I finally got my trash under control

[divisor]

and created a trash sorter which turned out to be much more. Blueprint and documentation of why and how and everything is here: https://factorioprints.com/view/-N98MSus72WaKny3W9BW

My base is at about 400 SPM and trash got out of hand, so I built this and i'm glad I did

Screenshot_20220810_214223-1.png (2.43 MiB) Viewed 4075 times

I want to say thanks for 3500 hours of fun with plumbing, belt and logic puzzles, base building, train simulation and starship troopers like bug squashing! For me it's the best game in ages. It doesn't stop to be interesting and create new logistical problems to solve.
As a developer myself, I take my hat off to the great software development. I think it is largely a product of your great communication with the community and attention to detail. I can't wait for the expansion and hope for new regular friday facts.


Edit: fixed image

[mmmPI]

Interesting read !

I think you end up with bots in there because sometimes you "mine" one accidentaly, that happens frequently when they fly around , one just fly under your mouse cursor when you where clicking something else, this or removing roboport, you personnal construction robot then treats the logistic and other contruction bot as they treat the repair packs. I never thought of automating the process of putting them back into the network i will have to see if i can make sure to replicate the functionnality while keeping the number of bots a multipe of 100


From what i understand you only have those yellow chest in your whole network, and thus all the trash end up being carried there automatically ? i'm not sure i got how the "belt-based" prevent interfering with the rest of the network.

I saw on your description that you didn't experimented all that much with different chests and functionnalities and i wanted to point out that there exist ways to sort trash that are simpler in design. ( but not belt-based) Looking at your creation and the different steps you solved i think you solved a more complicated problem, that is if you replace/duplicate your input from yellow chest to train station because then you could use such design everywhere on the map even before blue science or robots. ( when you deconstruct a depleted outpost , you put everything into such train or when you have extended defense line, the deconstructed older defence , the loads of ammo and wall )

For managing trash while being inside a giant roboport network when moving say 2000 solar pannels or a furnace array with all the mineral or fuel inside in a lazy way, there is this new "filter" feature on yellow chest that was (discretly) added, that allow to designate 1 item robots will store in one yellow chest rather than in unfiltered yellow chest.(could cause interference ? ). One way to use it is to replace the red chest in the mall with a yellow chest filtered with the item produced in the assembly. This way when you trash an item, robots will place it in the shelves of the mall directly.

One could also place large arrays of filtered yellow chest for every item in the game but that feel boring compared to a belt-based sorting machine

[Tertius]

Thank you for posting this nice storage facility! While inspecting it and reading your motivation behind it, I realized I have similar (quality of life) issues and could use such a facility myself to improve throughput and avoid certain manual tasks.

Until now, I just added storage chests all over the place as long as I went out of storage space, merged it with the storage chests of my mall, but it's all a huge mess. Every storage chest has a little of this and a little of that, some full chests (especially some in the mall) are clogging machines, and the only place with the whole inventory is mouse hover some chest, but having it sorted by amount is not that helpful if I look for one given item.

So I will use your facility as inspiration for my own development. I don't know if I have the same demands as you, but in the end I might build some similar facility myself. I simply haven't done structured thinking about this yet. I only know one thing: either way my storage most often gets clogged with wood, stone, ore and intermediates that are absolutely not belonging there but need to feed back into the smelter's and manufacturing input instead of staying in the general storage space for manufactured wares.

I would probably divide things in "items to store" and "items to put back to where they belong". The first is stored, the second is feed back to where they belong.
Keep amount of bots in the network stable in case of destroyed bots.
Stop the mall manufacturing things if there are enough somewhere in the network.
Move items that I need most near some accessible pickup place.
Specialized storage and distribution for artillery shells (that's the clogger number one for me)
Use a central line of constant combinators to define the "wanted" amount of items in the network for the mall.

My vision is that if I put to trash a huge pile of everything with 100000 items including all kind of intermediates, all gets sorted so the mall will start to consume whatever is in that pile and start producing needed items.
I think I don't need dedicated chests with "this item only goes to this chest" - in the end, it's not important where some item is stored, it's only important that it is best available for the task it is intended for, and there is enough storage, as long as it is kind of central.

[aka13]

Thank you for posting this nice storage facility! While inspecting it and reading your motivation behind it, I realized I have similar (quality of life) issues and could use such a facility myself to improve throughput and avoid certain manual tasks.

Until now, I just added storage chests all over the place as long as I went out of storage space, merged it with the storage chests of my mall, but it's all a huge mess. Every storage chest has a little of this and a little of that, some full chests (especially some in the mall) are clogging machines, and the only place with the whole inventory is mouse hover some chest, but having it sorted by amount is not that helpful if I look for one given item.

So I will use your facility as inspiration for my own development. I don't know if I have the same demands as you, but in the end I might build some similar facility myself. I simply haven't done structured thinking about this yet. I only know one thing: either way my storage most often gets clogged with wood, stone, ore and intermediates that are absolutely not belonging there but need to feed back into the smelter's and manufacturing input instead of staying in the general storage space for manufactured wares.

I would probably divide things in "items to store" and "items to put back to where they belong". The first is stored, the second is feed back to where they belong.
Keep amount of bots in the network stable in case of destroyed bots.
Stop the mall manufacturing things if there are enough somewhere in the network.
Move items that I need most near some accessible pickup place.
Specialized storage and distribution for artillery shells (that's the clogger number one for me)
Use a central line of constant combinators to define the "wanted" amount of items in the network for the mall.

My vision is that if I put to trash a huge pile of everything with 100000 items including all kind of intermediates, all gets sorted so the mall will start to consume whatever is in that pile and start producing needed items.
I think I don't need dedicated chests with "this item only goes to this chest" - in the end, it's not important where some item is stored, it's only important that it is best available for the task it is intended for, and there is enough storage, as long as it is kind of central.

I just have 1 furnace at the mall, which slowly chugs away ore which should not be there, and two boilers, which burn away wood that should not be there

[mmmPI]

I just have 1 furnace at the mall, which slowly chugs away ore which should not be there, and two boilers, which burn away wood that should not be there

that's cool , one can burn the wood in coal liquefaction that require steam if using solar pannel or nuclear energy, i use the same trick with science packs and labs , i always have 1 next to requester chest for all science when there are some 10 20 science that you pick up accidentaly when moving a belt or something.

Until now, I just added storage chests all over the place as long as I went out of storage space, merged it with the storage chests of my mall, but it's all a huge mess. Every storage chest has a little of this and a little of that, some full chests (especially some in the mall) are clogging machines, and the only place with the whole inventory is mouse hover some chest, but having it sorted by amount is not that helpful if I look for one given item.

One can avoid the clogging in mall by outputting into an active provider chest, as long as you limit the inserter outputing in it based on the logistic network content, and that you have filtered storage chest in quantity in an area where it's easier to build a 5x5 block of them. I do that for landfill solar pannel and accumulator. But then you don't get to enjoy the mechanical sorting machine ^^

attention to detail

I've noticed playing with the blueprint that there is 1 too many filter inserter between those picking up rocket control unit and logistic robots

[Tertius]

One can avoid the clogging in mall by outputting into an active provider chest

Of course, but this seems so wasteful. Using a chest with a capacity of 48 stacks only to transit some manufactured items. It's almost always empty. These are never used as storage space, only as extended output buffer of assembling machines or other item sources you consume with an inserter. On the other hand, they are intended for exactly that, so I might of course start using them for that.

[coppercoil]

Very good topic. I also have "The Great Recycling Station" where all possible and impossible items are sorted, buffered, and then redirected to the production bus, or to the raw material bus. I don't like storage chests and don't have whole-factory-network area because of the chaos. I do belt-based production, so everything has its own place, and production lines stop working if buffers are full. When I build some remote factory, I deploy a small temporary material-providing train station that can build just anything, and when done, trains automatically return all leftovers back to the booster base. I mean, zillion of leftovers . So, they definitely must be processed.
Sometimes I destroy a part factory because I just discovered a better design for it. An another zillion
An old defense wall deconstructed? Three zillions.
Also, I can just drop unnecessary personal items anywhere, and everything will return into the same chest in the mall. I like it.