Adaptive production
Posted: Mon Jan 06, 2025 12:18 pm
I've started upcycling of iron and copper plates. My setup includes a bunch of assemblers and a few recyclers. I've got two circular belt loops, one for plate input and one for produced items (pipe or copper cable). Recycled plates are fed back into plate loop, while legendary plates are extracted from the loop. I've got a bunch of lvl1 assemblers, a few lvl2, and one each for 3 and 4. This setup works fine, but this ratio of how many assemblers for each quality level needed is bothering me 
Various production and Fulgora recycling has left me with 100K+ of lvl2/3/4 plates which I would like now to feed into the input loop, basically boosting legendary production. But once I start feeding those, the assemblers ratio is now screwed, since I need more lvl2/3/4 assemblers.
So, I've started thinking if this ratio could be driven by circuit control. Let's say I have 20 assemblers and an input loop belt with "Read belt hold contents". Belt content outputs 4 signals - counts of different quality plates: 500/200/20/10
How would I now convert those numbers into "Set recipe", so that I would have 13xQ1, 5xQ2, 1xQ3, 1xQ4?
And later, when a surge of Q4 plates changes the input counts into 100/20/20/500, the ratio would be adapted?
I mean, I know how to divide those numbers, but after that I'm kinda stuck. I assume the logic would have to be tick based, similar to how Quality Grinder setups work.
One problem I kinda foresee, are feeder inserters which collect certain quality. If you change recipe (i.e. Q1 -> Q2) on the fly while inserter is collecting Q1 plates, that inserter is now stuck with Q1 plates. Is there a way to "purge" them?

Various production and Fulgora recycling has left me with 100K+ of lvl2/3/4 plates which I would like now to feed into the input loop, basically boosting legendary production. But once I start feeding those, the assemblers ratio is now screwed, since I need more lvl2/3/4 assemblers.
So, I've started thinking if this ratio could be driven by circuit control. Let's say I have 20 assemblers and an input loop belt with "Read belt hold contents". Belt content outputs 4 signals - counts of different quality plates: 500/200/20/10
How would I now convert those numbers into "Set recipe", so that I would have 13xQ1, 5xQ2, 1xQ3, 1xQ4?
And later, when a surge of Q4 plates changes the input counts into 100/20/20/500, the ratio would be adapted?
I mean, I know how to divide those numbers, but after that I'm kinda stuck. I assume the logic would have to be tick based, similar to how Quality Grinder setups work.
One problem I kinda foresee, are feeder inserters which collect certain quality. If you change recipe (i.e. Q1 -> Q2) on the fly while inserter is collecting Q1 plates, that inserter is now stuck with Q1 plates. Is there a way to "purge" them?