Adaptive production

[vesoljc]

I've started upcycling of iron and copper plates. My setup includes a bunch of assemblers and a few recyclers. I've got two circular belt loops, one for plate input and one for produced items (pipe or copper cable). Recycled plates are fed back into plate loop, while legendary plates are extracted from the loop. I've got a bunch of lvl1 assemblers, a few lvl2, and one each for 3 and 4. This setup works fine, but this ratio of how many assemblers for each quality level needed is bothering me

Various production and Fulgora recycling has left me with 100K+ of lvl2/3/4 plates which I would like now to feed into the input loop, basically boosting legendary production. But once I start feeding those, the assemblers ratio is now screwed, since I need more lvl2/3/4 assemblers.

So, I've started thinking if this ratio could be driven by circuit control. Let's say I have 20 assemblers and an input loop belt with "Read belt hold contents". Belt content outputs 4 signals - counts of different quality plates: 500/200/20/10

How would I now convert those numbers into "Set recipe", so that I would have 13xQ1, 5xQ2, 1xQ3, 1xQ4?

And later, when a surge of Q4 plates changes the input counts into 100/20/20/500, the ratio would be adapted?

I mean, I know how to divide those numbers, but after that I'm kinda stuck. I assume the logic would have to be tick based, similar to how Quality Grinder setups work.

One problem I kinda foresee, are feeder inserters which collect certain quality. If you change recipe (i.e. Q1 -> Q2) on the fly while inserter is collecting Q1 plates, that inserter is now stuck with Q1 plates. Is there a way to "purge" them?

[waterBear]

If I understand your question right, the simplest way to do it is to have inserter -> steel chest -> inserter in front of every assembly machine, then do a typical quality-switching circuit based on the contents of the chest. Logic is something like "if legendary steel >= 8 then switch recipe to legendary steel chest", while reading machine contents (include while crafting), inserter hand contents, and chest contents. I probably still have a quality switching blueprint lying around somewhere if you want to see it, they're not complicated once you get past reading all the contents carefully.

Presumably the reason you don't want a bunch of different assembly machines for each quality is because you don't have enough legendary quality modules to go around, but that's by far the easiest solution once you know your production ratios.

[Muche]

One problem I kinda foresee, are feeder inserters which collect certain quality. If you change recipe (i.e. Q1 -> Q2) on the fly while inserter is collecting Q1 plates, that inserter is now stuck with Q1 plates. Is there a way to "purge" them?

If the inserters are already holding something (when the recipe changes and the new one does not want it) they will put it into machine's trash slot, so they are able to feed it what it wants.
You will have to deal with unused ingredients present in an output chest/belt where previously only products were to be expected.

[waterBear]

I happened to have the game open for a minute to test something else, and figured I'd copy a quality-switching design for you to see. It's not recommended to switch recipes on any machine with a productivity bonus since you lose the accumulated bonus when you switch recipes, but you can see what's going on using this BP.

It has all the ingredients you need - reading contents from everything, emptying to a belt, upcycling low-quality outputs, and taking inputs from a chest. The full monty.

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