Adjustable Item "stored" stack sizes

[Dasani]

I don't really know what to call it, which is why it was also impossible to search for such a thing in advance.

But the general idea is this... I'd like to be able to modify how many items an assembler will hold before it stops working. Both in components needed for construction, as well as the finished product.

The biggest place this comes in handy is when mass producing items that build very quickly but also using speed modules. For example building fast inserters or smart inserters with 4 Speed Module 3's installed is a horribly inefficient exercise because the assembling machine constantly turns it's self off and stops pulling in new components constantly after it feels it has built enough. Just in the time it takes for the (in this case long handed inserters) to move the finished product to a belt, it starts and stops several times and will not run efficiently. If I could change the numbers for stored materials and stored finished products for those particular types of items up to say, 10-15 finished products and enough to build 10ish more, I believe I could keep it running smoothly without hiccups due to the inserters moving multiple units at once and having multiple inserters doing so.

That's all. Thanks.

[ssilk]

See this: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=37205 factory production queue time instead of quantity

Can you answer this: Is it the same issue?

[Dasani]

Yes, that is the exact same issue.

Seems some of the people reading it don't understand the problem though. Inserters are more than fast enough to keep up with the rate they're being consumed, or you could even stick 9 fast inserters on a single assembly machine 3 and still run into this problem. It has nothing to do with needing more inserters or them not being quick enough, it's simply the fact they stop working until a certain threshold is reached and the threshold is so tiny that when building and moving things that quickly, the machine goes idle a lot.

A very, very simple to be able to adjust the quantities of materials they will store and minimum threshold to start loading again would solve the issue completely. And I agree, it is a very real and problematic issue when dealing with end game tech and having very fast speeds for things.

Being able to bump it up to making 5+ items that it holds in output before it stops producing and stops requesting new components would make it efficient. Being stuck at only 2 is grossly inefficient with the speeds factories can output.

Someone in that thread mentioned the size adjusts based on the speed increase of the assembly machine. I can't test right now to confirm if that is true or not, but even if it is true, it isn't tuned or scaled properly obviously or this wouldn't be an issue.

I routinely run machines at +300% speed and I run into this issue all the time. It isn't the inserter's fault, it's the fact they choose not to load anything until the machine is actually producing something or trying to produce something, but every time IT goes idle because it's full, it stops the inserters too. Very, very annoying problem. May not be a "bug" but it is definitely an oversight and should be corrected imo. If not, assembly machines should have some kind of cap on how fast you can make them work because at a certain point they actually slow down instead of speed up.

[ssilk]

My opinion to this (some things already said in the other thread):

Compare this with reality: Let's say we have a ticket sales.
In front of the ticket sales there is a queue and a small way back to the street.
The man in the ticket sales is able to dispatch 1 person per minute.
This time is more than long enough to keep the queue filled and enough so that the dispatched people can walk back to the street.
Now we send the ticket sales person into (extremely expensive) training. When he comes back, he is able to dispatch one person PER SECOND!

The problem is then soon, that the queue cannot keep up. And a much bigger problem is, that they cannot walk back fast enough on the narrow path. And on the counter there can be only one at the time.
The manager for the ticket sales sees this of course. He can try to improve the queue, make the ways broader. Increase the space for the counter. Etc.

But in the end he decides to build a second counter.

What I want to say is: If you remove one bottleneck, you will find the next. That is just some kind of natural law. The deeper you dig, the more bottlenecks you will find.

The only alternative I know to is parallelizing.

[Dasani]

I disagree because this is the only bottleneck aside from straight up running out of resources.

I think a more accurate analogy would be unwrapping presents on christmas. Any sane, logical, reasonable human being is going to have all the presents inside and ready to open in sequence one after another, boom boom boom. But this system is basically saying you can only have 2 presents in the house at any given time. After you open those two, THEN you can go out to the car and bring in two more and only two more and then open those. But you have to keep going back and forth every single time. And since you can only have two at a time, and you can only bring in more after those two have been opened, there is a period of time where no unwrapping is taking place while presents are moving from the car to the house. Between every single unwrapping...

The limitation is completely arbitrary and pointless.

I mean, there needs to be some limitation there just to prevent your machines from filling up with hundreds or more of materials, but honestly that value should 100% be adjustable to suit the flow of your factory. The default works just fine 90% of the time, but I mean, isn't it better to fix it instead of just saying it's such an edge case that it doesn't need to be looked at?

The very concept that my factory is working so quickly that it actually SHUTS DOWN and stops working, even when there are plenty of resources still flowing in and all of the equipment can 100% handle the workload, is just ridiculous imo. The only reason for it is the arbitrary limitation put there. I'd be happy to be able to adjust it, either globally or for specific machines. If there is a mod that can do it, i'd just run that, even though I still feel that this is such a core mechanic "issue" that it really should be addressed.

Also I checked in game, the queue size does NOT increase with speed increases.

It's kind of a big deal because one of the things I enjoy most about the game is optimizing efficiency and finding ways to squeeze every ounce out of everything that I can. When my factory stops working, not because of not being able to keep up with demand or because running out of resources, but simply because of an oversight on the part of the devs, it's just really annoying.

I'm using exact ratios for certain things in the factory so that everything gets consumed exactly as it's created and also exactly when it is needed. It works fine at base speed level, but at a certain point it stops working because certain parts of the machine just won't operate when that queue has more than 2 objects in it. So for those parts, the only thing I could do is build more machines to compensate for this feature sort of breaking the design.

More tech should make things better, not worse. Going backwards and adding more work from having superior technology just doesn't make sense.

[ssilk]

I disagree because this is the only bottleneck aside from straight up running out of resources.

My argument against that: If that bottleneck is removed by adding more stack size, we will find the next bottleneck.

Surprise?!?!


Maybe now the stack sizes of the inserters are too small, or they are not fast enough to keep up. I really don't know, I know only, that the next bottleneck is waiting right behind the stack-size increase.

[BenSeidel]

I think that the issues is not that there is a bottleneck, it's the nature of the game, but the nature of the bottleneck. It's the only bottleneck that you cannot design around in a progressive way. for example:
If you don't have enough of X, add more factories making X or upgrade the factory or add modules or add some beacons, etc.
If your belts are full, add more belts or make a train network or use bots.
If your inserters are not fast enough, upgrade them or increase your research or maneuver your belts to add more.
If your inserters are not responding fast enough because of the game code you... take modules out or remove the beacons or downgrade the factory or remove some of the additional inserters, etc.

It just seems the wrong way to go, especially when every other problem is solved by adding MOOOAAAARRRRR!!!!!!

[ssilk]

Hm. Good arguments, but on the other hand, there are several bottlenecks already in game, that cannot designed around.

- A rail has a maximum throughput cause of the length of locomotives and accelleration/decelleration-speed (cause that decides the distance between the trains).
- You cannot speed the belts up faster than 31 (32?) times of basic belt.

And many more. There are physical limits. Like in any factory: A machine that creates 200 cakes per minute (we have "soon" christmas ) cannot just accelerated to tripple it's speed, cause the result is then not longer cakes but mud.