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Making Furnaces and Assemblers report their current inventory (Input and output) to circuit network would open some interesting smart builds.
For example a smart furnace that smelts iron, copper, steel and stone and works with any stack size upgrade without the need of an array of combinators to count items while inserting them.
Knowing how much has piled up in outputs can be used to prevent overproducing items.

Hm. This needs to be connected with the suggestions around the inserter stack-size: choosable stacksize, or just a special inserter with tack size 1. Etc.
Otherwise such stuff won't work well for the furnaces.

That's currently part of the challenge.
There's a way to pick up any x items from belt's already viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28110#p181710

I do agree, making inserters pick up lets say 5 iron plates by sending them 5 iron plates as signal is something i'd love to see too, but having furnaces report inventory is even more practical for that purpose.

Optera wrote:Knowing how much has piled up in outputs can be used to prevent overproducing items.

There's not much so overproduction in assembly machines since inserters stop filling them with ingredients when their output is like 1-2 extra items, not the whole stack.
The question is - why is it different with furnaces. If that's to make early game easier, such limitless filling should probably work with stone furnaces only.

edit: by the way drills do not have such limitation just attached coal drill to chemical plant producing plastics - input stack is kept at full 70 unlike with inserter.

On the topic of sending furnace/assembler inventory to the circuit network...

For certain actions it might come in handy.

I remember that I had an idea for an application for that... I believe it had something to do with controlling the itemflow on mixed item belts to prevent clogging... I would have only put resource items on the belt which are currently needed by one of the assemblers further down the line, so the belt wouldn't get overstocked with the wrong item type. (it is still a problem even with being able to shut belts on/off and measuring their contents... it can still get clogged if you have bad luck.)


For the most part the item overflow in a furnace problem could be solved with being able to adjust the stack size bonus of inserters, but that's another issue.


Eventually it might be of importance if the Assemblers/Furnaces would be turned into smart machines themselves. Like being able to specify a recipe via circuit network. Then knowing the current contents of the furnace/assembler might prove to be necessary to know the current state of the input/output buffer or something.

Optera wrote:That's currently part of the challenge.
There's a way to pick up any x items from belt's already viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28110#p181710

Sadly I uncovered a flaw that isn't as easy to fix with that setup:
viewtopic.php?p=182323#p182323

Also it doesn't work with logistic bots, which is real problematic. So the belt approach should only be seen as a temporary solution.

Optera wrote:I do agree, making inserters pick up lets say 5 iron plates by sending them 5 iron plates as signal is something i'd love to see too, but having furnaces report inventory is even more practical for that purpose.

Which would be a better long term solution that may scale with later additions to the game.

The easiest variant would be a slider inside the inserter menu to specify the amount of items to be grabbed, but that would be also quite static and can't be adjusted on the fly.

But even more awesome would be to specify the amount of items to be grabbed with the circuit signal. Like you said... sending a circuit signal with 5 iron plates may set the filter to Iron Plates and tells the inserter to wait with moving until it holds said 5 Iron plates.