, computers.
It can build anything that can be built by assembling machines with no more than two intermediate steps from the ingredients you supply.
I have used this successfully to produce things which I want to have constantly available, but don't constantly consume in large quantities: many of the buildings and all railroad stuff except the rails themselves (signals, locomotives, wagons).
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How to use it?
You can connect the ingredients on the incoming belts in any order, but you must configure the inserters so their enable condition matches the item on their belt. Due to the sushi belt design, you can easily add more input materials as you progress.Set the production targets on the constant combinator in the lower left, and that's it! Your requested products will be delivered into the output chest. A green light will light up when all requests are fulfilled.
There is a 4x4 space where you can later fit a roboport and connect this to your logistics network. Adapting the control circuit to integrate with the logistics network is left as an exercise for the player
The two assemblers on the top pre-produce intermediate products which are commonly needed and cheap to produce. In the blueprint, it is set to produce gears, iron sticks and copper wire. You can program it to something else (via the constant combinator in the middle), it just has to be something that can be directly produced from what you supply on the belt. Initially, the pre-production assemblers will consume most of the iron and copper plates until they have reached their production target. If you don't want to wait, manually put gears, iron sticks and copper wire into the output chests of the pre-production to jumpstart production.
Given iron plates, copper plates, steel, electronic (green) circuits and stone bricks as inputs, the mall can produce: iron and steel chests, medium and big electric poles, pumps, train stops and signals, locomotives, wagons, storage tanks, lamps, most combinators, repair kits, steam engines, solar panels, electric drills, pumpjacks, steel furnaces, assembling machines level 1&2, oil refineries, chemical plants, labs, radars, gun turrets. (Also, belts and inserters up to the fast level, pipes, walls, ammunition, and red and green science, but I don't recommend that because those are things you need in large quantities, so you're better off having dedicated production lines for those.)
How to speed up production:
This is obviously not designed for maximum throughput. The ratio of upstream to downstream production is always 1:1, which is not the optimal ratio for most recipes.
Having said that, a large slowdown, based on my observation, is that when assemblers get a new recipe, all of the excess ingredients they hold must be moved out before they accept the new recipe. Upgrading the inserters to fast inserters will give you a good speed boost.
Troubleshooting:
If the control circuit becomes stuck on a recipe it shouldn't hold (for example, if you accidentally requested something for which you don't have the ingredients), disconnect the green wire that connects the input and output of the memory cell (the decider combinator that shows an equals sign on its display) and then reconnect it.
Over time, the chests in the recycling loop accumulate excess inventory that was cleaned out when switching recipes. Theoretically, if the output chests of the upstream assemblers become completely filled, the mall will get jammed because the upstream products can no longer flow downstream to the assembler that needs them, but in practice you will probably get to logistics robots long before this happens. It does happen that the final output chest gets full, but that doesn't interrupt the production chain, just the recycling loop. Update the chests to steel chests as soon as you have steel!
How does it work?
Annotated screenshot
The assemblers in the bottom row produce based on your demand. They are connected into a production chain, so if you request something that requires intermediate products, those will be produced by the upstream assemblers. For example, if you request a locomotive, the main assembler will have its recipe set to the locomotive, the middle one will produce engines for the locomotive, and the right one pipes for the engine.In the production chain, the output inserters move outputs from chest to chest in a "recycling loop" that allows outputs to be reused as ingredients, this is because excess ingredients are cleaned out each time the recipe changes.
The control circuit does not decide which item to produce first. When multiple things are in demand, the assembler will pick one (in inventory order, I think).
Two combinators keep a snapshot of the demand in memory until the production of one item is completed. This prevents switching between different production targets before any production completed and never getting anything done. The reset signal is sent by the assembler when it finishes producing its recipe. I found that the reset signal has to be delayed by one tick, otherwise the demand calculation is not updated yet. This is done by a combinator that simply forwards the R signal.
Each assembler outputs its ingredients as demand to the next upstream assembler's control circuit. There is no memory cell for the upstream assemblers. It's not required: if the main assembler's recipe doesn't change, then its ingredients will also not change.
Feel free to use this as-is or to reuse elements from it in your own designs!