How to pick a single signal from a wire and make it sticky?

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pacanimal
Manual Inserter
Manual Inserter
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Joined: Sun Feb 23, 2025 1:15 pm
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Re: How to pick a single signal from a wire and make it sticky?

Post by pacanimal »

If you just want to select a signal, stick to it, and stop sending it when it's no longer present in the input, you don't need all of that.
This is what I use to throw away excess on my space platforms:

Screenshot 2025-02-23 143555.png
Screenshot 2025-02-23 143555.png (246.74 KiB) Viewed 141 times
All it is is a selector that selects the biggest signal (or smallest, or whatever you want, then a decider that checks for an existing stored signal. Two more deciders either pass through the new signal (if there isn't one) or loops the existing one. Any selected signal (biggest one, in my case) will remain until it disappears from the input (reaches 0) even if other signals grow larger than it while it's selected.

It will also pass through the remaining count at any given time, in case it's needed. You can easily make it static 1 instead if you want.

Using this to throw away excess means my inserters can work with only one item type at a time, resulting in larger stacks and better throughput.

Specifically, what I use is a few arithmetic combinators to subtract the amount I want to keep, then pass all non-negative numbers, with a single decider (each >0), to the input of the above blueprint. Note that the negative numbers in this case are generated by me having less than the desired quantity of an item on the platform. There are no oddities such as negative output, or negative numbers circling around anywhere aside from this.

Here's the full setup (save for the platform itself and the inserters, if you're curious:
Screenshot 2025-02-23 145934.png
Screenshot 2025-02-23 145934.png (380.39 KiB) Viewed 132 times
The bottom decider passes through all the signals I want none of at all. These can be done with a single decider, and their counts still participate in the selection of the biggest signal.

Edit: Removed spaceship platform from blueprint
Edit: Added full example
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