Crusher recipe swapping system without productivity progress bar loss

[MBas]

What it does

This automation selects the recipe for the most needed material. Each crusher completes a set number of production cycles to avoid losing any productivity progress. For instance, at asteroid productivity level 4, setting queue to 7 means each crusher completes 7 productions before the combinator allows a recipe swap.

This is an upgraded version from this ship design viewtopic.php?f=193&t=118296

Setup

• White Square: Combinators here select the most demanded material, need them once for whole system.
• Yellow Rectangle: Tracks completed cycles per crusher, need it also once for whole system.
• Blue Rectangle: Dedicated setup per crusher. To expand, ensure consistent signal settings: "1" for the left crusher, "2" for the right. For additional crushers, use "3" in the blue rectangle. Click through the components and ensure the signals are set correctly. You need to change the signal in the crusher and match it with the two signals in the combinators according to the crusher number.
• Set parameters inside constant combinator according to description of the combinator (see screenshot below). On this example, it will try to keep 250 iron ores, 200 ice cubes, 100 carbons and 100 calcite within plarform hub. Combinator never swaps until 9 productions is done (this example suits to research level 8). Please take into consider that Q is the amount of finished cycles with extra from productivity included.
• Make sure to connect the hub with a green cable. I didn’t include this in the blueprint to avoid overwriting your hub settings. The hub must have "Read Contents" enabled.

Possible problems

• Material Overproduction: Material quantities may exceed the set values. This is not a bug but intended to preserve the defined cycle count. For instance, producing a set amount of copper might result in excess iron ore from the advanced crushing recipe.
• High Q Value: High Q values can cause logistics issues. If you choose a high Q to preserve productivity, ensure material demands are set high (>400), especially for iron ore. Rare materials like calcite don’t need such adjustments. If you have productivity on not very nice level like 9, consider setting Q to a lower number than 19, even if it means losing a small amount of productivity progress.
• If the difference between demanding material is too high, it may happen that something that is not reached its higher bar will be prioritised over something which is completely missing. To avoid this as much as possible, try to demand materials in ratio of total number that is finished in usual recipe.
• Demand Discrepancy: If demand differs greatly among materials, materials with high demand may be produced over entirely missing ones. To avoid this, set material demands proportionally based on typical recipe output.
• In the constant combinator screenshot above, sulfur may occasionally be produced even if it’s not in the parameters. If this happens, you can remove the sulfur signal from the constants to hard-ban its production. This has never happened to me in real scenarios—only during testing when I intentionally tried to break the system by faking material counts, etc.

In general, the higher the Q you use, the more carefully you need to think through your material demand settings.

Blueprint

Code: Select all

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[T-nm]

Very nice!
A better version would be one that could split evenly different recipes among the available crushers, so you could add more crushers in line. I guess it would require each crusher to have a constant combinator and change the way we assign the decider.
Right now this version only supports 1 recipe at a time.

[MeduSalem]

Very nice!
A better version would be one that could split evenly different recipes among the available crushers, so you could add more crushers in line. I guess it would require each crusher to have a constant combinator and change the way we assign the decider.
Right now this version only supports 1 recipe at a time.

You mean like some of the smart-furnace setups back in the day that could smelt any ore, and which allocate the available furnaces depending on the relative demand of each output to the total demand of all outputs? ^^

I would post the logic I had made for that smart furnace setup because it would work for this application as well (just that you would need a couple more deciders which would set the recipes in the crushers), but the savegame where I used that logic got nuked during one of the update transitions.

And I don't remember whether I actually ever posted that one on the forums. We sure did a lot of research/builds for it back in the day in one of the threads because before 2.0 the furnaces were the only machine that actually allowed for recipe-switching.

[MBas]

You mean like some of the smart-furnace setups back in the day that could smelt any ore, and which allocate the available furnaces depending on the relative demand of each output to the total demand of all outputs? ^^

I actually did it too back in time viewtopic.php?f=193&t=64296
Also with protection of loosing productivity bar progress. But for new research (there is a research of steel productivity) it would be a little bit more complicated.

[MeduSalem]

I actually did it too back in time viewtopic.php?f=193&t=64296
Also with protection of loosing productivity bar progress. But for new research (there is a research of steel productivity) it would be a little bit more complicated.

Is the productivity a problem now for smart furnaces? I remember back in the day it wasn't. It actually kept the productivity even when it switched between the input ores. Haven't done a smart furnace setup since a long time so I cannot say if they changed any of the furnace behaviors. ^^

Would actually be interesting to try with the Foundries. xD


But yea, now that it is possible to actually set recipes it probably discards the productivity during the switch on a crusher. That would suck a little bit.

I would argue with the amount of chunks you get, that it would actually be "acceptable" that some productivity is lost every now and then.

Otherwise I would likely also put a global counter there that only allows a global recipe switch to happen after every <y> items. Wouldn't do it per crusher, just seems overkill. The amount of combinators you would need to place could then just be spend to place more crushers with a fixed recipe. ^^

[MBas]

Currently, all of my ships have only one crusher, except for one—the large one traveling to Aquilo—which has two. I keep producing additional resources in sequence even when it’s unnecessary. My asteroid research is at level 10, which means the production bars are synchronized. Despite this, I still maintain a recipe for 5–10 units of production before switching, and it’s never an issue. I do this because, during a recipe switch, you lose some time removing materials from the previous recipe. The crusher simply produces some material in advance, and there’s no downside to it.

[MeduSalem]

Makes sense to produce a little in "advance", since there totally is an overhead involved from the recipe switch. Because during the time it switches it could already demand more and you would prevent constantly flipping back/forth that way. ^^


I currently put up a crusher for each recipe lol. I thought about using recipe switches, but then was "meh", after I found out that the total weight of a platform doesn't really matter much anyway (but that it is rather the width that ruins top speed) and that I can be generous with how I set up the crusher area as along as it fits into the width I set for my platform. Sure, I cannot direct-insert from the crushers into the platform hub because there are like 8 or whatever, but that doesn't really bother me. ^^

[MBas]

Well its made for minimalistic designs anyway

[cyrus104]

I really like this design and playing with it. I can't get it to ever start. I see your note about connecting the hub with a green but what do I connect it to?

Thanks