TL;DR
The current quality circuit tools are limited and require a lot of clicking and many parts for a setup to do anything useful. I'm sure there is "design space" that can be explored, that doesn't make it too easy, but makes it a little easier to handle quality on the circuit network.What?
"WHAT do you suggest? What is your idea that should be changed?"I'm not really sure what the solution should look like. After writing the post, maybe the thing I want is a "each quality" meta logic signal, similar to "each", "every" and "any".
Or maybe I just want the quality symbols that already exist to be functional meta symbols, that function "intuitively"? e.g. "x number of uncommon items == uncommon quality == True"?
Maybe I want a "items" x "qualities" => "list of all each item and at each quality" multiplication? Not like this, but you get what I mean?
- 03-14-2025, 22-04-52.png (50.21 KiB) Viewed 510 times
Why?
I think the quality system really enhances the game and offers a lot of interesting choices! But dealing with it is really hard. Even with "programming". The circuit system feels dis-proportionally weak when dealing with quality, compared to other aspects of the game.Dealing with quality and items usually result in a matrix of [items] x [quality tiers]. The tools don't really fit this problem well. We can separate decently with filters, but it's very very hard to combine them or do something holistic.
For example, I would like to set up a requester chest, to request the highest available tier of science pack first, so they get used first, before I have to resort to using lower tier science. This requires a lot of manual clicking and one quality transfer combinator for each science pack.
- 03-14-2025, 21-52-59.png (522.98 KiB) Viewed 510 times
I can't set up e.g. a constant combinator, select all science types at basic quality, "matrix multiply" it with quality and cross reference that with my logistics network data.
I can currently also not do something like this to select things from [base list] and compare it against [rarity]:
- 03-14-2025, 21-54-21.png (70.06 KiB) Viewed 510 times
but what I didn't expect before starting, was that filtering what I have, to detect which outputs I should be setting is actually way harder than setting up that mall. The setup below isn't even complete, I could output the missing ingredients with another decider, but the main point is that the part on the right does very little, but requires a lot of space and clicking to build.
- 03-14-2025, 21-53-54.png (1.06 MiB) Viewed 510 times
Can the current tools do what I want? Probably, yes.
Maybe I am misunderstanding how the tools that already exist are supposed to be used, but it feels like an unreasonable amount of effort, to achieve relatively simple results.
If I am wrong and what I'm asking for already exists but I missed it, please share some hints.
