Factorio Forums

Hi,

what do you thing about a Programmable Logic Controller - PLC in the game? Of course there're the combinators, but somtimes you need a bunch of them an it takes much place and look ugly too.
So here comes my idea with the PLC.

The PLC should have the size of one combinator, but inside is room for building some logic with the combinators. After creating the logic inside you only declare the in- and outputs of the PLC and wire it to your network.

Xenomorph wrote:Hi,

what do you thing about a Programmable Logic Controller - PLC in the game? Of course there're the combinators, but somtimes you need a bunch of them an it takes much place and look ugly too.
So here comes my idea with the PLC.

The PLC should have the size of one combinator, but inside is room for building some logic with the combinators. After creating the logic inside you only declare the in- and outputs of the PLC and wire it to your network.

As much as I would like it, in the end it would destroy almost everything we combinator fanatics have been fighting for.
- its too powerful, lessenes complexity and difficulty the circuit network stands for
- you are a survivalist on a foreign planet, if high tech operating systems are introduced they will have to come from the ship wreck or buildt by hand or blueprint. Not just some arbitrary new combinator block
- its is actually not necessary in no aspect of the gameplay (I am not really playing, more testing contraptions and I can say I would not need a PLC), similar funtionality can be blueprintable form some factorio-CPU guru

Would be nice as a mod, but I think it doesn't fit into vanilla factorio style.

It's like asking for a splitter which you can build belt contraptions inside of. Yes, it would hugely reduce the size of belt balancers and such, but it's not in the style of vanilla factorio (ie. explicit visibly working factory). This can already be seen happening with Factorissimo builds, they look nothing like vanilla Factorio.

I personally would only like a way to help organize the wire mess that sometimes results when making complex combinator circuits. Some kind of underground wiring thing, maybe. Power poles tend to add to the mess, rather than help.

I love the mess. I would even power belts with electric poles just to get more mess ^^ but that of course is horrible and beautiful

I think a small PLC of limited capacity would be okay.

The real world counterpart would be a device about the same of a small tissue box or computer speaker with 8-10 inputs, 8-10 outputs, and capacity for at most 250 lines of code.

It would of course provide a handful of timers and counters for convenience, just like real PLCs do.

Like so it would not completely shrink the wiring clutter into invisiblity, as it would be too limited to do more than automate a basic task like regulating the level of an oil tank or making a generator start and stop when needed.

You would have to deploy several of them with an interconnecting protocol of your own design to make any sort of large scale automation this way.

Gertibrumm wrote:
As much as I would like it, in the end it would destroy almost everything we combinator fanatics have been fighting for.
- its too powerful, lessenes complexity and difficulty the circuit network stands for
- you are a survivalist on a foreign planet, if high tech operating systems are introduced they will have to come from the ship wreck or buildt by hand or blueprint. Not just some arbitrary new combinator block
- its is actually not necessary in no aspect of the gameplay (I am not really playing, more testing contraptions and I can say I would not need a PLC), similar funtionality can be blueprintable form some factorio-CPU guru

I don't want to replace the combinator logic with the plc, only get the "mess" out of my sight. I used some 9 segment displays to show the amount of chests and tanks. Those displays and the logic they need to work are so big that you could see it from outer space. I found the Nixitubes and the display with logic is reduced to a 1x2 space for one number.
This is the thing I want for the combinators. A 1x1 space where i can do the whole ugly mess inside. Not to make it easier, only efficient. You has to do the same work inside the plc that you has to do outside to get the result.

Yoyobuae wrote:
Would be nice as a mod, but I think it doesn't fit into vanilla factorio style.

It's like asking for a splitter which you can build belt contraptions inside of. Yes, it would hugely reduce the size of belt balancers and such, but it's not in the style of vanilla factorio (ie. explicit visibly working factory). This can already be seen happening with Factorissimo builds, they look nothing like vanilla Factorio.

I personally would only like a way to help organize the wire mess that sometimes results when making complex combinator circuits. Some kind of underground wiring thing, maybe. Power poles tend to add to the mess, rather than help.

I don't agree with the visibly working factory. Of course, you can see things move on the belts, get inserted in factories. Becoming new stuff which moves on the belts again to becomes another new stuff an so on. That looks nice and you can see what happens.
At the combinator logic you can't see what happens like on the belts. You must hover the mouse over every single combinator to see what signals are at the in- and output. And for the reason why you must look into the setting of the combinators.
That is not visibly.


This plc fits into the game, late game for sure, but it fits. Tell me how the rocket or the satelite is beeing controlled? If there are only the combinator logic you can use, you has to use it there too and than the needed space for the controller of the rocket has planetsize...

OdinYggd wrote:I think a small PLC of limited capacity would be okay.

The real world counterpart would be a device about the same of a small tissue box or computer speaker with 8-10 inputs, 8-10 outputs, and capacity for at most 250 lines of code.

It would of course provide a handful of timers and counters for convenience, just like real PLCs do.

Like so it would not completely shrink the wiring clutter into invisiblity, as it would be too limited to do more than automate a basic task like regulating the level of an oil tank or making a generator start and stop when needed.

You would have to deploy several of them with an interconnecting protocol of your own design to make any sort of large scale automation this way.

Oh, I don't want a real plc in the game. That would destroy the combinator logic. If you get a real plc programmable with scl or fc it becomes more complex as it has to be.

I think Xenomorph hits the point.
There where already Lua Combinators as mod. But it was never considered to be in game cause of that...