Factorio Forums

The behavior of combinators without power is a recurring issue on this forum:

Unpowered Decider combinators

Combinators output when unpowered:

Comparing combinators cannot be unpowered

What I am trying to accomplish is reading a value from the logistics network, and toggling signals on a circuit network in response. Ex: "If there < 10 power switches then set the green circuit, copper wire, and iron plate signals to 1" The only mechanism I could find to access the logistic network values was the power switch and like other posters my expectation a combinator could be unpowered to reset the output to my circuit network was incorrect. The gameplay experience is one can turn on constant combinator signals fed through a unpowered decider combinator when the switch turns on but when the switch turns off there is no change because the decider combinator retains the last state. This confuses people even though the reasoning why the behavior exists makes sense.

To avoid revisiting the original behavior around unpowered combinators I suggest on of the following tweak:
1) Allow constant combinators to toggle on/off state based on logistics network values.
2) Add a checkbox on combinators to specify expected behavior in a power loss situation (reset/hold output)
3) Make powered state a signal available for all combinators to operate upon. (I suspect I do this in-game with accumulators or multiple switches, but it is a big painful workaround for an implementation artifact)

I apologize if I missed the obvious but I can tell I'm not the only one to encounter the combinator power behavior in a bad way. Thank you.

Unpowered combinators lead to undefined output (more specifically, it does not update its internal state until power returns). The right way to do this is to ensure that your combinators never lose power by putting them on a separate solar/accumulator power circuit.

1) The whole point of a constant combinator is to be, well, constant. If you want toggling of status, you need a decider combinator which takes values from a constant combinator.

2) This overcomplicates the issue and will IMO make the GUI even more confusing to beginners than it already is

3) How would you expect powered state to be transmitted if the network has lost power? When this happens, it's almost certainly due to a disconnection of some kind.

If your aim is to use a switch to toggle behaviour remotely, you could do something like turning on an inserter and reading the value of a chest.

Xycor, This reply is in response to what you are trying to do rather than your suggestion.

You can read the logistics contents from a roboport, if you connect a wire to the roboport, you can then select read logistics. Then use a decider combinator, set up to output A = 1, if power switches > 10. The output of the decider combinator should go into an arithmetic combinator. A constant combinator setup with the output you want should also be connected to the arithmetic combinator using the other colour of wire.
The arithmetic combinator should be setup with each * A, and output each. The output of the arithmetic combinator will be as you want.

Thanks BaggyK, that is a working solution so I can continue experimenting with my factory. Appreciate the help. I still hope the devs give the behavior in this area some more attention though. I would not have figured this out without help.