Circuits - options for ANY quality / SUM of quality / IGNORE quality?

[4wry]

Quality is poised to be something you need to keep tight control over in a base since it potentially causes a lot of disruption if intermingled into normal production. One reason is that regular counts will no longer work. E.g. stacks get split (no full trains), recipes become incompatible, conditions are not met and so on...

For circuits something that would remedy this to a degree is to have a default "Any" quality setting to merge signals by item. A basic question would e.g. be - how many items are in a chest, regardless of quality? Since each quality level is essentially it's own item I doubt there is currently any convenient way to sum them. The selector combinator can filter by quality, so technically you could build counters using the sum of the outputs for a specific item, however, this could and should potentially be readily available.

One thing that might be nice on combinators would be an option to 'ignore quality' and return the sum of all at e.g. a normal signal. Otherwise the selector combinator could have this as an output (outputting the sum for each item category as 'normal').

This may not solve all challenges (e.g. separate stacks and inventory space, incompatible recipes), but it may give players a slightly better handle on things when circuits are involved. As mentioned, quality production is probably best setup separated.