Factorio Forums

TL;DR

And additional letter to the signals. Think about you have an uncomment, epic, legendary copper signal... now you also have a copper_l for low/min or a copper_h for high/max signal which sits where the quality indicator is

What?

Ability add a letter to a signal instead of just quality. So a signal could have a marking of common, uncommon, unique, epic, legendary, or a letter if you choosing. Letter would be displayed in the same place where the quality marker is currently and would be treated the same way, i.e., like a different signal. A letter be outside of a selection of "any quality copper"

Why?

You need so many combinators to so simple things, it is a grind as you need to set the same thing 10 times (forced ordering of "and" and "or", no else in the decider combinator -- this seems to be fixed in the next version though). Given you need a lot of combinators you need a lot of signals. And I am running out of easy-to-understand signals such as easy readable way to denote max and min values.

Think about epic copper steel and plastic production via light density material:

I want to stop the production if I have enough of all materials. I would love to have that copper_max, steel_max, and plastic_max value saved in one place. This is because I also need those values more than one time. E.g., if I am low on steel and my copper storage is running full, I want to send the excess copper to the recycler. (if steel < steel_min and copper > copper_max + 1 stack, then activate belt to the recycler).

Touching this simple logic network is so delicate. My current setup is using 8 combinators, signals like circle, moon, white, yellow to denote signals like copper_max... and I dont even have a "steel < steel_min" functionality (so no buffer for temporary peaks of one material ... lots of material wasted).
Every time I need to change anything, I spend 20 mins to figure out which signal means what... and which combinator does what.
(Yes, there are descriptions but they are also distributed across multiple combinators.)

So I would love to love circuit networks, I have so many ideas what to do with them, but right now they are just annoying. And having a copper_max signal would be a huge step towards easier debuggability, reusability, readability... and overall fun

Unrelated related: Just switched to the 2.1 experimental... and the else has landed. So happy. Small implementation for the devs, big step for the circuit network fun

Touching this simple logic network is so delicate. My current setup is using 8 combinators, signals like circle, moon, white, yellow to denote signals like copper_max...

Then don't.

I usually use the actual signal, just on a different wire color. Green wires generally carry the actual count of the items, while red wires carry limit information. That makes it easy to do things like `Each(G) - Each(R) OUTPUT Each`; all positive signals are signals which exceed the limit, and the amount they exceed the limit by is available. I can route that output directly into a requester chest to dispose of unwanted materials or do further computations with them.

Different kinds of limits come from different constant combinators. And constant combinators can have descriptions on them, so you can write down "lower bound" and "upper bound".

While I get the idea, I think it's a bit too... bloated. Once you have user-defined subscripts for signals, you're going to want to do selector combinator gymnastics to convert one subscript to another, filter based on subscripts, etc.