Allow belt/chest circuit readers to read spoilage level of most spoiled item

[Tinyboss]

It would be nice for pentapod-egg-keeper-alivers. Just run it when the stored egg is just about to hatch.

[Vasya228]

For logistic network I kinda solved it by offloading fresh products to a storage chest (yellow) with an inserter, and then unloading most spoiled to a passive provider chest (red) when yellow has more than N items. From the red chest most spoiled get offloaded right into a heating tower in the same manner.

As bots prioritise yellow chests over red, they get the freshest eggs, and red chest keeps some for an emergency.

Production works constantly and refills chests in a rate which allows all contents to be burnt in 1/2 of spoil time.
I also tried to trigger offloading on a timer (based on a decider combinator), but in case of production issues it would burn all eggs requiring me to visit Gleba to refill it manually.

[d4ltr0n]

+1 I would kill for this feature. The most obvious use case in my mind is the ability to burn biter eggs or pentapod eggs right before they hatch.

[adam_bise]

This would be best to put as a selector option. Freshness ascending selects spoilage first, rotting second, and unspoilable last. Would work well with a decider dropdown that filters spoilable vs unspoilable.

[jdrexler75]

To add another related idea this makes me think about, add an inserter choice to pick up anything with specific spoil settings. For example, remove anything with less then a few minutes or percent left. Kind of like the spoil first/last but numeric which makes more since because stacks in chests average spoilage anyways.

Yes, those were my thoughts as well, since inserters already have a similar setting anyway, my wish would be to make this an inserter setting.

As far as I can tell all use cases would be to decide removing too spoiled items from a container, be it to burn eggs before they hatch or discarding low-value agri science that would just clog the belt or spoil in transit. The circuit network isn't really suitable for this option, and for chests it will get really complicated when they hold different spoilable items such as a variety of quality agri science. But an inserter can only pick and hold one type of item with one spoilage value; it seems the right place for this.

So perhaps extend the "spoilage priority" setting to include a threshold % for the "spoiled first" priority, or allow setting a threshold in the filters (that might be a more intuitive place to look for this functionality, but might be messier to find a good UI.) Alternatively, a new separate option.

Spoilage filter.png (40.48 KiB) Viewed 78 times

Realistically though it would be a splitter option, like sorting out the bad apples as they pass some optical inspection equipment. Then you'd have to constantly keep the produce flowing to avoid eggs hatching though, but perhaps that's a compromise which doesn't make the problem too easy to solve.