Melting all qualities of ice with one chemical plant

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mingo888
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Melting all qualities of ice with one chemical plant

Post by mingo888 »

I am attempting to design a machine which melts any quality of ice received. This would be useful on Fulgora, where I have quality modules in all my recyclers. Although a simple solution would be to just have five chemical plants, one for each quality, I am trying to do it with just one plant and circuit controlled recipes. The biggest challenge is avoiding changing recipes before all ice of one quality has been processed, since ice in the trash slot breaks the machine.

I believe I have gotten close to a working prototype. The blueprint below works as such:
  1. The items on the belt in front of the chemical plant (various qualities of ice) are read and passed to the selector combinator
  2. The selector combinator uses the "quality transfer" feature to transfer the quality of the ice to the ice melting signal. (There is a constant combinator emitting the ice melting signal.)
  3. The quality ice melting signal is passed to a decider combinator which (I thought) acts as a latch that holds onto the first signal it receives until reset.
  4. The output of the aforementioned decider combinator is used to set the recipe on the chemical plant.
  5. The contents of the chemical plant, the recipe finished signal, and the contents of the inserter feeding the plant and read and fed into another decider combinator.
  6. This second decider combinator only outputs the reset signal (which resets the first decider combinator that is acting as a latch) when a recipe has just finished and no ice of any quality is present in the inserter or the chemical plant.
The trouble with this design is that I misunderstood how the "anything" signal works as output in the decider combinator in step 3. I interpreted "first signal" as the first one received, but it actually refers to some internal signal ordering if signal values are the same. This results in my latch failing to act as a latch if a lower quality of ice shows up on the belt while higher quality ice is being processed. I tried adding an arithmetic combinator to multiply the output of the latch to be larger than any other potential input signal, but couldn't get that to work either (it got stuck in some loop with two signals).

I am open to any suggestions to fix my design, as well as to any simpler designs. I am somewhat frustrated that adding quality to ice provides no benefits, but results in strange problems like this. A simple way to strip quality off the ice, or allow the chemical plant to accept any quality of ice, would nullify the need for this device.

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BlueTemplar
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Re: Melting all qualities of ice with one chemical plant

Post by BlueTemplar »

While not answering your question,
for similar frustrations, check out :
Ability to craft lower quality with higher quality
And indeed :
newllama wrote: ↑Fri Nov 08, 2024 4:06 am [...]

Nothing to see here this is a totally normal thing on Fulgora:
Image
And :
Allow Quality Downgrade
BobDiggity (mod-scenario-pack)
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waterBear
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Re: Melting all qualities of ice with one chemical plant

Post by waterBear »

This is something I also did, but for mech armor, BP below.

It reads the contents of the input chest and it will set the recipe to make the highest quality that has enough ingredients in the chest. It resets the recipe when it receives the "finished" blip from the assembly machine. Oh, and it is smart enough to unload all the old quality ingredients before resetting its logic loop. It does work, just slowly.

It is quite a complicated Rube-Goldberg machine. As is often the case it required adding a few combinators to delay the signal, since the logic chain that determines if there are enough ingredients to make any given quality is quite long.

It might be helpful for doing a more general recipe or help you with your ice specifically.

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fryyyy
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Re: Melting all qualities of ice with one chemical plant

Post by fryyyy »

Try this:



We're checking the items like your blueprint, but we ignore what's on the belt (only counting inserter and chemical plant) if the chemical plant is working or if there is an item in the inserter's hand. I did a bit of testing and it seems to work properly. Let me know if this isn't what you were looking for.

Signals:
W: Is the plant working?
A: Is there anything in plant or inserter hand?
❌: Do we want to ignore belt contents?
✔️: Do we want to include belt contents?
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mingo888
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Re: Melting all qualities of ice with one chemical plant

Post by mingo888 »

Thanks for that blueprint, waterBear. I think it may be far too complicated for my simple ice melting machine, but I will keep it handy for the future when I want to upgrade my equipment.

Thank you too, fryyyy. Your blueprint worked wonderfully. I was actually able to improve it slightly and remove three of the combinators by noticing that the W signal isn't needed at all (simply checking the contents of the inserter and machine is sufficient to ignore the belt), the X signal isn't needed (we can check if "everything" = 0 and output the green checkmark then), and one of the decider combinators normalizing all signals to 1 isn't needed. I couldn't find a way to make it any simpler, though; the other decider combinator normalizing to 1 can't be removed without breaking the machine due to signal mixing.

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