[belkinpower]

Exactly this. I use other people’s blueprints for balancers because I find those complicated and not particularly interesting, but for everything else I’ve deliberately avoided looking at other designs. Creating something mediocre and inefficient and then inventing better ways to do it is half the fun.

I also highly recommend playing with a non-engineer friend. It’s an interesting way to watch someone gradually develop an intuition for abstractions and service-oriented design.

[paledot]

One of the Factorio devs (kovarax?) has a blog post about regretting the introduction of copy-pasteable blueprints. I feel like balancers are where the devs become complicit in that cycle. They could have 3+ lane balancers as single structures in the base game, but by sticking with only two, they're forcing people to build their own higher order balancers. Few people have the interest or ability to design a 7-to-5 balancer, so we blindly copy designs - and build a habit of getting our designs online.

I submit that with more useable balancers, importable blueprints never would have made it into the base game.