Smarter logistics

[technocrazy]

Right now the belts are just a transporter, you drop items on them and they travel down the lane until the end, resting atop until packed away.
even with filtering inserters there may be situations where one assembler or refinery gets all their resources snatched away from it's neighbor.

I suggest mirroring airport central luggage transport systems where everything goes through a core machine, is addressed and packed into a transport sled to be shipped off to the proper terminal.
This is currently possible only with roboports and as such extremely expensive energywise.

For this, we need

• item addressing
• belt splitters able to read the address and understand which belt an item needs to go

Essentialy this comes down to be a system not unlike filling oildrums except this here will be a quality of live improvement.
Instead of inserters grabbing everything their target has set as required, the item itself will tell the inserter if it's to be grabbed compared to having to set up intricate systems to keep your item flows separate.

[bobucles]

Can you not do this with smart inserters and combinators? It's a hell of a trick to pull off though. Better off just letting the raw materials fill everything up.

[technocrazy]

Can you not do this with smart inserters and combinators? It's a hell of a trick to pull off though. Better off just letting the raw materials fill everything up.

Yes, but I'm not going there since i'd be faced with medium spitters before I could wire up ammo feeding.

[bobucles]

Getting your raw materials where they need to go and in the right quantities is a core puzzle of factorio. To just have things automatically go where they're needed would defeat the purpose of the game.

You'll figure out base building tricks as time goes on. One of the most useful designs is the "central bus" concept, where you run a gigantic artery of main goods and branch it off to the various factory chains. Later on the logistic bots take care of the sorting stuff very well.

[ssilk]

I need to point to this topic: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=24061 New Types of Belts (NOT!)

And basically, what you want can be done by using splitters in more or less complex ways or (as already mentioned) more or less circuit logic.

[mattj256]

Getting your raw materials where they need to go and in the right quantities is a core puzzle of factorio. To just have things automatically go where they're needed would defeat the purpose of the game.

I totally agree that vanilla Factorio shouldn't make it too easy to sort items in the right place.

There's already a HardCrafting mod that includes a belt sorter. You can run one belt in and three belts out:



Perhaps you or someone else will be inspired to write a mod to make the logistics easier.

[technocrazy]

I need to point to this topic: viewtopic.php?f=80&t=24061 New Types of Belts (NOT!)

And basically, what you want can be done by using splitters in more or less complex ways or (as already mentioned) more or less circuit logic.

It's not a new belt type per se, it's just sort-of-smarter belts, or rather a more realistic approach to warehouse logistics. Yes, I am employed in such an area, that's why I don't like the current gameplay.

[ssilk]

Hm.
That item addressing sound interesting, if I need to sort out luggage, but I cannot see, how that would be a good game, if I just need to build a machine, which knows in forecast where each items should be routed to. Sounds more or less boring, cause nothing surprisingly can happen.

So how do you think, that would enhance the gameplay?

[Frightning]

Getting your raw materials where they need to go and in the right quantities is a core puzzle of factorio. To just have things automatically go where they're needed would defeat the purpose of the game.

I totally agree that vanilla Factorio shouldn't make it too easy to sort items in the right place.

There's already a HardCrafting mod that includes a belt sorter. You can run one belt in and three belts out:



Perhaps you or someone else will be inspired to write a mod to make the logistics easier.

The above pictured functionality can already be achieved with a chest and some Smart Inserters (albeit, with reduced throughput; unless you're willing to make the design quite a bit larger).

There is also an advantage of the design I described above: It can't get backlogged as readily from one item being saturated as the above pictured device can.