Smart/multitask furnaces

[-root]

So I just rebuilt this live on twitch. Took me nearly 3 hrs to do on a much smaller scale with only copper and iron.

This is some next level stuff right here. Medusalem & Rk, props. Mad props. You've just set a new bench mark for super-psycho builds!

I'll be putting out a youtube video detailing the build and how it works.

[MeduSalem]

@rk84 and @MeduSalem (et. al.) Hey guys! Beautiful looking setups! I am thoroughly intrigued! But I am more of a hands-on type of guy, so is there any way you could provide a save game for me (and others) to check these out? (If I would need mods installed that would be no problem, but that doesn't seem to be the case.) With these explanations along with an interactive experience, I'm sure I could get a much better grasp of logic and logistics setups such as these and in general (even though these look quite advanced). In any case, thanks for the inspiration, guys!

I'd like to but with the slow upload rate of my internet connection it would take nearly forever to upload that huge thing somewhere... -_- ^^

Thanks for the help. It fixed the stone issue. Now I'm trying to come up new idea to control active furnaces. Like if every furnace had a number (from 1 to max count of furnaces) that activates it. And some how every ore type would get range of numbers to loop activate furnaces.

Glad I could help. ^^

It cannot be guaranteed, cause it can happen, that some provider chest as odd numbers inside (1 or 3 stone) and then the bot brings also only 1 or 3.
There is no way to guarantee anything, if a furnace needs > 1 item.

Well it's not a 100% gurantee but I'd say 99.99999%. It's near to impossible that my stone provider chests would only have 1-3 stone inside ever. I've 6 provider chests feeded by fast inserters from an express belt filled up with stone being backed up by another 12mio stone storage system nearby which is currently filled with about 3.5 mio stone if not more (haven't checked the storage lately but it might be even fuller). I'm literally getting choked with resources on that map, which is my own fault since this test map is one of my earlier ones where I did not know how to make some "nice" decisions during map creation.

The chance that I'm running out of stone in the provider chests is converging to zero since I'm producing bricks only on demand rather than constantly, since I might end up with millions of bricks with no stone left to make more rails to expand the network...

That's the same reason as to why I won't overproduce steel bars... because I might end up with millions of steel bars but no iron plates left for everything else.

I know it does save space by compression but there are not enough consumers for Steel Bars and Stone Bricks in my opinion to make it worthwhile to do it; so that will always stay something I will only produce on demand with a little output buffer of 4800-9600 bars/bricks (so 1-2 full chests of each) or something like it. And they will be refilled over time if there are spikes in the demand which the production couldn't keep up with.

If there would be a way to get iron plates back from steel plates and stone from stone bricks by the same ratio... like getting 5 iron plates for each steel bar then I would actually compress all iron plates into steel bars and decompress them when I need them. xD

At least I make sure that the consumption never surpasses the production rate or only during small spikes I can live with. Overproducing stuff carelessly where you might run out of resources and gaining too much of something you don't need anyways will lead to problems no matter which setup you are using.

So I just rebuilt this live on twitch. Took me nearly 3 hrs to do on a much smaller scale with only copper and iron.

This is some next level stuff right here. Medusalem & Rk, props. Mad props. You've just set a new bench mark for super-psycho builds!

I'll be putting out a youtube video detailing the build and how it works.

Thanks ^^

I'll be watching the video once you link it.



If it were possible to set a schedule in assemblers as well... like 2 or 3 types of items that may be produced depending on which source materials you feed it then I might actually expand the idea there as well because I've too many assemblers just idling and doing nothing or only every once in a while.

... but that's just a dream of mine. xD

[ssilk]

Well it's not a 100% gurantee but I'd say 99.99999%.

Sorry, but a guarantee is 100%. And btw. it is not 99.99999%, it is more like 99.9%, cause it might happen, if any chest gets empty.

But - well - that is different thinking of Germans: "When does the bad thing happen?", instead of "How long does it work without happening something bad".

[MeduSalem]

Sorry, but a guarantee is 100%. And btw. it is not 99.99999%, it is more like 99.9%, cause it might happen, if any chest gets empty.

But - well - that is different thinking of Germans: "When does the bad thing happen?", instead of "How long does it work without happening something bad".

I understand that concern and it is fully legitimate. ^^

I have found a solution to the empty chests... just by preventing the "input" inserters (the ones emptying the requester chests and dumping stuff into the furnaces) from running when the provider chests are about to run dry (simple logistic network check in my case). This way neither the requester nor provider chests ever get empty even if you run out of stone or iron ore/plate supply. The production will then halt and wait until the contents of the provider chests raise above the threshold again. xD

That way you ensure that once the robots arrive at the provider chests that they will always have at least enough resources that they can pick up 4 at once.

That's the failsafe if you really somehow managed to run out of stone/iron plates ever. The same goes for iron ore and copper ore even it wouldn't be necessary for them.^^

Actually this failsafe works quite well...

I've 98 furnaces... which basically means 98 * 4 (robot cargo size) = 392. I set the inserters which dump the iron plates into the furnace for steel bars to only work when there are above a total of 400 iron plates in the logistic network distributed over all the output chests of other furnaces and in a small provider buffer chest holding additional plates (this one is coming back from my storage facility containing iron plates and since they are passive chests they have a lower priority than the active provider output chests next to the furnaces, thereby bots will only take stuff from the storage facility when the active provider chests next to the furnaces are empty.

I did basically the same for the stone inserters as well and for iron ore and copper ore... just to test things.

I could set the number higher for additional security if I would be doubtful, but it should work just fine with that since I let it run on maximum output rate of steel plates possible and the iron plate requester chests never ran dry, nor did the iron plate provider chests. They didn't even go below the local buffer stored in the requester chest because they are refilled at the same pace as the plates are consumed. ^^

So if even if the steel demand is very high they can't consume more than what is available and they will always leave some more plates in the provider chests so that there's never any odd number in the chests, which is especially important for stone.

[-root]

Ok, best place to watch it is probably twitch.

VOD on Twitch

The youtube video is blocked in some countries.

[Phillip_Lynx]

... The youtube video is blocked in some countries.

Surley because of the music you played during the stream

[ssilk]

I have found a solution to the empty chests... just by preventing the "input" inserters (the ones emptying the requester chests and dumping stuff into the furnaces) from running when the provider chests are about to run dry (simple logistic network check in my case). This way neither the requester nor provider chests ever get empty even if you run out of stone or iron ore/plate supply. The production will then halt and wait until the contents of the provider chests raise above the threshold again. xD

That way you ensure that once the robots arrive at the provider chests that they will always have at least enough resources that they can pick up 4 at once.

Well, might be, that you are right. My concern was about the moment when one provider/storage chest runs dry. There could be 1 or 3 items left in the chest and the bot picks them up and drops it in the requester and brings your counts in it from even to odd. I admit, that I never tested, if that can really happen, but I think it can.

Edit: The fact that it didn't happen yet is eventually, because I think, that the chests might never have odd values in it. So a good next question is: does it happen, if the chest contain an odd value? And if yes: How can a chest contain odd values?

[MeduSalem]

Well, might be, that you are right. My concern was about the moment when one provider/storage chest runs dry. There could be 1 or 3 items left in the chest and the bot picks them up and drops it in the requester and brings your counts in it from even to odd. I admit, that I never tested, if that can really happen, but I think it can.

Edit: The fact that it didn't happen yet is eventually, because I think, that the chests might never have odd values in it. So a good next question is: does it happen, if the chest contain an odd value? And if yes: How can a chest contain odd values?

Yupp if only 1 or 3 items are left in a chest... no matter if it is the provider chest (which happens when they emptied by bots faster than they are filled by inserters) or requester chest (which may happen when bots take from multiple provider chests containing only 1 item and deliver it to the same requester chest or something)... it becomes a complete disaster because then it will require manual help to get some of the furnaces unstuck. It builds up a race condition which has to be prevented.

Complex Approach

So if you only have one provider chest providing raw stone to the furnace setup and set a Threshold the input smart inserters can't go below depending on how much is in the logistic network then it will be no problem... Since bots acquiring stone will "remove" the items from the "available"-stack instantly once they get the task assigned to pick something up. This works even with the travel-delay the bots have, in fact this works even better than having red/green wire doing it, because they give wrong information on the already for pick-up "reserved" items.



I've studied the behavior by hovering my mouse over a logistic chest and watching the resource numbers. They are always reflecting the available resources MINUS what is already "reserved" for bot pick-up. If at any point the available stone number drops below 4 or worse then you're screwed because then there is more consumption than resources available for pick-up guaranteed leading to the odd-number problem which we try to avoid.

To prevent that odd number disaster and the resource number from dropping below 4 in the stone provider chests just raise the "Threshold" in the Smart "input"-inserters to a higher level until the numbers never drop to 4 or below in the available resource counter. That's the empiric method on getting the Threshold right but takes quite some time to study and will always depend on the exact number of furnaces and the number of provider chests.

So I thought about a way to calculate that Threshold for Stone (which I may be corrected upon if someone finds a mistake):

Code: Select all

Threshold = (Number of Stone Provider Chests - 1) * Chest Capacity + Robot Cargo Size * Number of Furnaces + 4

Chest Capacity = 2400 for Stone
Robot Cargo Size = 4 (it does work with sizes of 1 and 2 as well, but not with 3 because then it will lead to the odd number problem again!)

The "+ 4" at the end ensures that even in the worst case scenario that there is at least 4 stone left in the provider chest.

This is because you won't exactly know which provider chest the robots will prefer for pick-up if there are several available so it might happen that all bots will go for one stone provider chest totally emptying it while the other provider chests are completely full, thereby maybe falsely fullfilling the threshold requirement if one doesn't include that dumb behavior of bots into consideration.

For more security you can raise the number gained by the formular (I prefer to work in increments of 100 or 1000), but it should work with the formular otherwise there are glitches or special behaviors in the game programming I don't know of yet and which I haven't encountered the past month. ^^

This works for Stone obviously... at least I haven't had any weird things happening when I forcefully shut down the stone supply.



For Steel Bars the above empiric method or formular works too to some extend, but there I tend to calculate only with 1 provider chest because of the following reason reasons:

On top of the work condition for the "input" inserters you will need to have a local buffer in the Iron Plate Requester Chests. It may be based on a multiple of 4 and 5 (robot cargo size, inserter stack bonus and steel bars requiring 5 iron plates, but any other number will work as well as long as it is greater than at least 20 to overcome inserter speed and to hide bot deliver delay).

This is because robots only can carry 4 Iron Plates so it will take at least 2 Bots (in other cases even more) to deliver the required amount of Iron Plates... but since the "Input" Inserters will get the chance to input Iron Plates more than once until the first Steel Bar is finished crafting - thereby preventing the Inserter from working in a very delayed manner - the local buffer needs to be greater than that. So it would be in the best interest to have a multiple of 4 and 5 as a failsafe. I'm currently using 100 as local buffer in the Iron Plate Requester Chests and it never drops below 90 under very heavy load, because in my case the "Input" inserters stop working because I'm hitting the Threshold of available plates in the provider chests.



But to come back to the odd number thing... yes there may be odd numbers in the requester chests for Iron Plates depending on which source the bots picked from (there are multiple because of multiple furnaces provoding iron plates and if you have a backup from a storage system then those chests as well), but as long as the local buffer in the requester chest doesn't drop to an amount where the inserter would pick up less than 5 you are good to go. It also doesn't matter if there's odd numbers in the provider chests as long as it doesn't affect the local buffer in the requester chests in a bad way, which means capping the "Input" Inserters with the Threshold working condition so that the bots may catch up with refilling the requester chest again before continuing to work.

And for the Stone... it doesn't matter if there's odd numbers in the provider chest as long as it doesn't drop below the Threshold where the "last" bot to arrive would pick up an odd number of stone. So the threshold prevents the inserters from emptying the requester chests and thereby stopping to create "demand" until the point where there's enough stone in the provider chests again.

So this is where the Thresholds kick in and in case of Steel Bars also the Local Buffer prevents the inserters from ever entering any weird numbers of items into the furnace.

Update:

WELL. Screw the stuff in the spoiler... I've found an even simpler approach:

... Why did I never consider that the input inserter only works when the requester chest it takes from has the required amount of items in it?

For steel this is an pretty easy approach, since once it has 5 plates in the chest the inserter will enter exactly those 5 plates into the furnace.

For stone you will have to tell the requester chest only to request 2 or 4 stone. The bots will bring 4, the inserter will take all 4, but since it is a multiple of 2 they will be smelted into bricks leaving no rest in the furnace. It's the only place you will need a threshold in the inserter to gurantee that the bots are able to pick up 4 stone from the provider chests. xD



At least this reminds me of... why the hell can't we optionally change in an inserter menu how much items it tries to grab with each turn? It would make life so much easier for stone if you could specify that those stone inserters should take only 2 stone instead of the regular 5 like other inserters. ^^

[xnmo]

I was almost going to post this in -root's help thread but decided here was probably more appropriate.

Really like this smart furnace idea and will likely use some variant of this in the future. That being said the look of the staggered rows in the design by rk84 and -root was bugging me so I made a slight change to the blueprint. Looks a lot neater and is more efficient on chest usage too.






With this blueprint it's also easy to leave in spaces if you want. So if that is what you desire you can fit beacons in too. Maybe not enough compared to what MeduSalem likes though

[DerivePi]

If you are just dealing with Cu and Fe ores then the problem with balancing the "smart" furnaces goes away and the issue is limited to supplying the right balance of Fe and Cu ore. When you add stone and steel, two serious challenges present:
1. Furnaces must be fed the correct number of ingredients for steel and brick production
2. Production of Steel and brick should be limited. There is no reason to limit the production of FE and CU plate.

The corollary to item 2 is that FE and CU plates should continue to be produced regardless of supply. There is no reason for any furnace to be idle when it can be producing these plates.

To balance CU and FE (and not have idle furnaces) production I propose linking 2 timing circuits together. When one loop finishes, the other begins. One loop for CU and one for FE. Along each loop, place smart inserters that are linked to the storage of FE and CU plates. The inserters operate if the storage is below a certain ascending amount and shortens the timing loop (ie the time that ore is not loaded into the system - more supply of that plate = longer time for the opposite ore to be loaded into the system). Once the loop is finished the other timing loop begins (with an exception if supply of the other ore is empty it doesn't start the other loop). Loading the system is done with smart inserters and can be placed onto a belt or directly into each furnace.

[MeduSalem]

I was almost going to post this in -root's help thread but decided here was probably more appropriate.

Really like this smart furnace idea and will likely use some variant of this in the future. That being said the look of the staggered rows in the design by rk84 and -root was bugging me so I made a slight change to the blueprint. Looks a lot neater and is more efficient on chest usage too.

With this blueprint it's also easy to leave in spaces if you want. So if that is what you desire you can fit beacons in too. Maybe not enough compared to what MeduSalem likes though

Looks nice!

Iron and Copper ore is pretty easy to achieve... and there's no real downside at all. ^^

... I just used the beacons because there was space to fit some and because I'm also experimenting around with beacons in different layouts in general... to find out if they are really worth the effort.^^

If really using beacons then the furnaces have to run 24/7... feeding a massive storage system or something if you are not going to use all the plates, which is the case for my maps. Otherwise using beacons makes no sense at all and it would be better to have more furnaces to make up for that.

I'm actually curious how the expaned logic system in one of the upcoming updates will be like... because I read that there may be ways to control entire power grids with a signal of the logic circuit... Which actually would allow easily to shut down power to all beacons thereby reducing their power drain to zero once you don't need them anymore.

If you are just dealing with Cu and Fe ores then the problem with balancing the "smart" furnaces goes away and the issue is limited to supplying the right balance of Fe and Cu ore. When you add stone and steel, two serious challenges present:
1. Furnaces must be fed the correct number of ingredients for steel and brick production
2. Production of Steel and brick should be limited. There is no reason to limit the production of FE and CU plate.

The corollary to item 2 is that FE and CU plates should continue to be produced regardless of supply. There is no reason for any furnace to be idle when it can be producing these plates.

To balance CU and FE (and not have idle furnaces) production I propose linking 2 timing circuits together. When one loop finishes, the other begins. One loop for CU and one for FE. Along each loop, place smart inserters that are linked to the storage of FE and CU plates. The inserters operate if the storage is below a certain ascending amount and shortens the timing loop (ie the time that ore is not loaded into the system - more supply of that plate = longer time for the opposite ore to be loaded into the system). Once the loop is finished the other timing loop begins (with an exception if supply of the other ore is empty it doesn't start the other loop). Loading the system is done with smart inserters and can be placed onto a belt or directly into each furnace.

Yupp, pretty much... Steel needs to be limited at first but can be handled easily later on once inserters are able to grab 5 plates at once... as they can be easily set to work only when they actually can fetch 5 plates in one grab. But stone remains a massive downer and something one has to keep an eye at. Limiting the production is one way to go at it. But I might actually throw stone out of my setups because it's not that easily to be controlled like the other 3. I wish I could set the inserters to how many items they grab which each pick, because it would make things much, much easier.



I actually once had a simple gate logic by linking the output inserters and output chests together... then I had a load balance of 50:50... but it had one fatal flaw... it did not work if one of the ore supplies stopped because it blocked the processing of the other ore. And I couldn't solve that problem because the game doesn't provide a way to have "greater/equal", "lesser/equal", "NOT", as well as an "OR" for red&green wires. The logic system is a bit too limited to create complex gate systems in small spaces.

So timed circuits are better suited for that kind of load balancing obviously. That would be the smart approach.

I'm for the lazy approach... by regulating the ratios with my output belts... the more output belts for a plate type the more plates have to be made to fill the belts up, easily to calculate... one express belt = 2400 plates/min. It can be fine-grained with the amount of inserters taking from those belts at my storage center. There are roughly 8 inserters needed to take everything from an express belt with nothing passing by so that gives you increments of ~300plates/min or something (I guess someone has measured this already and may provide exact stats). Rather simple to setup... if the plates of one type go below a certain threshold then more inserters take from the belt thereby requesting more from the smelterbank thereby increasing the production of that plate. Needs a few seconds to adapt (the traveltime from the smelterbank to the storage system) but it works quite well. xD

Actually I only need the lazy method once... before my storage system is completed... but afterwards I never see it working again... because I think it is impossible that my 40 million plate storage will ever run full.

[n9103]

With this being a discrete system we're using, x >= n is the same as x > n-1. Same goes for <= and <.
Also, all the conditions on any smart inserter are already OR'd together, not AND'd. That aside, you can easily OR with simply having two inserters inserting into one chest with one condition each.
AND is two inserters, with one condition each, in series with a belt removing the items that are put down, so that one condition can't be met, and then a later condition is met, and it would count as if both had been met, for one cycle anyway.
NOT is the only one that's a pain to implement actually. Though that might be a personal problem for me, since I avoid using circuits that are completely independent of the resources they're dealing with.

[Junion]

are you sure the conditions on Smart inserters are Or'ed together?

I have a setup where a single inserter watches on red if a box has >3 logic bots, then watches on green if it has >0 construction bots.

The thing only triggers when the box it's watching has both >3 logic bots and >0 construction bots...that sounds like And behavior to me.

Unless you want to say it 'ors' to turn off?

[DerivePi]

Conditions for smart inserters are "AND" conditions.

There are a series of other logic gates you can produce in another thread ( https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ate#p35908 )
They are a bit bulky though.

[MeduSalem]

With this being a discrete system we're using, x >= n is the same as x > n-1. Same goes for <= and <.

I have already experienced situations where this leads to problems. Especially on edge cases when two or three conditions are coupled together. In those cases either two/three conditions trigger or it leads to a complete deadlock or it just misses out on one item causing an imbalance. I wouldn't ask for greater/equal if it would be possible to cover everything with "greater than"/"lesser than". I appreciate though that the devs tried to simplify things but some things may not be realized when comparisons work only this way.

One example which comes back to my mind for this problem is that one can't specify negative numbers for conditional settings, which especially a problem with the logistic network condition where negative numbers may be pretty common because of bots reserving stuff for pick-up when it becomes available to them. So having an inserter work in an interval from 0 to 100 is impossible to cover in such a scenario because you can't enter a condition to work when greater than -1... it would only work with greater or equal than 0. Having only one condition set to work when lesser than 101 (which covers 0 obviously) is just crap because the inserter will continue to work even when there are negative numbers like -42 in the logistic network, which you may not want.

As I've said... I experienced other scenarios as well where this becomes a problem.

Also, all the conditions on any smart inserter are already OR'd together, not AND'd. That aside, you can easily OR with simply having two inserters inserting into one chest with one condition each.
AND is two inserters, with one condition each, in series with a belt removing the items that are put down, so that one condition can't be met, and then a later condition is met, and it would count as if both had been met, for one cycle anyway.

As the other people above me stated... red&green wire conditions as well as logistic network conditions work only with AND. They are not OR'd together. The conditions must all be met or it doesn't work.

That said I just hate belt circuit systems. They are one ugly workaround for the limitations of the current logic system. They always end up being quite space consuming depending on what you want to do and require running additional wiring all over the place. I like to have selfcontained stuff which is easily to blueprint so I try to avoid having belt circuit systems.

NOT is the only one that's a pain to implement actually. Though that might be a personal problem for me, since I avoid using circuits that are completely independent of the resources they're dealing with.

Some stuff isn't possible without a NOT condition... and having to do weird belt circuits... just meh... like I wrote above. Just makes me abandon the entire idea when I realize I would have to resort on that stuff. ^^

Conditions for smart inserters are "AND" conditions.

There are a series of other logic gates you can produce in another thread ( https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ate#p35908 )
They are a bit bulky though.

Exactly... It's possible to have other logic gates implemented by belt circuits... but NOPE. So not going to work out for self-contained stuff or tight setups. :/



So bottom line to this the missing conditions should be added at some point when the devs have time and I don't really see a reason why not. Also being able to toggle the Red&Green wire & logistics network conditions relations to be OR'd or AND'd individually for each relation would be quite nice. It would be nice if the relation between the 3 available conditions would be something like triangle, where you can decide how each relation between each two conditions is supposed to work.^^

[ssilk]

a condition to work when greater than -1... it would only work with greater or equal than 0. Having only one condition set to work when lesser than 101 (which covers 0 obviously) is just crap because the inserter will continue to work even when there are negative numbers like -42 in the logistic network, which you may not want.

Since v0.10 you can ENTER other numbers into the number field. Just click into the field and write a number.

So bottom line to this the missing conditions should be added at some point when the devs have time and I don't really see a reason why not. Also being able to toggle the Red&Green wire & logistics network conditions relations to be OR'd or AND'd individually for each relation would be quite nice. It would be nice if the relation between the 3 available conditions would be something like triangle, where you can decide how each relation between each two conditions is supposed to work.^^

see eventually this discussion: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=5276

This is about how forum thinks, that the circuit network might work in future, and that shows, that the behavior of smart Inserter is quite ok, if we have more control about routing and operations on the signals. In my eyes, I don't want to think about "do I use now an AND or better OR?". That's too much micromanagement for me. I want to think about "which type of regulation controller do I need here, to make it run, and how do I need to cable it?".

This is also much more like in reality, cause no planning engineer of an iron smelting factory would use one thought into this direction (logic gates), but instead thinks about, which type of SPS can handle this needed kind of control.

[MeduSalem]

Since v0.10 you can ENTER other numbers into the number field. Just click into the field and write a number..

Negative numbers don't work for some reason. You can't enter a minus symbol, so only positive numbers work.

see eventually this discussion: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=5276

This is about how forum thinks, that the circuit network might work in future, and that shows, that the behavior of smart Inserter is quite ok, if we have more control about routing and operations on the signals. In my eyes, I don't want to think about "do I use now an AND or better OR?". That's too much micromanagement for me. I want to think about "which type of regulation controller do I need here, to make it run, and how do I need to cable it?".

This is also much more like in reality, cause no planning engineer of an iron smelting factory would use one thought into this direction (logic gates), but instead thinks about, which type of SPS can handle this needed kind of control.

Oh well if there's something even more sophisticated and robust being discussed for this then why not. I'll let myself get surprised with the result and what the devs will eventually implement once they get to the logic rework...^^

[rk84]

I'm trying to make more advance version and after alot of wiring I have working unit of 140 furnaces.

Furnace usage is not quite 100%. I did not bother to tweak signal conditions for border cases. So far it have work fine atleast for iron, copper and steel. I have not tested stone alot yet. It lacks proper input for stone. I'm thinking of trying stone Insertion to lognet chests in patches of 20.

Major part of logic without going in to details too much.
Total of 3 control signals in furnace area are in present and their magnitude (0-141) is used to control ore distribution. They are like borders that divide the area into 4 parts. (2 borders can divide area into 4, but I think crossing borders would have lacked flexability to control each part's size). I imagined parts lineary so that every part has 1 or 2 neighbor(s) ( steel | iron | copper | stone).

For addtional upgrade. Furnaces are turned off, if storages are full and/or out of raw materials. Alien artifacts are use to signals on/off -state.
Also Speed module 3 is for controlling system update frequency. I think I left module in chest so it is constant.

Here is save for prototype 2: v0106b.zip


Here is image of the signals. Why Steel-iron border is reversed? Its just accident, but I noticed it gives ability to manually stop steel by adding steel picks in system. I draw it when I was close to mental break down. hmm Iron gear and pipe seems to be reversed in this picture. damn it

signals.JPG (18.21 KiB) Viewed 5957 times

[xnmo]

Furnaces draw 0 watts when idle, so turning off the system will only save on idle inserter draw. And it takes you a good 150 inserters to net you a massive savings of a single solar panel, so I don't really see the point.

In fact, it may even be the case that the energy usage of the circuit system used to turn off the furnaces will actually draw more power than you save. Not to mention it definitely costs more than a single solar panel to implement.

That being said it would be worth it if your setup involves beacons, they use a ridiculous amount of power and never turn off even if they aren't doing anything.