Once you make it past the early game in Satisfactory, your production lines will skyrocket in complexity. As the number of items you’re producing goes from a dozen to dozens, so will the number of conveyor belts carting all of that around. Mastering Smart Splitters will be a crucial part of advancing in Satisfactory, keeping your production lines navigable and easy to understand.
What is a Smart Splitter?
The function of a regular splitter is fairly obvious–it splits a single conveyor belt into as many as three belts. That’s great for a smelter cranking out more ingots than any single production line needs, such as having one smelter sending ingots to make plates, rods, and screws. There’s no configuration needed here, either. It’s just plug-and-play.
So what makes a Smart Splitter smart? Smart Splitters are programmable, allowing you to determine which items on a belt go where. There are programmable splitters, too, that do the same thing but at a higher level, allowing you to sort more than three different outputs.
How to unlock Smart Splitters
To build a Smart Splitter, you’ll need Reinforced Iron Plates, Rotors, and AI Limiters. The first two will unlock as part of the normal progression of building the space elevator, but AI Limiters can be unlocked most easily through the MAM Research machine, in the Caterium research tree. You just need to fashion 200 Quickwire and 50 Copper Sheets. Once you’ve unlocked the AI Limiter, build 10 of those and another 50 Reinforced Plates to unlock the Smart Splitter.
How to use Smart Splitters
At their most straightforward, Smart Splitters allow you to send up to three items down the same conveyor belt and have them split up equally across the three outputs. After dropping a Smart Splitter, you can click on it to set the outputs:
For example, you could send all the components for a given end product down the same belt and have them split off into the correct machines. This works best in earlier components, but as you progress, ratios can get more complex and you might have to do a bit of math to figure out the best way to split things.
Another great way to use a smart splitter is to make sure you’re getting the most out of a given production line. For a simple example, let’s say you have a concrete production line set up. Once you reach Mk3 miners and belts, you’ll be making way more concrete than you can reasonably use and store.
In this case, you might use a smart splitter to send the concrete to two different destinations–storage and manufacturing–and still find the lines gummed up. Having full belts isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it’s hardly the most efficient. Your line might be working at only 20% capacity or something like that.
What you can do instead is pipe that third output to an Awesome Sink. Alongside the many specific ingredients you can program into the Smart Splitter, there’s a generalized option called Overflow. Essentially, this will ensure that those two main lines are completely full, and then start sending any extra down the overflow path. And so instead of having a machine that’s working at low capacity, you can be dumping waste concrete into the Awesome Sink constantly. Concrete doesn’t generate many points in the Sink on its own, but when you’re sending concrete there every waking moment, it builds up. Put a smart splitter and an Awesome Sink overflow on every production line you can think of, and suddenly your machines are operating at much higher efficiency and you’re racking up Awesome Sink points.
Smart Splitters are a crucial component in making the most of your production lines, both for streamlining and overall production efficiency. Don’t sleep on this useful part.
