Factorio Forums

Hi there.

I am trying to make legendary biochambers in a biochamber and as expected I want to use my leg-nutrients as ingredients and not as fuel. No matter what I do this thing keeps breaking down on me.

First, I did it without much concern and saw my leg nutrients being used as fuel. Ok, my mistake. Then I set up a dedicated inserter for leg-nutrients and enabled it only when nonleg-nutrienyts were > 0. Wrong again, as the red bar also count as nutrients in the reading. So I changed the condition to activate when nonleg-nutrients are > 1. I wanted to believe that this was all but no, I would find leg nutrients back on the fuel slot a few mins after.

So I created a double condition for the inserter using a combinator. Now it will only insert when nonleg-nutriens are >1 AND leg-nutrients are < 5 (5 is the requirement for the biochamber reciepe) to avoid overinserting leg-nutrients no matter what. Wrong again! I still find leg nutrients in the fuel slot.

So My last chance of fixing this was to override the stack size of the inserter to 1, thinking that maybe, in the fraction of time when the nutrient spoil, I am inserting more (due to the stack size) and that goes to the fuel slot. Wrong one more time!

So at this point I think that there is an error in the biochamber logic. Something like, when nutrients are in the ingredients slot but not on the fuel slot, it will internally rearrange them. This is problematic as the fuel line (the red bar) is quality specific. If you started to "burn" a leg-nutrient, then the bar is legendary and can only be restarted with more leg-nutrients. If you hover over it, it will say "Nutrients (Legendary)"

Have any of you guys been sucessful at solving this?

Good thing is that after all the tinkering and testing I managed to get 800 legendary biochambers, so I am on the verge of letting this go and just use those.
But I love the challenges of this game and I'd like to learn how to fix it.

Thanks!

It happens when the fuel slot gets empty while the leg-nutrients inserter already has a hand of them because the craft cycle just finished.
Increasing its condition to nonleg-nutrients>2 seems to help in case of fuel and craft cycles syncing up and nutrients drying up.
It doesn't seem to help in case of nutrients spoiling. The fuel slot gets priority again.

I tried to put the leg-nutrients inserter on a separate electric network behind a power switch (similarly controlled by amount of nonleg-nutrients). It does disable the inserter mid-swing, so it lowers the chance of it happening, but it's not foolproof, as inserter has a small electric buffer and it takes couple of ticks to deplete it and actually stop the inserter from inserting.

What is the Harm in using Legendary grade Nutrients for Fuel here? It seems like a lot of hassle to “solve” this problem, why does it exist to begin with? Is there a shortage of Nutrients (at Legendary quality) / how many Legendary Biochambers per second do you need?

Not every imperfection needs to be polished and bug-free - sometimes a “good enough” solution lets you move on to the next puzzle.

Thanks both for the replies.

I will change the condition to >2 and see if it improves.

On the question of why not use legendary nutrients for fuel, I feel like it is wasteful as the quality does not add any fuel value. Now I wish that at some point I can ask the same question myself... but my factory cannot support that at this point. For me, making leg bioflux is not that easy. I am not considering legendary biochambers something I need continuous supply, so I guess that you might be right and I might be spending more time finding a solution than scaling to get all the machines I need for good.

I think this can be solved by combining the approaches above with guaranteeing a minimum freshness of normal nutrients that get added. And maybe a counter that disables the input of legendary nutrients if it's been too long since the last insertion of regular nutrients.