Green and Red Wire - Logistics Tutorial?

[gustavoghe]

Helle you guys,

Im sorry if this has been questioned before. I have been searching the internet, and even google let me down on this one. Do yo guys know the green and red wire? The intelligent green chests? Well, I have been playing factorio for a while now. See my video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaTS_DfnWkA

But there is one thing that i dont get is the green wires and logistic systems...

Does any one know of a good tutorial on how to use them? Heck, does anyone knows how to use them?

Thank you very much for the info.

Bye

[ccik]

Hello,

I don't know about any tutorial, but the logistic network is not too complicated.

It basically counts the number of items you have in your smart chests. If you connect your smart chest to any network, but an iron gear in the chest, the network will sense the amount of 1 for gears. Then you can set conditions for smart inserters, to specify when they should operate, for example, when there are less than 100 in the network.The green and red logistic wire do exactly the same, the difference is, that all wires of the same color connect to each other, while two with different colors do not connect, so you can build to different networks. If you have multiple chest connected to one network of the same color, the amount of items will be added up. So the inventory of the network has to be seen as "global" inventory of all the connected chest. If you want this effect, than connect all of the chests with one color, if you don't want to do this, then use different colors.

You have to place the wires along power poles to either a smart chest or a smart inserter. Just select the wire, then ALT+click on a power pole, then click on the smart inserter or the smart chest. It the two are further away, you have to manually connect the wire from power pole to power pole until you can reach the chest or inserter you need.

Example:
You always want some shotgun spare ammo in storage, but you don't want to overproduce. So you set up your production line, and transfer the ammo via a smart inserter to a smart chest. You connect the nearby power pole to the chest, then connect the same power pole to the smart inserter with the green wire. If you hover the mouse over this pole, you should see a symbol a the right side of the screen with the items and amounts of these items inside the network. Next, open the inserter GUI, and set condition for the inserter. Here you can see to which networks the inserter is connected, and which conditions are currently set. For our example, we want to set something like this " ammo < 100" under the tab for green network condition.
This means, that the inserter will only operate as long as there are less than 100 shotgun ammo in the network. As soon as there are 100 ammo in the chest, the inserter will stop working, and so you can effectivly shut down one production line. As soon as you remove ammo out of the chest, production will start again.

This is a basic example of how to use this system. There are a lot of possibilities with this.

The logistic networks with roboports works exactly the same, but it is wireless and works only with the logistic chests.

I hope this will give you some basic understanding of how this works.

[ssilk]

This is not the best, but a first beginning: https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... it_network

Hm.

I think the basic thing to understand is, that the red and green wires are "smart wires": Every connected chest adds its content into the wire.

The best similarity is MIDI (musical standard), where you have keys on a keyboard and every key has a value for the note (the "height"). The keys are like the different item-types. You can press the key also with different power; that's the velocity. That is like the amount of items. So technically there is not much difference between "I press the C-key on my keyboard and it has a velocity of 120" or "I have Iron ore in the chest with an amount of 120 items". Same type of information, mathematically it is called Tuple. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple

Now some small "magic" (from the tuple-concept) comes into the game: there are several keyboards (=chests) and the velocity (=amount) of the keys (=item-types) for each keyboard is added.
Or in other words: You can see this added amount of items of each connected chest, if you hover with the mouse over a red/green wired power pole. It is like you put some chests inside a logistic area.
(But don't mix logistic network with circuit network!)

And the rest is easy: A smart inserter gets access to the measured amounts of items, and then it can be used to make decisions: Should I move or not?

You can built up several networks, because you have two types of wires (red and green) and if you don't connect them over the poles, they keep separated.

I recommend to built a small setup with two chests and a smart inserter to play around with it.

[gustavoghe]

Hey,

Thank you guys for the help. I do understand the mechanics now, but I also feel the we should have more practical examples on when or whether to use the logistics systems. I mean, the shotgun example is awsome, and i can understand that, but how about more complex desings?

Does any one has a setup that they will be willing to share with us?

By the way, loved the midi comparison!

Bye

[ssilk]

For more practical examples: I think this will change a lot in the upcoming versions. It would be useless to put too much work into that, especially, when the current use is... not very high. The logistic network is much more useful, for example!


OT:
And please don't mix logistic system with circuit network!

I saw it coming, that this "networks" are a nice naming, but ugly explainable, we really need to find new wording here. Some ideas:

Logistic network/system = Logistic area = circuit network without wires (chests connected by roboport)
Circuit network = red/green wires, connects only the chests, which the wire is plugged into.

Logistic area is included in construction area... How should I describe that with a "logistic network"? A network spreads to whatever size you need, like the electric network.

[Zourin]

Red and Green wires can be helpful, for instance, in coordinating train stations a little bit.

For example, you have three train stations. One at an oil refinery, one near your big power plant, and one at your smelting complex.

You have a set of smart inserters loading Solid Fuel into a train car. These are hooked up to both the Red AND Green wire net. The Red connection is set to stop at 500, the Green is set to stop at 1,000.

The Red wire line follows the long power lines to the Power Station unloading dock, where ten fast inserters pull solid fuel off the train wagon into smart chests. The smart chests are each capped at 1 stack (10x64=640 max capacity) to avoid emptying the wagon completely. You can optionally use smart inserters and use a mini-green network to limit overall capacity to 500, as long as the green wires do not connect to the OTHER green wire that is heading to your smelters.

The train continues to the Steel smelters, along with the Green wire from the Refinery station. The setup here is much the same. Inserters unload into smart chests that are Green wired to the Refinery loaders. If you wanted a 'smarter' you could do the opposite of the Power Station, and use a small red-wire network to control smart unloaders, as long as that red wire doesn't connect to the red wire going to the power station.

The Refinery smart inserters will continue to load the train car with Solid Fuel as long as either the power station or the smelters require additional fuel. The train ensures that the power station is fed first, followed by excess going to the smelters.

[ssilk]

Yes, nice. I used about that to the excess here: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=8&t=2688
Currently I'm working on a setup which feeds my factory only when some resources really needed and stores the rest and stops smelting, if too less power remaining.