Factorio Forums

Suggestion: Make a checkbox on the Centrifuge UI to not hoard ingredients while doing manufacturing.

Use case:
You just got Kovarex Tech and you've set up your circle of Centrifuges to turn hardly-any U-235 into all the U-235 you can eat.

The problem is, as (40) U-235 turns to (41), the next 2 Centrifuges take (21) and (20) and now nobody is making any U-235 until you manually shift things around.

The suggestion is to prevent Centrifuges from taking additional U-235 (any ingredient) while they are currently manufacturing. Don't "queue-up" ingredients, just sit empty until you're done making, then pick-up what you need, as available.

It's a Quality Of Life (QoL) thing, but it's a rather major annoyance at this particular transition point in every-single factory bring-up.

Thanks!
~Chum

Copy blueprint
It's not the universal solution to early-game Uranium woes.
But it's definitely a point to start improving from.

Unless you really care for early-game Rare quality Uranium, a handful of beacons with a handful of Speed modules backing singular Kovarex kovarexing centrifuge is your friend at stage when this specific inquiry is impactful.

This is kind of fixed in Space Age as you can read a machines contents then stop inserting. You need two filter inserters since one inserter would block u238 as well.

Also useful on Gleba as nutrients have stacks of 100 but spoil quickly.

Here's a straightforward way to do it:
Set the centrifuge to "read contents" and hook it to the bulk inserter putting U-235 back in, and to the fast inserter pointing to the next centrifuge in line.

You can see that the bulk inserter will move exactly 40 (set the stack size to 10 so it doesn't grab more on the last swing). The fast inserter is set to enable when U-235 >= 40, so it will only move a U-235 to the next centrifuge when the first one has 40. (Ingredients that are being used for the current craft also are read out to the circuit network.)

It won't hoard ingredients and you can chain as many as you like.

You can use the new Read working signal on the centrifuge to turn off the U-235 inserter once the machine is running. It's extremely simple and works like a charm.

triggerman602 wrote: ↑Mon Nov 11, 2024 6:21 am You can use the new Read working signal on the centrifuge to turn off the U-235 inserter once the machine is running. It's extremely simple and works like a charm.

If you do that you need to always keep the centrifuge output empty. The "output blocked" condition also counts as "not working".