Advanced Circuit Networks + Combinators

[McDuff]

TL;DR

Higher levels of circuit wiring and multi-function combinators, based on and expanding on ideas here and here.

What?

As technology in "the real world" improves, you get both increased capacity and miniaturisation. Electronics get faster, denser, and smaller. I propose a similar kind of progression into higher levels of circuit operation within factorio.

More research would unlock expansion of circuit colours, multicore cables, the ability to read and write to different colour channels - some of these ideas have already been covered in the forum posts above.

I also propose a higher level of combinator with multiple functions and internal wiring. The recipe could be fairly advanced - 4 arithmetic combinators, 4 decider combinators and a processing unit for example, so as to represent that it's fitting the functionality into a smaller space rather than giving you the functionality for "free".

A mockup wireframe of potential GUI on the advanced combinator is in the image below.

Factorio Circuit Mockup (1).png (12.41 KiB) Viewed 3560 times

This would effectively increase the density of processing power at the expense of material cost, a reasonable trade up. It wouldn't make combinator programming "easier" in the sense of doing things for you. It would also probably still end up with large combinator stacks because, if there's one thing we know about factorio players, it is that they will keep adding to their factories until the functionality gives out.

Why?

It increases combinator and circuit network functionality while simultaneously making the top-level visuals simpler to understand and more space efficient.

Functions that currently take 3 or 4 combinators could be pulled down to just 1 in size, while multiple colour channels and bussing would enable you to keep tabs of different inventory counts and perform operations on them either invidually or across channels without messy wiring and buffering.

[Atlas]

Someone proposed "circuit boxes" few weeks ago. It was something like a chest for combinators. +1 for miniaturization.

[Tekky]

Someone proposed "circuit boxes" few weeks ago. It was something like a chest for combinators. +1 for miniaturization.

Here is the thread:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=57067 Add a space saving"circuit box" for combinator setups

[Engimage]

From the start Factorio is the game for building complex stuff from basic elements. This is a set purpose for the game and it will unlikely change ever.
Such stuff is a space for modding. Just like Factorissimo such bundled "black boxes" can be made using surfaces feature of the game.

[McDuff]

I appreciate that, but

a) shrinking things down and making them faster is already accepted as part of the tech progression - fast inserters, steel furnaces, red and blue belts etc can't do anything that the predecessor's can't do, they just do more of it in a given space.

b) several aspects of this suggestion involve actually increasing what you can do, i.e. having separable inputs and outputs on different wire colours (for eg setting a filter and reading hand contents of an insertor on two circuits, or setting a requester chest and reading the contents on two circuits), or increasing the number of wires so you can run multiple independent busses.

You can do absolutely anything with combinators, but some of the layouts needed to do so are unreasonably large and totally unreadable. To me it makes sense to have some way of compressing basic 2-4 combinator setups down into smaller blocks.

[mrvn]

From the start Factorio is the game for building complex stuff from basic elements. This is a set purpose for the game and it will unlikely change ever.
Such stuff is a space for modding. Just like Factorissimo such bundled "black boxes" can be made using surfaces feature of the game.

Is it actually?

I want an assembler that takes a blueprint (in the module slot?) with some combinators and wires and then has a recipe that takes an "Integrated combinator box" and whatever the blueprint lists and builds an "Integrated combinator" that contains the combinator setup from the blueprint inside.

The big question is how to make the assembler require and accept whatever items are in the blueprint?

[McDuff]

Something else that would be handy with separable outputs - being able to connect to an assembling machine (or chemical plant or oil refinery) and have it output "products" on one wire and "ingredients" on another. At the moment I use a mod that adds combinators to do this.

To me, this kind of thing actually plays into the "belts vs bots" story too. The logistic network connects arbitrary points based on demands and supplies. "I need this" signals matched with "I have this" signals. Being able to do this easily with wires and combinators means that you should be able to create interesting ways of doing this kind of Any to Any supply management without bots.This is the kind of thing I've been trying to work on recently, and it's fun, and to a large extent doable with a few mods, but there are vanilla changes that could make it even better and more intuitive.