Maximally(?)-compact steel-furnace smelting

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quyxkh
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Maximally(?)-compact steel-furnace smelting

Post by quyxkh »

As an exercise I've been working on just how dense I could make steel-furnace smelteries, I think this might be the practical limit. It meters fuel to keep an average 5.5 fuel per smelter, I don't think it's practical to avoid the recirculation, even without supply shortages and output backpressure, distracted smelter-loading inserters mean that sometimes an item on the supply belt just gets missed, eventually it'll happen to enough of the same kind in a row to clog the last pair of smelters. Under ideal circumstances, with fully-compressed supplies, it recirculated 32 copper ore while smelting (so far) 575000 copper plates. Keeping the recirculation from happening needlessly was fun. I left in my test harness and recirculation counters and a not-strictly-necessary lane balancer. This would be much harder and uglier without the 16.16 priority and filter splitter options..

This uses 68 smelters per belt, coal is 8000kJ and for all but brick smelting is 315kJ/ingredient item, the fuel uses ~4% of the belt capacity, ~67.25 smelters can handle the load.
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Test-harness equipment included
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mrvn
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Re: Maximally(?)-compact steel-furnace smelting

Post by mrvn »

Have you tried using the filter splitter more? Specifically I mean the feature that the splitter stops when the filtered item is backed up. So at the end of the row filter for coal and have it go nowhere and feed the other side back to the start. Then copper should flow through till coal backs up and starts flowing again when the last inserter takes coal from the splitter.

quyxkh
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Re: Maximally(?)-compact steel-furnace smelting

Post by quyxkh »

mrvn wrote:Have you tried using the filter splitter more? Specifically I mean the feature that the splitter stops when the filtered item is backed up. So at the end of the row filter for coal and have it go nowhere and feed the other side back to the start. Then copper should flow through till coal backs up and starts flowing again when the last inserter takes coal from the splitter.
I did have a filter on the exit initially but that has two problems, first it recirculates unnecessarily, you want missed items to wait at the last smelter rather than take up a supply belt slot that could be feeding new material unless there's no chance of the other item showing up (so 'anything > 5' on the last smelter's input belt segment moves the recirculator segment, turns out you can get a clog with six items if you do it juuuust right), and you can get either coal or ore bunching up at the end depending on random chance and load variations so recirculating just one doesn't prevent all the clogs that can form. I also tried 'Everything > 5' to recirculate whatever's been held once the clog's cleared, since it's going to get recirculated eventually anyway, but it turns out procrastination pays off here, the flush-on-clear winds up recirculating much more often, you can see it in the recirc counters.

mrvn
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Re: Maximally(?)-compact steel-furnace smelting

Post by mrvn »

If you put coal on just one side of the belt then you never need to circulate coal. Even if coal builds up the copper ore would still flow.

But lets assume it builds up (e.g. copper ore did run out so only coal was delivered). You can stop adding more coal when coal > 1 on the belt for the last furnace.

It's too bad though that splitters have no circuit connector.

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