Chest provision

[ledow]

How do people provide items from chests? Consider the following:

I make yellow, then red, then blue belts, automatically and add on over time.
My factory is therefore using a mix of all three and I have factories providing all three into chests.

I also want to hold a stock in hand of the latest belts.

So - if I make them passive provider chests, I can get the latest type of belt, and anything that uses intermediate belts can have them.

But... what I also want is to auto-trash older belts. When I upgrade a line from red to blue, the blue is supplied to me and the red taken away by bots.

But, I'd like to feed those red - preferentially to making new red belts - back into the blue-belt process.

If I use a requester chest for reds, feeding into the blue factory, I have to go back and remove the provider chest for the reds or everything will just flow constantly via bots from one to the other. And I might want to keep a stock of reds handy (I like to use reds in blueprints to form push-barriers around my walls, say).

The problem is that I either have to choose a cut-off point and from that point only use the new belts and rejig the chests, because I can't have "requester" and "provider" chests for the same item without them forming links and constantly moving all the contents.

If I use active providers, I end up with the same problem but just using main storage as a buffer and filling that up.

Similarly with other things - I like to have auto-trash enabled for ore and things that I'm likely to grab accidentally (e.g. solid fuel in trains), but if I have a requester to collect the trash, I also want a provider to give me a base amount when I need it (e.g. solid fuel for when I want to use the tank in a hurry).

How do people solve this? Do we have to do circuit magic between a requester and a provider and end up with bots hesitating between the two? What I feel I need is a chest that will take from the player or bots, but not from provider chests.

[enelos]

I don't use yellow and red after i got the blue belt but maybe my system can be adapted without too much trouble.
I put a requester chest between the two assembling machines requesting 20k of the yellow limited to one slot. The inserter from the yellow factory is set to work for yellow=0. This way it automatically recycle the old belts.
To use the older belt in blueprint i think you can put a passive provider on the side of the assembling machine. By setting the first inserter to belt=x and the second to belt<x, I think you can manage to recycle (as the construction bots will place deconstructed belt in storage chest which have priority over the passive provider) and to have a stack ready to use.
Its possible though that the bot will tend to transport belt from one chest to the other but only when using the more advanced belts. I will try to think about that

[Kelderek]

The answer is to use conditions on your inserters by connecting them to your logistic network. If you used a belt based design for automating the crafting of the 3 belt types, then I recommend rebuilding that to be a purely bot based build. Have your yellow belt assembler only get inserted ingredients if the amount of yellow belts in the logistics network is below some threshold you set. This way no new yellow belts will be made if you have lots in storage. Then for red and blue belts, just use requester chests to supply ingredients and again set a maximum threshold to limit the inserter that puts those ingredients into the assembler.

All of the items removed from your inventory via trash slots will end up in storage chests and that is exactly where they will be grabbed for crafting new items if needed. But since your inserters have conditions on them now nothing new will be crafted as long as there is already plenty in the network.

When you gain access to requester chests for the first time in a game it is often a good idea to review all the places where you are crafting useful items to let them pull from the logistic network. If you have belt based smelting, maybe add one or two requester chests to feed into extra smelters to smelt any excess ore that you put in your trash slots and ends up in the network. You can have a requester chest to take your wood and feed it to boilers. There are a lot of applications for handling the items you don't want on your character.

[rcp27]

Have the output of your yellow belt assembler feed into a requester chest that feeds the red belt assembler and tie it into the logistics network, asking it to run if the logistics network drops below a threshold. If you are worried about running out, have a second inserter with the same condition feeding a passive provider either direct from the assembler or from the requester. The only time you will end up with bots shuffling stuff from passive provider to requester is if the supply from the yellow assembler to the requester chest is slower than the red belt machine consumes them. It's hard to see how you would end up in this situation.

[Krazykrl]

You don't need to tie your inserters to the logistic network... you just need to wire them to the intermediate chests. KatherineofSky has a great setup for this, which i use in every game. Where you have 9 input/output chests for each Yellow/Red/Blue Belt/Underneathy/Splitter. Even early-game you would wire up your steel chests. i.e. yellow belts -> red belts would be YellowBeltAssembler -> Inserter (YellowBelt in the chest < 100) -> Steel Chest -> inserter -> RedBeltAssembler... Later, swap the steel chest to a Passive Provider... and when you get requester chests, plop them down and set them to request 20k of each. And you'll automatically upcycle them into the higher tier belts.

[rcp27]

I've seen the KoS tutorial video. The problem with that solution, and the reason a logistics network solution is needed is the requirement the other person who started the thread specified, that the lower level items remain available even after the higher level items are being made. Rather than belts, consider a system like this for recycling trashed inserters. There are good reasons why you will always want yellow or blue inserters to be available, but it is nevertheless advantageous to use scrap lower level inserters for making new high level ones.

[netmand]

Once your passive provider chest is full of belts that belt production should stop and the requester chest for ingredient belts will be fulfilled. Same goes with the lower-level assembler, etc. Once the requests are fulfilled you will have a cache of belts in their respective passive provider chests at all levels. Auto-trash belts to storage chests and limit the number of belts coming out of the assemblers so the requester chests will pick from storage chests and passive provider chests before more are produced.

Control how many belts are available for picking by reducing the size of the passive provider chests on the output of the assemblers (using the red-X limiter while the chest is opened).

Control how many belts are in your requester chests by limiting the number of ingredients requested, like 3-8 times the number needed to make a batch plus a number of extra to compensate for delivery delays. Keeping this number low also causes the lower level belts to be available if lower level belt production outpaces the ingredient requester chests for the next level. Control production pacing by number of assemblers and modules for each level.

[PuffTheDragon]

I had a simulare problem with copper and iron. I solves this by make a passiv provider chest. The inserter is connected to the logic network. When lesser than 500 hundred items (belts) are in the network, he insert some into the chest.
Now i have an request chest, with an inserter to put said item back into production. There are two combiners. On reads the content of the logic network. If there are more than 600 items, he gives out a 1 to an aretmetic combiner. Now i multiply by 20000 with said item. The request chest will now reuest every item in my network.

Pros: no more than 599 items of X are providet in my net. When i deconstruct everything will go back into production.
Cons: there is a little loop, when the request chest starts.