Factorio Forums

I can already hear the "just don't do this"...but bear with me. Please. I'm posting this soley because of possible determinism concerns.

In a neighbouring thread we discussed the possibility of a loader-based N-splitter to complement the 2-splitter in base.

I did various experiments and thought i ended up with a working 1x1 3-splitter, but i just couldn't get it to stabilitze when not built manually. So yet another hour later i've determined that more than one splitter per tile works only if constructed in a very particular order, and only while the game is running. As soon as you load the game it breaks! And loading should never affect the game-state as far as i understand.

I've attached a video in case anyone thinks this is a photoshop joke. (A gif would be too large) Demo mod (contains minified loader and reduces chest collision_box): Demo savegame (it's not save stable, so this is the broken one...): Demo video (zipped because forum doesn't like .mkv): How to reproduce:

1. Load the attached save+mod.
2. Remove the inputting loader (west side), place it back down (blue side towards belt), rotate it to "input" mode.
3. Remove and replace the inputting belt segment.
4. Now it's a bit fiddly...
5. Remove one of the other loaders (north/south work best) and place it back down. Then replace the belt segment that loader is connected to. If it worked continue. If it didn't try another loader+belt pair first.
6. Do so for the other two loader+belt pairs.

It's important to rebuild the belt right after the loader. Rebuilding all loaders and after that all belts doesn't work.

Hello, well the game is built in a way, that transport belt-like entities should never share tiles. This example breaks it. I could write some non-trivial code to make sure, that it is enforced, and the mod is not loadable if you wish.

So roughly what were you intending to check? Naively i'd assume this could "simply" be checked during runtime on entity placement (too expensive perhaps?). And i don't wish to cause startup errors just because my entities *can* be used in a wrong way (which i obvisouly don't do now that i know this happens).

I would have to check, that the transport belt related entities have collision boxes and grid settings setup in a way, that it is not possible to have more than 1 transport belt related entity on the same tile, as it breaks the games and creates desyncs.

That would definetly break a few nice things for me that rely on grid-free loaders, like having an assembler with "built-in" loaders that share a tile with the machine. So i kindly ask that you just close this report and we can forget about it :).