Factorio Forums

In the (related?) report "[2.1.7] Asteroid signal no longer sets crushing recipe" viewtopic.php?p=695465#p695465, I discovered that the Oxide Asteroid signal no longer triggers the Ice Crushing recipe. That change broke the ability to implement zero-combinator crusher recipe switching.

Now, after unlocking the Asteroid Reprocessing technology, I realize that Oxide Asteroid does in fact trigger a recipe, but it is a Reprocessing recipe:
This change has caused many of my small ship designs (which use crusher recipe switching) to break the moment I unlock the Asteroid Reprocessing technology.

Preserving the old behavior (Asteroids trigger their corresponding crushing recipe) is justified because:

• There is precedent: furnaces also work this way (the ingredient is what sets the output recipe)
• This is going to break a lot of small ship designs
• No one was relying on the new behavior (Asteroids trigger Reprocessing recipes)

EDIT: as it turns out, I was able to fix the breakage (recipe thrashing) by segregating signals to red / green, but I would still prefer that we not change the existing behavior.

Thanks for the report however this is not a bug.

Ok. So this is an intentional change. That does not make it a good change. The images above show that it picks metalic asteroid reprocessing for bot carbonic and oxide asteroid signal. For metallic, it then picks carbonic. Thus, the logic here includes sorting by some pretty arbitrary recipe property that probably just boils down to ordering some string defined in the prototype. This is not intuitive or useful in any way. The previous behaviour was useful and more intuitive then this one.

Maybe of this to ideas and suggestions. The current implementation does not seem helpful.