What do combinators do?

[peteed1985]

All these guides about them go into damn tangents about them being like a Bus System or or X > Y type stuff without ever bothering to explain what they do in simple terms.

Took forever to work out construction robots were totally useless for what I made them for because they just place items from a blueprint on the ground when I was thinking they were basically an assembler that could craft out of chests and put items back into chests because nothing on the wiki or guides I found said they didn't make items.

Logistic robots were easy to work out. My production lines are so bad I have to either have my ore/bars backing up and clogging up crafting or make more than I need of some parts because some aren't made fast enough and others too fast haha. I have like 20000 iron bars in chests from overflow and same or green circuit boards and copper wires. Copper wires one assembler makes more than enough to feed 4 red science makers but I don't need more red science so I end up manually moving it to another line to craft something else. So yeah i'm not too good at the game yet.


But yeah back to combinators, the items says nothing about what they do really and wiki seem to explain how they work in great detail but without an at a glance single sentence explanation of what they do and for me without knowing what they are in the first place the detailed explanation sounds like gibberish.

It's like someone explaining to you how to do like String Theory maths when you don't even know high school maths to base the knowledge on.

Same with circuit network, what does it do? My electrical power lines already have wires so I can't see the point of green and red wires and all that and I can't see a simple explanation of what it is.

[Evan_]

I was pretty baffled too about those. Checked a video or two, but I got lost in the details.

GoperAtl's detailed, written guide helped me lot. viewtopic.php?f=18&t=14556 I admit I had to slow down at times, re-read sentences and such, but an hour later I had my first smart chest - smart inserter combo that was actually smart.

[peteed1985]

I was pretty baffled too about those. Checked a video or two, but I got lost in the details.

GoperAtl's detailed, written guide helped me lot. viewtopic.php?f=18&t=14556 I admit I had to slow down at times, re-read sentences and such, but an hour later I had my first smart chest - smart inserter combo that was actually smart.

Yeah I tried that but it starts explaining how they work in high detail too. Seems like the circuit network and combinators are a completely useless couple of features from what i've read though that is likely just because I still have no idea what they even do.

[Evan_]

I still have no idea what they even do.

Math - and you can apply that to certain parts. Im kinda' glad the above guide didn't give detailed practical applications, so I can discover the fun stuff myself. My first construction with them was a chest that always keeps 300 stones, but initiates building wall-pieces when it has more than that. Simple wiring really, but it can be useful for many processes in a factory.

But I've seen a number display (with a 5*3 grid of lamps) that shows how many things in a chest. Ahh and a tetris. Pretty awesome stuff, though it's totally not something you need to know in order to finish a game or make very efficient and/or impressive things.

[mooklepticon]

This did a good job of explaining it to me:
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-88