Cannot distinguish between fuel and ingredients in pentapod egg production

[adoxon]

I wanted to make a perfectly balanced Gleba base because I am a little crazy. In doing so I came across an interesting unsolvable problem that I could find no references to in the forums. When using a bioreactor with the pentapod egg recipe, the fish breeding recipe, and the biochamber recipe it requires nutrients for both the fuel source and as an ingredient. If you want to read both the ingredients and fuel from the machine the nutrients value is summed together and you cannot tell how many nutrients are in ingredients or in fuel. As far as I could tell these 3 recipes are the only ones in the game with this property (the fuel is also an ingredient).

In my case I am working with pentapod eggs recipe. The rest of my base inserts exactly the ingredients into the machines to craft once and fuel as needed while crafting (one at a time). Extreme overkill, I know, but it is an interesting logistic and circuit problem. However, because nutrients are both a fuel and ingredient in pentapod eggs they will be distributed by the inserter however it decides. Observationally, the inserter preferentially passes in fuel when its below 5 or 6 and will insert as ingredients otherwise. As a solution, I am sure there is a much more complicated setup that measures the input and output values through the inserters with memory cells and simulates the internals of the crafting process to predict what the correct distribution would be at any time, but that is a little past the level of crazy I am willing to take on right now.

I am not sure if or how this should be solved, but I wanted to highlight its existence. I would personally prefer one of the following options, though neither solves the inserter destination problem.

1) Broadcast the fuel as a settable signal in all machines that support it. A letter would be reasonable, similar to other systems like Total Construction Bots in a Roboport or Temperature in a Nuclear Reactor. This would solve the issue immediately without much cost to either the UI or UPS and should not be difficult to implement since it exists elsewhere. You could even default the signal to be the each signal or the fuel in question if you want to continue providing the same signaling that currently is supplied to make it mostly backwards compatible.

2) The new circuit combinators are a beautiful thing and their ability to specify red or green wire associations on their inputs makes me think that a similar thing added to building read write operations would be wonderful. Specifically being able to specify the circuit destinations of the signals. In this case I would read ingredients to green and fuel to red. However, circuit outputs don't have any kind of routing like this implemented. So this ask would likely be more costly than 1 to implement and might have additional performance implications by preventing some optimizations from occurring. I can also see it being too powerful for some people and remove the delightful constraints that make puzzle solving fun. Though I would be delighted to do something like read the contents of a requester chest to one network and also set the logistics requests at the same time from another.

Picture for reference (dont mind the HDR color warping, looks great on my screen)

12-05-2024, 23-59-41.png (477.19 KiB) Viewed 1213 times

Note the 101 nutrients on the green signal
30 of them come from the in process recipe
63 are inserted as ingredients
7 are spare fuel
and 1 is currently burning fuel (red bar)

[Koub]

Related : 117032

[NineNine]

Absolutely. What I thought should happen is that if "Include in crafting" is NOT checked, and "Include fuel" is checked, the signal should be sent should be the fuel (plus the one in the machine if there's one in there). That's not what's happening. In fact, there's no way to read just the fuel in a machine, as far as I can tell.

[Eternal]

my solution for perfectly balanced.... few burners and inserters to pick up excess eggs :D