logistics:
- Conveyor Splitter divides one belt’s flow into multiple outputs.
- Conveyor Merger combines multiple belts into one.
- Conveyor Lift moves items vertically between floors.
The exact m/min throughput per belt tier was not pinned down in research, so check the wiki before relying on precise belt speeds. What matters in practice is matching belt tier to the rate a line actually needs, and upgrading the belt before it becomes the bottleneck.
The manifold
A manifold is the workhorse pattern: run one long belt past a row of identical machines and tap each machine with a splitter in series. The first machines fill and start first, and the whole line ramps up to full throughput over time as the buffers fill behind each splitter. It is compact, easy to reason about, and trivial to extend. To add capacity you place one more machine and one more splitter on the end of the belt. For most large, growing factories the manifold is the default choice.
The balancer
A balancer is a splitter network that divides resources equally so every machine runs at full rate immediately, with no ramp. It costs more building and more careful layout, but it pays off where you need instant, even output or a compact perfect-ratio sub-assembly. Many real factories combine the two: manifolds on the main production lines, balancers in the spots where precise ratios genuinely matter.
| Manifold | Balancer | |
|---|---|---|
| Layout | One belt, splitters in series | A splitter tree dividing flow |
| Startup | Ramps to full as buffers fill | Full rate from the first second |
| Expansion | Add a machine and a splitter | Rebuild the tree |
| Best use | Main lines, growing factories | Perfect-ratio sub-assemblies, instant output |
Do not over-engineer with balancers. The manifold self-balances once buffers fill and is far easier to extend, so reach for a balancer only when you genuinely need every machine full from the first second or a clean fixed ratio. Most lines do not.
Where logistics meets the rest of the factory
Belts only carry solid items. Fluids ride pipelines, which is a separate system with its own pumps and headlift rules. When a fluid needs to share a belt or a truck, the Packager (Tier 5) bottles it into canisters or tanks. For moving items across the map rather than across a factory floor, belts give way to trains, drones, and vehicles. And to replicate a tuned logistics layout, the Blueprint Designer (Tier 4) lets you save a module and stamp copies with the build gun, which is the standard way veterans scale a clean line.
Related: Factory Ratios for the numbers the manifolds feed, and Trains, Drones, and Vehicles for moving items across the map.