Circuits - options for ANY quality / SUM of quality / IGNORE quality?

[4wry]

Quality is poised to be something you need to keep tight control over in a base since it potentially causes a lot of disruption if intermingled into normal production. One reason is that regular counts will no longer work. E.g. stacks get split (no full trains), recipes become incompatible, conditions are not met and so on...

For circuits something that would remedy this to a degree is to have a default "Any" quality setting to merge signals by item. A basic question would e.g. be - how many items are in a chest, regardless of quality? Since each quality level is essentially it's own item I doubt there is currently any convenient way to sum them. The selector combinator can filter by quality, so technically you could build counters using the sum of the outputs for a specific item, however, this could and should potentially be readily available.

One thing that might be nice on combinators would be an option to 'ignore quality' and return the sum of all at e.g. a normal signal. Otherwise the selector combinator could have this as an output (outputting the sum for each item category as 'normal').

This may not solve all challenges (e.g. separate stacks and inventory space, incompatible recipes), but it may give players a slightly better handle on things when circuits are involved. As mentioned, quality production is probably best setup separated.

[Firestorm253]

11-16-2024, 15-54-19.png (147.18 KiB) Viewed 534 times

let's say you want to make a combinator that only passes through certain items, but all qualities of this item, this is currently impossible.

11-16-2024, 15-55-25.png (464.02 KiB) Viewed 534 times

it's not possible with a quality transfer combinator, because i want the quality to be kept.

please add this functionality

[Firestorm253]

current workaround:

11-16-2024, 17-29-08.png (203.93 KiB) Viewed 507 times

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this transfers the input signal from base quality to each quality, removing the need to set each quality of each item, and then subtracting it as a very big number. at the end adding a "each > 0"

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into an older thread with a more general suggestion for the same issue.

[rapus]

Quality is poised to be something you need to keep tight control over in a base since it potentially causes a lot of disruption if intermingled into normal production. One reason is that regular counts will no longer work. E.g. stacks get split (no full trains), recipes become incompatible, conditions are not met and so on...

For circuits something that would remedy this to a degree is to have a default "Any" quality setting to merge signals by item. A basic question would e.g. be - how many items are in a chest, regardless of quality? Since each quality level is essentially it's own item I doubt there is currently any convenient way to sum them. The selector combinator can filter by quality, so technically you could build counters using the sum of the outputs for a specific item, however, this could and should potentially be readily available.

One thing that might be nice on combinators would be an option to 'ignore quality' and return the sum of all at e.g. a normal signal. Otherwise the selector combinator could have this as an output (outputting the sum for each item category as 'normal').

This may not solve all challenges (e.g. separate stacks and inventory space, incompatible recipes), but it may give players a slightly better handle on things when circuits are involved. As mentioned, quality production is probably best setup separated.

Inspired by the recent answer of Firestorm253, that's the most compact approach for grouping all qualities on the common quality channel (takes a single selector combinator):

QualityGrouping.png (63.78 KiB) Viewed 264 times

How it works: It transfers every item and quality channel to the normal quality of the very same item. As by the wire mechanics, if multiple combinators put a value to the same channel, the wire sums them up. Thus, "every quality of item"-> "place value for common quality item" -> "wire sums up on the common quality item signal channel"