, computers.
For example:
- an item spoils, but there will never be a full hand of spoilage so the inserter will stall with a partial hand
- collect as many items as available and swing with a partial hand without waiting (and stalling) for the rest
- with quality modules, if an item with an upgraded quality has been crafted, the machine will stall until the item with upgraded quality has been extracted.
The stack inserter can be made to swing with a partial hand, if:
- a blacklist is configured and items in hand appear on the blacklist
- a whitelist is configured and items in hand disappear from the whitelist
Partial hand from machine output
So the solution is to wire the item source with the stack inserter and set the source to read ingredients (or if a belt set to hold mode). Set the inserter to "set filters" and "whitelist". This way the inserter will only ever try to grab what's currently in the machine or current belt piece and will swing immediately as soon as the current item has been fully extracted so it disappears from the whitelist.- 0 machine.png (172.12 KiB) Viewed 268 times
Partial hand from belt [whitelist]
In case of a belt, and if used with a regular inserter, it has the advantage it will not wait for half a second if more items show up. It will swing immediately.- 1 belt 1.png (98.53 KiB) Viewed 268 times
Partial hand from belt [blacklist]
In case we cannot connect a wire to the source for some reason, for example because we cannot set it to read contents because we want to read ingredients, or if we want to grab directly from a splitter output, we can use the blacklist:Wire the inserter to some building nearby to create a circuit network and make sure that building doesn't send anything to the circuit. Set the inserter to both "set filter" (blacklist) and "read hand" (hold mode). This way the inserter will immediately blacklist whatever it grabbed in the previous tick and will swing immediately.
In most cases this is equivalent to the whitelist approach above, but you need that dummy circuit connection. And in case you use it to read from a belt, you only ever grab 1-2 items (or item stacks) from the belt. With the whitelist approach the inserter will continue grabbing items as long as they flow into the current belt piece with belt movement.
- 2 belt 2.png (120.54 KiB) Viewed 268 times
Build full belt stacks from recycler output
Another feature we want is with high throughput recycler output. We want to put all recycling results stacked on the output belt. If you let the recycler output directly on a belt, it will not wait until a stack of 4 items accumulated, it will output whatever it currently has.So we need to handle the stacking with stack inserters.
It's possible to let items stay in the recycler and just remove whenever a full stack inserter hand accumulated. Configure a constant combinator with all possible recycling results and set the logistic group multiplier to -15, so the constant combinator will output -15 for all results. Feed this and the recycler content to the inserter as whitelist, so as soon as 16+ items of one kind accumulated, they will show up as whitelist and the inserter will grab a full hand.
- 4 recycler 1.png (204.96 KiB) Viewed 268 times
Build full belt stacks from recycler output with quality
If quality or more than 12 different result items are involved, this will not work because the recycler can stall with a full inventory. We need to directly output to a chest as buffer, then extract items from that chest.We have up to 3 places for stack inserters grab from the chest and put the items onto belts. Instead of reading the recycler inventory, we read the chest content.
- 3 recycler 0.png (322.54 KiB) Viewed 268 times
If you inspect the constant combinator configuration, you will notice different things to accomplish several tasks:
- the sets are different. Top inserter is set to output just jelly, processing units and spoilage, bottom one is set to output carbon fiber and bulk inserters.
- every quality of every possible item has to be explicitly listed. There is no wildcard possible here.
- the multiplier is -3 instead of -15, and the amounts are 0, 1, 5 and 1000. So we get 0, -3, -15 and -3000.
- single item: 0 makes the inserter swing for every single item (no stack): we want this for spoilage and very rare items from higher quality.
- low throughput: -3 makes the inserter swing for 4 items: 1 belt stack, it will not wait for full 16 items
- high throughput: -15 makes the inserter swing for 16 items only
- no throughput: -3000 will make the item never appear on the whitelist. This item isn't handled by this inserter.