Quick-setup resizable mining outpost

deemer · Post by **deemer** » Sat May 14, 2016 8:46 pm

I want to expand my base and exploit all the resources, but setting up mining outposts is a pain.

Here is my set of blueprints that makes it easy again:

: Complete mining outpost; Complete.jpg (254.4 KiB) Viewed 16322 times

: Exploded view showing separate blueprints; ExplodedView.jpg (141.96 KiB) Viewed 16322 times

: View of what the combinator is doing; Combinator.jpg (341.93 KiB) Viewed 16322 times

Blueprint string--mining drill array

Blueprint string--extension busses

Blueprint string--train station

siggboy · Post by **siggboy** » Sun May 15, 2016 2:35 pm

deemer wrote:I want to expand my base and exploit all the resources, but setting up mining outposts is a pain.

Here is my set of blueprints that makes it easy again:

Use robots. That's actually easy. No belt laying at all, and you can space the mining drills pretty much however you want, don't have to line them up.

Mine directly into active provider chests from each miner (or pair of miners), set the requester chests at the loading bay to 200 each (not 20k or they'll not fill evenly).

In my experience 100 robots is more than enough for a large ore patch.

Xterminator · Post by **Xterminator** » Sun May 15, 2016 5:48 pm

Nice designs! It certainly makes it easier to have blueprints and premade designs for outposts. Personally I would put the miners much closer together but that's just me. I can see the benefit of spreading them out since it means you won't mind the outpost of resources as quickly.
Guess it really comes down to how much raw throughput and resources you need and how fast.

Thanks for sharing.

TheVeteraNoob · Post by **TheVeteraNoob** » Mon Sep 05, 2016 1:39 pm

If you use similar wire setup you can get a usually more exact number in each chest and change the number of chests.

1. Wire each chest to the below inserter. Except the one furthest down the belt. (Red wire)

2. Connect each inserter to the same green network. Except the same unwired inserter before.

3. Wire the last chest to the input of a adder. Set the condition to each*-1 and output each.

4. Connect the output to the green network.

5. Set each inserter to anything < 0.

siggboy · Post by **siggboy** » Mon Sep 05, 2016 2:13 pm

That's a nice variation of the chest balancer. I don't believe it does balance more evenly, but it simplifies the configuration if you want to vary the chest count (as you point out). It's not really a big advantage because usually you have a blueprint that includes the chest balancer and it will not be necessary to change any configuration regarding the number of chests.

Mehve · Post by **Mehve** » Mon Sep 05, 2016 6:39 pm

Question: What exactly is that glob of splitters and UG's just before the train station proper? I see four belts going in, and four going out, and I'm familiar enough with a variety of ways you can make a 4-to-4 balance, but I honestly can't figure out wth the stuff in the middle is trying to do?

siggboy · Post by **siggboy** » Mon Sep 05, 2016 9:51 pm

It's a 4-4 balancer with too many splitters (more than needed); I think it also tries to balance the belt lanes, but I haven't checked if it actually works, probably it does. The splitter based balancer is mostly unnecessary, because the loader already uses a combinator-based balancer (and it's due to the fact that the layout expects the mining drills to feed from two sides onto 2x2 belts).

This is a very heavily engineered, actually overengineered, solution for when you need the full capacity of 4 red belts and want to drain the miners as equally as possible.
The routing from the mining drills is also a little more complex that it needs to be (the extra splitter to be able to feed from both sides is not needed).

Most outposts won't output more than 2 blue belts of ore, and you simply feed those along the two sides of the wagons and the combinator-balancer does take care of the rest. If you need more than 2 blue belts then the posted layout is not bad.

So for most cases I guess it would be better to simplify it a little: use two stacked splitters at each join point to output 2 balanced blue belts of ore, and just feed those to the train station. No need for 4-4 balancer, and a lot less need for splitters and belts.

Mehve · Post by **Mehve** » Mon Sep 05, 2016 10:41 pm

Alright, so I wasn't missing anything obvious. I was a little concerned for a moment

Also, anyone grabbing those blueprints n ow, be careful - it's spaced for pre-0.13 trains, and won't line up with current train spacing without shrinking the gap between the first two cars and the last two.

TheVeteraNoob · Post by **TheVeteraNoob** » Tue Sep 06, 2016 3:48 am

siggboy wrote:That's a nice variation of the chest balancer. I don't believe it does balance more evenly, but it simplifies the configuration if you want to vary the chest count (as you point out). It's not really a big advantage because usually you have a blueprint that includes the chest balancer and it will not be necessary to change any configuration regarding the number of chests.

I've seen the other design in action. Due to being based on average storage it tends to go funny after a few uneven loads . Not that it matters much

siggboy · Post by **siggboy** » Tue Sep 06, 2016 4:08 am

TheVeteraNoob wrote:I've seen the other design in action. Due to being based on average storage it tends to go funny after a few uneven loads . Not that it matters much

Well I don't know what you mean by "it goes funny". It just blocks the inserters that are in front of chests which have more than the average amount of stuff in them. The inserters take batches of items from the belt, which causes it to work unevenly, but modulo the batch size the chest contents are averaged.

Your solution is not really different in that regard, the averaging is just derived in a different way; the inserter operation is pretty much the same.

All these averaging solutions have a lower throughput limit than a perfect splitter-based balancer, but that usually does not matter for a mining outpost (unless it's so big that you're getting close to the throughput limit of the train station, and then it won't make much of a difference anyway).

TheVeteraNoob · Post by **TheVeteraNoob** » Tue Sep 06, 2016 12:45 pm

The chests with less items in them will increase the average items per chest before equalising their numbers. So if one chest ever becomes unbalanced it is impossible for them to equalize.

Edit: after typing this I realize this makes no sense whatsoever. But this is what I have seen. But once again the difference isn't big enough to matter.

siggboy · Post by **siggboy** » Wed Sep 07, 2016 1:36 am

What you've seen is due to the fact that the inserters load more than 1 item at a time, and the average values are rounded. That means the balancing will never be count perfect (unless you use non-stack inserters with no bonuses), but it will always be within a small margin of error around the actual average value.

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