Factorio Forums

It would be cool if we could filter on splitters / inserters by freshness. The current state of priority picking most / least spoiled items is not enough in my opinion. We currently have the ability to filter by quality so in my opinion it makes sense to be able to filter by freshness percentage too. We could have another row right below quality, with comparator and slider from 0 to 100.

Default values could be >= 0 (so all items fulfill this condition), you could then set comparator (>, <, =, <=, >=) and (slider value 0-100) to filter items with given freshness. I know you are probably meant to design factories on gleba around constant flow, but this would allow one to send only sufficiently fresh research bottles, filter out pentapods right before spoiling and so on... I think that having such option would allow for more versatile factory designs than just pump and dump.

Absolutely this, came to the forum to post it.

It's very annoying to ship science packs from Gleba. For example, having 2.000 of them in storage in Gleba, but you've configured a ship to grab 1.000 of them and leave. Because it matters for research how spoiled they are, plus they can just spoil, you want to grab the fresher batch of the 2.000 but atm you can't!

The filtration should be applied to everything IMO (inserters, when requesting items for a rocket..) but inserters should be top priority, from there you could at least take off the logistic network the one's you configure. As the OP says, just priority is not enough.

Loosely related suggestion : viewtopic.php?f=6&t=118843 (give us the tools to mesure spoilage accurately)

Because it matters for research how spoiled they are, plus they can just spoil, you want to grab the fresher batch of the 2.000 but atm you can't!

Hmm, I haven't tried exporting Gleba science yet, but couldn't you have two boxes, one for less spoiled, one for more spoiled, and have inserters constantly picking up less spoiled from the more spoiled box to the less spoiled box and more spoiled from the less spoiled box to the more spoiled box ? Wouldn't that work ?

BlueTemplar wrote: Wed Nov 13, 2024 8:20 pm

Because it matters for research how spoiled they are, plus they can just spoil, you want to grab the fresher batch of the 2.000 but atm you can't!

Hmm, I haven't tried exporting Gleba science yet, but couldn't you have two boxes, one for less spoiled, one for more spoiled, and have inserters constantly picking up less spoiled from the more spoiled box to the less spoiled box and more spoiled from the less spoiled box to the more spoiled box ? Wouldn't that work ?

I actually don't know... Wouldn't it just keep shuffling the same item around? You put 4 least fresh items from one box and put it to the other. There are now only 4 items, so the inserter pick ups all of them and puts them back. You would have to have different inserter speeds for that to actually work and thus always loosing some science.

Further more you have no assertion about freshness. You could somehow possibly take the most fresh ones, but what if even the most fresh items are right before spoiling.

I actually quite like the spoiling mechanic and would love to see some mods revolving around that. But i think that for that to work we actually need more tools to handle it.

There are now only 4 items, so the inserter pick ups all of them and puts them back.

You seem to be forgetting about the other pair of inserters ?
And more importantly, extra science flowing in ?

You could somehow possibly take the most fresh ones, but what if even the most fresh items are right before spoiling.

Sounds like at that point you're screwed anyway ? *shrugs* (And you already have something to deal with spoilage... in fact just enough sides for a spoilage filter outserter on the 4th side ?)

You seem to be forgetting about the other pair of inserters ?

I don't think it matters what kind of inserter are you using. I have tinkered with it for a while and couldn't figure any way to have continual flow of items that would result somehow in filtering based on spoilage.

Sounds like at that point you're screwed anyway ? *shrugs* (And you already have something to deal with spoilage... in fact just enough sides for a spoilage filter outserter on the 4th side ?)

Well it depends... if you had the ability to set filter on inserter to pick up only items with freshness higher/lower than X, then you could immediately discard all just before spoiling items and wait for another batch.

+1 I like the filtering idea.

BlueTemplar wrote: Wed Nov 13, 2024 8:51 pm Sounds like at that point you're screwed anyway ? *shrugs* (And you already have something to deal with spoilage... in fact just enough sides for a spoilage filter outserter on the 4th side ?)

I think about making 2 boxes and an inserter with freshness filter between them. So it moves almost spoiled items from "fresh" box to "spoiled" box. At that point I can determine how many fresh items I have and produce more as needed.

Yes, my idea was about how to achieve something close enough to this before this suggestion is implemented.
(I haven't tried it myself yet, because I'm not even producing enough agriscience to fill a single rocket per space cargo trip...)

Right now I'm trying to setup a suspended factory on Gleba that just keeps minimum flow for automatic restart (replicating egg every 10 minutes or so, getting some fresh fruits and bioflux as necessary).

For eggs it's either circuit network timer or 10 minutes belt trip for an egg with some breathtaking Gleba scenery (mostly just parallel belts ).

For bioflux it's separating different batches of bioflux and keeping some rough ways of estimating it freshness. Unprocessed jellynut can give some rough estimates: still exists => bioflux is fresh; spoiled => bioflux is half spoiled. So far looks promising on small production scales.

For eggs it's either circuit network timer or 10 minutes belt trip for an egg with some breathtaking Gleba scenery (mostly just parallel belts ).

Actually this can be done with Heating tower. You can have single passive provider chest that is filled via biochamber with pentapod eggs. You then need three inserters - one from chest to empty space, the other from empty space to biochamber. This feeds back to biochamber. Third inserter checks if the chest has more than X eggs and incinerates most spoiled (There you can use least / most spoiled setting on inserters).

With this setup you should never run out of pentapod eggs - granted you have always some bioflux.

Every place that then needs pentapod eggs can request it from network. I even had restart requester chests on science producers that could kick start the process if it somehow died out. (I was watching via circuit biochember - if it had some pentapods, the requester was disabled)

But if for some reason you run out of bioflux for prolonged period, you are out of luck. Spidretron with roboport and enough firepower to yoink some eggs right from the enemy is only failsafe that never fails.

There's another long-term automated solution for this (granted, a bit cheesy) :
.

dav245 wrote: Sun Nov 24, 2024 5:28 pmWith this setup you should never run out of pentapod eggs - granted you have always some bioflux.

It's not what I want to do. I want to slow down production as much as possible. Using egg with little time remaining (filter on inserter) exactly achieves the goal.

Similarly 2 minutes Bioflux becomes 5 seconds Nutrients which may be not very useful. Filter would help here too.

BlueTemplar wrote: Sun Nov 24, 2024 5:39 pm There's another long-term automated solution for this (granted, a bit cheesy) :

after you visit Fulgora, 'store' pentapod eggs as crafted biochambers, and recycle them back into fresh eggs when you want to restart the factory

.

Right, but this option has its issues. Egg will be random. And then I need to automate biochamber production chain. So right now this is more like a backup plan.

+1 for being able to filter by freshness as a percentage, or with a time limit.

*rant coming*

Freshness is kind of meehhh overall. You can set inserter to spoiled first but when it picks up from a belt that is just ignored. Very unintuitive.

Logistic requests have no spoiled first / last filter including the the rocket silo.

If I have one inserter putting things in a chest and another removing spoiled first at the same speed then the freshly add item will (after a while) always be mixed with the most spoiled stack and make it a bit fresher. If your throughput is higher than the spoilage then everything will gradually become fresh. But if your throughput is less and the stacksize is big then everything will ripen until the whole chest will spoil within ticks.

For items with freshness the chests should really be FIFO. New items should not be added to all but the last stack of that item and removal should be from the front (unless freshness filter says otherwise).