Assemblers do not select the fill-X-barrel recipe from the X-barrel item signal

[DaleStan]

When sending the signal water-barrel to an assembler 2 in "Set recipe" mode, the assembler does not select the recipe for filling barrels, even though that recipe is unlocked.

04-11-2025, 18-16-03.png (550.45 KiB) Viewed 412 times

The expected behavior is that assemblers receiving an item signal should select the single available recipe that produces that item.
This should work for fluid signals too; the water fluid signal should select the unbarrelling recipe, since that's the only water-producing recipe available for assembly machines.

I want to build an auto-barreller; an assembler that connects to a sushi pipe and barrels fluids until I have enough barrels of each fluid in the associated container. Using a stack of 10 or so arithmetic combinators to translate each item signal to the corresponding recipe signal is technically possible but unnecessarily painful.

0eNqVUu1ugzAMfBf/DlWh0AmkPUlVoUC91lI+WBLaVYh3nwOrJko1acofco7vzmcGaFSPnSMToBqAWms8VIcBPJ2NVBEzUiNUIL1H3Sgy50TL9kIGkwxGAWRO+AVVOh4FoAkUCGeG6XKvTa8bdPxAPJiiRpAmJK3VDRkZrAMBnfXca02UjHz5phBwhypJNwXLnMhhO9dzESmCs6pu8CKvxP3c5Oe6X36zkYdDAR+kArpn9MfWTXItaaRzqNjPZy8V++eCsU7LCLHfTrrJbwXvE9DH3Hh2PuMoVkNn4s/41lO/Lad+PWeoOQvqmDa4Hl/p7v6pm22Xug/+51BmvF5lE5d/4w3FaA+pSEUm0iNjFFDzq99/TMCVFzAJF/uszMuy2O+2ebnNxvEb8QzaMQ==

Copy blueprint

[boskid]

This is not as simple as you are trying to make it look like. We already have some amount of magic that causes chaos within our team and it is related to the item signals allowing to select recipes. For now this is working as intended because the only cases where a recipe is selected given item signal is when that recipe _produces_ that item. In case of barreling, since both fluid and barrel are considered a catalyst, filled barrels are not considered to be produced as those are just catalysts changing their form. Adding exceptions to this logic may have some unexpected consequences, for example imagine sending an empty barrel signal causing light oil unbarreling recipe to be selected since it technically "produces" (by your meaning) those empty barrels. The only case i can see could be kind of safe would be to select barreling recipes from the items only if there are no other recipes that actually produce those barrels (as in not changing form of catalysts).

[Rseding91]

Moving to won't-fix given the inherit complications of selecting a recipe from an item. In this case, you simply have to use the combinator setup if you want to do this.

[DaleStan]

Is it possible to keep the existing logic, but add to the end of it "If no recipe was selected, and exactly one recipe outputs the item (or fluid), select that recipe"?

If there are multiple recipes (e.g. supplying the solid fuel item signal to a chemical plant) it seems perfectly reasonable to go "nope, guess again". The existing logic correctly selects the barrel recipe from the barrel item, so adding a second attempt that only triggers if the first attempt found nothing won't break any of the existing logic.

On the other hand, Rseding already pointed out that mods have the power to specify which recipe is selected for a given item signal, so is it possible to just adjust the base mod to cause those recipes to be selected?

[robot256]

On the other hand, Rseding already pointed out that mods have the power to specify which recipe is selected for a given item signal, so is it possible to just adjust the base mod to cause those recipes to be selected?

A mod could remove the catalyst flag from the product of the barrelling recipe (leaving the unbarelling recipe the same). Then the barelling recipe would be selected by the assembler, but there might be other side effects like how the statistics record it.

[DaleStan]

On the other hand, Rseding already pointed out that mods have the power to specify which recipe is selected for a given item signal, so is it possible to just adjust the base mod to cause those recipes to be selected?

A mod could remove the catalyst flag

What catalyst flag? The string "catalyst" does not appear in the data_raw_dump.json, does not appear in the Lua API docs (both results are out of date), and only appears in the official mods as a comment in the declaration of the kovarex enrichment recipe.

[boskid]

This logic is based on ItemProductPrototype amount and ignored_by_stats. If amount is larger than ignored_by_stats then such product goes into production statistics and is considered as product by SetRecipe.