Hard mode: Spill items from belts and inserters

[Nick-Nack]

Hi there!

The idea:
Introduce a hard mode where inserters and belts spill items on the ground when they cannot transport/insert anymore.

Due to mods and starting conditions there is a lot of possibilities to make fighting the aliens harder. But for me and many other players, Factorio isn't about fighting, it's about building. There is one very simple change that would make the building part far more challenging and interesting and should be included as a hard mode:
Inserters and belts spill the items that they cannot move onwards. This would happen in multiple circumstances:

1. A belt is full and normally would stop moving items. Instead items are spilled from the end of the belt.

belt.png (664.92 KiB) Viewed 6867 times

2. An inserter wants to insert an item somewhere where there is no place. The item is dropped.

overflow.png (512.46 KiB) Viewed 6867 times

3. An inserter can grab an item that does not fit the building the inserter points to. The inserter grabs the item and drops it on the building.

wrong-type.png (339.33 KiB) Viewed 6867 times

Technically this should be simple to implement, as it only needs to dumb down inserter and belt code and combine it with item spillage as implemented when the player has to many items (e.g. due to cancelling handcrafting).

[Sean Mirrsen]

The problem I see with the first point (well, "problem") is that it won't just work for full belts. How it would work is that any item that reaches the end of the belt, gets dumped off. There is an obvious loophole (literally) for it, circling the belt around to plug it into itself and just have no endpoint, which would mean that the system would have to somehow recognize it and do something to prevent it from working.

Also the dumbing down of inserters would have some fairly... bad consequences. I.e., as it is, there would be literally no way to automate a factory without constant spillage, until you get to combinators and the circuit network, and at that point you'd have half your factory covered in the things just to keep stuff running. Because for a lot of items, an assembler or furnace just can't work fast enough to use up the materials being plugged in even by just one inserter arm. It will be especially bad with fuel for boilers and furnaces.

Other than that, it would be... interesting, I suppose. Punishingly hard to work with, but probably interesting.

[Nick-Nack]

The first thing in my opinion isn't a bug, but a feature: Don't build a factory where items get to the end of a belt. And yes, circling it around might help, but as soon as the circle is full the items should spill at the point where they are inserted into the circle. Basically as soon as an item on a conveyor belt would be at the same position next tick as it was this tick, spill it instead.

Yes, the early game would be a problem. One interesting twist could be to allow burner inserters to have the old behavior. But I'm open to other ideas here, too.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Basically as soon as an item on a conveyor belt would be at the same position next tick as it was this tick, spill it instead.

Doing it in exactly that fashion would have the hilarious side-effect of an entire compressed belt (if, e.g., being fed into by several fast inserters on converging lanes) spontaneously exploding into emptiness and a lot of scattered materials as soon as it hits the end. Because at that point all items on the belt would stop moving simultaneously.

On a similar note, it would make converging belts impossible to manage, as any item passing on the same lane as the belt joins in, would spill items due to blocking the way. The best way to avoid that would have been using an inserter (because in principle, a robot arm can easily wait for a free spot to place an item in to appear), but it won't work if they are dumbed down as the other part of your suggestion outlines.

There would really be numerous logistical problems with running a factory under those conditions. Possibly to game-crippling levels.

[sparr]

There would really be numerous logistical problems with running a factory under those conditions. Possibly to game-crippling levels.

People have played no-belts games of Factorio.

Other people have played games with perfect production ratios for various items.

One or both of these approaches would still be viable with this spillage idea.

[BlakeMW]

In 0.13 with the logistics update this would be much more doable as you can use the circuit network to detect the status of belts and in an emergency use the power switch to simply cut off power to a segment of the factory (for example if ore is being produced faster than it is being consumed, the mines could have their power cut off).

[Nick-Nack]

Doing it in exactly that fashion would have the hilarious side-effect of an entire compressed belt (if, e.g., being fed into by several fast inserters on converging lanes) spontaneously exploding into emptiness and a lot of scattered materials as soon as it hits the end. Because at that point all items on the belt would stop moving simultaneously.

This shouldn't happen, as the last item on the belt would spill, but the others would just continue, as the last spot in the queue is empty again.

[sparr]

Doing it in exactly that fashion would have the hilarious side-effect of an entire compressed belt (if, e.g., being fed into by several fast inserters on converging lanes) spontaneously exploding into emptiness and a lot of scattered materials as soon as it hits the end. Because at that point all items on the belt would stop moving simultaneously.

This shouldn't happen, as the last item on the belt would spill, but the others would just continue, as the last spot in the queue is empty again.

He was pointing out a funny problem with your simple implementation approach, not the idea as a whole.

In 0.13 with the logistics update this would be much more doable as you can use the circuit network to detect the status of belts and in an emergency use the power switch to simply cut off power to a segment of the factory (for example if ore is being produced faster than it is being consumed, the mines could have their power cut off).

There are already a lot of factory designs that disable production via smart inserters with limit conditions. 0.13 will add some capabilities for those. This sort of approach is very viable, in this hard mode.


I am interested in implementing this hard mode idea as a mod. Would you guys play it?

[Nick-Nack]

He was pointing out a funny problem with your simple implementation approach, not the idea as a whole.

Yeah, maybe I was a little to vague in my description above

I am interested in implementing this hard mode idea as a mod. Would you guys play it?

I actually started thinking about implementing it as a mod myself, but given that inserters and belts are hardcoded in C this doesn't seem to be viable :-/

[Moonheart08]

Doing it in exactly that fashion would have the hilarious side-effect of an entire compressed belt (if, e.g., being fed into by several fast inserters on converging lanes) spontaneously exploding into emptiness and a lot of scattered materials as soon as it hits the end. Because at that point all items on the belt would stop moving simultaneously.

This shouldn't happen, as the last item on the belt would spill, but the others would just continue, as the last spot in the queue is empty again.

He was pointing out a funny problem with your simple implementation approach, not the idea as a whole.

In 0.13 with the logistics update this would be much more doable as you can use the circuit network to detect the status of belts and in an emergency use the power switch to simply cut off power to a segment of the factory (for example if ore is being produced faster than it is being consumed, the mines could have their power cut off).

There are already a lot of factory designs that disable production via smart inserters with limit conditions. 0.13 will add some capabilities for those. This sort of approach is very viable, in this hard mode.


I am interested in implementing this hard mode idea as a mod. Would you guys play it?

Certainly, just allow us to turn on functions (config, anyone)

[sparr]

viewtopic.php?f=93&t=26002

No configuration yet, just testing the waters to see if it's worth working on this further.

[Nick-Nack]

That's great!

[MeduSalem]

Yeah, why not. Bring it on as a possible hard-mode feature one can activate. I'm missing the chest-bombs from earlier days anyways. xD


But in all seriousness, what happens at splitters? Wouldn't items spill there too if a splitter tries to combine two belt streams into one, with the combined sum of items overflowing the capacity of a single belt?

[sparr]

But in all seriousness, what happens at splitters? Wouldn't items spill there too if a splitter tries to combine two belt streams into one, with the combined sum of items overflowing the capacity of a single belt?

That's what happens in my mod. Basically anywhere a belt wants to send its items forward and can't.

[Nick-Nack]

Bascially: Don't use fully loaded belts, as they are prone to spillage

[MeduSalem]

Bascially: Don't use fully loaded belts, as they are prone to spillage

It would be nearly impossible to maintain an even ridiculous 10% workload on a belt due to conflicts with inserters.

More likely it would be only 1 item per belt tile at any given point in time so you are on the safe side that there is no conflict when inserters want to insert something... which kinda starts to resemble the concept of Big Pharma.

[Nick-Nack]

Thing is, even a little bit of spillage wouldn't hurt if your setup is right, as it would spill onto the empty parts of the belt.

[Rseding91]

Not likely to ever happen. It goes completely against what Factorio at its core strives for: automation you can set-and-forget and not have to micro manage.

[ssilk]

Also my opinion. Moved to won't implement.
But the idea itself is quite interesting.