Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Improve the selector combinator to make recipe calculations easier

What?

Add a recipe mode to the selector combinator, with the following output options:

- output the inputs required per craft given a recipe signal

- output the items crafted per craft. Output either to "Each", in which case it outputs the items being crafted, or a fixed signal where it outputs the count

The configuration would allow us to select the machine and the surface where the machine is placed for the calculation. I see no need to connect these to the circuit network, but it would be nice to have them as blueprint parameters.

Why?

Currently we can ask a machine to output its ingredients, but it comes with two downsides: We need a machine just for the calculation, costing space, and the output signal poisons the recipe selection signal, so you need to feed it via a diode increasing latency. I use these to run the calculations for an auto crafter, and having to use a machine for this makes them complicated, and their blueprints cannot easily be duplicated for different machines, as you need to manually replace the machine.

Also machines do not provide info about the number of items crafted per craft. While you can work around that with a constant combinator, it is annoying to do manually, and would need to be updated whenever recipes change.

using green and red you can avoid poison problem but I agree it's annoying I would also prefer selector combinator to be able to do that, also ability to select which recipe to use if the item have multiple recipes would be nice.