Factorio Forums

TL;DR

When debugging the circuit network, there should be a hint when the dump inventory is preventing the circuit connection from setting a recipe on a assembler/etc.

What?

In this image, the combinators are outputting a single recipe. It's not very clear why the crusher's recipe is not being set, the entity's status just says "No recipe". It turns out the reason is that there's items in the dump inventory. However, since you can manually set a recipe while there are items in the dump inventory, it's not obvious that the circuit network would not be able to do the same. So, we need some hint as to why the recipe is not being set by the circuit connection. Initially I thought this may be a bug.

Instead of just "No recipe", it should say something like "No recipe, machine not empty" or "Waiting for machine to empty".

Why?

This mechanic is new to 2.0, and the circuit network's restrictions are different from the player's manual restrictions, so a note should be made for that. Additionally, even years in the future once the newness of such things wears off, the note will help visual debugging of the circuit network, because instead of having to open and check each machine with "No recipe set", you can see if some of them just aren't set due to dump inventory.