Productivity bonus given too late

[Ober3550]

So I know that recently a decision was made on how productivity is treated in smelters how they reset between craft types which really messes up the way that smart smelters work. There is a way to ensure that the effect works on copper and iron ore processing by limiting inserters to only insert 10 at a time however in my experience occasionally the 10 crafts will complete and the purple bar will stop right before the end which can be a pain when the smelter is intended to do a different item next cycle and you lose the extra item. The next problem I've faced with productivity values and smelting is how there isn't a simple and or efficient way to ensure that 5 crafts occur for steel in a batch. I'm wondering if theres a mechanical fix however I haven't thought of one yet and it'd just generally be easier if the current productivity value for steel atleast is stored in the smelter. Another fix would be to make the internal buffer for steel hold 25 or 50 items in the smelter... however that wouldn't allow for different types of productivity modules other than two ones that give 10% bonus.

[Ober3550]

I was on my phone previously but here is the afformentioned productivity bug.

[Rseding91]

Thanks for the bug report and screenshot but none of this is a bug.

"Smart smelting" was never a goal when designing how furances work and as such isn't something the furnace logic cares about.

[Ober3550]

I don't get how the productivity bar not reaching the end after the theoretical bonus isn't a problem. I've managed to come up with a neat control system to manage creating steel in batches however around half of the furnaces still have the same problem. If the bar isn't reaching the end after 5 items for 20% prod doesn't that mean that you're not quite getting 20% prod?

[Rseding91]

If the bar isn't reaching the end after 5 items for 20% prod doesn't that mean that you're not quite getting 20% prod?

Yes, just like how some research doesn't actually complete with the exact number of science packs it says it needs. The progress is applied each tick as a % of the total progress and when that adds up it's not exact and can be slightly smaller/larger. That's expected and not something we plan on changing because it wouldn't be worth the time spent and may not ever be possible to change.

[Ober3550]

What would you suggest for a small moded fix? Add a small value of prod on the tick the machine stops?

[BlakeMW]

A possible solution would be to make a very small increase to productivity, i.e. instead of +10%, making it +10.01% - this would not really change the actual productivity but would bias the system towards "rounding up".

[Ober3550]

Do you happen to know how to do it? My Lua is very bad and it'd be handy for someone to just make something quickly. What's the minimum productivity increase you can do?

[BlakeMW]

You could try modifying the modules themselves. I'm not sure what it would do in terms of display but presumably it would tend to round for display.