Factorio Forums

TL;DR? I need circular route for dozens of different types of mixed goods that will filter out only a few items into different belts and/or buildings, without EVER missing one. For example, I may have steam engines, pipes, electronics, copper wire, steel plates, ammo, guns, etc etc flowing down the line. I have to take EVERY copper wire, (among a few other recipes,) off the line without missing any. I have too many other prodcuts present to only remove all other products with smart inserters.

Honestly, I haven't given this hours of consideration yet, but I wanted to see what various ideas people would come up with. The scenario is this - I'm using the Realistic Reverse Factory mod. It adds a factory that uses power to deconstruct items into their recipe parts. The problem is this. It will choke on items that have multiple products (belts, underground belts, copper cable, etc) if you only have one of that item in storage, because it needs two (or more) to function.

So, I'm creating a facility with multiple reverse factories. One is a main facility - everything it breaks down will be recirculated back out to a belt that recirculates all broken-down items to their most basic parts, (any recipe requiring a smelter or liquid handling will not work, as well as science packs.) with the exception of those recipes with multiple products. I know how to use a smart inserter to filter those items off a belt, but I can't see how to make sure that it filters ALL such items off the belt without missing any, even during power outages.

The only thing I can imagine right now (horribly inefficient) is to have one chest with an inserter taking out wire, and another unloading anything if wire = 0. Then another chest in series, doing the same for belts, then for every item I need taken out of circulation. I'm positive someone here can think of a better solution without resorting to stuff like the smart splitter mod. (Which I consider cheaty because it eliminates one of the most basic confounding puzzles in the game, as well as all the ingenious solutions to that puzzle.

EDIT: I thought of lots of smart inserters, enough to pull a solid belt of copper off the line before reaching the inserter that feeds the line back into the original chest that supplies the factory. But if power is lost, and a lot of copper comes down the like, the inserter feeding the chest still might get at least one cable or belt or whatever before they're stripped out by the smart inserters.

The best solution to running out of power, is build so many solar panels that you never run out.

If you want to be 100% safe against items leaking during power failures, you need to do the smart chest == 0 thing. It's quite compact even if it is inefficient, meaning you can do many parallel lines to speed things up. Obviously you want to blueprint it, duplicating circuit networks by hand is madness.

Being power-outage-proof isn't REALLY essential . . . I can correct rare problems like that by hand. I was just sure that there was an ingenious solution out there that I hadn't considered.

EDIT: it's not too compact. I need a chest in that row for three kinds of belt, three underground belts, wire, electric poles . . . another chest and inserter in the row - and the best design I can fathom for one product per belt is four rows wide - smart inserter to take the product off, a underground belt rising from the ground, to pass goods from the row above it, and another underground belt going down to continue passing goods under to the row below. There are about fourteen recipes in the layout I'm building, so this smart-chain is a bit of a doozy.

kind of confused why the smart with filters and smart with ==0 you think will be a big setup.

the way i see it.

input belt with all sorts of items on it. have x fast inserters spaced every other space pulling everything off it into chests, number of inserters depends on belt speed and item load/thoughput you want.

all these chests connect with fast inserters (so everything ends up shifted to the 2 end chests) if one chest chain with fast inserters between (remember item stack bonus works here) them is enough speed for you, then merge the two chests into one.

then you make a chain of chests with fast inserters between them and smart inserters with filters set for items you want to pull off the line taking em out to the sides. you can set 5 filters on each of these so that you dont need too many, but if theres one item that goes through this setup a lot, i'd set a seperate one for it too. these guys will draw MOST of what you want to filter away.
then at the end of this you have a couple steps where instead of fast inserters you put smarts wired to work only if there are no items that should be filltered away in the chest. can do again upto 5 items per chest if you give the filtering start inserter a signal passed through 5 deciders instead of feeding it the contents of the chest directly. each chest can have conditions to filter away upto 10 different item types (smart insterter on each side with 5 items each).

Keep in mind, each and every item pulled off the belt has to go to a unique reverse factory. Otherwise a factory might load one copper wire, then not be able to load more because there are converyor belts clogging the line.

Also note, that one inserter can have five filters - but every SINGLE product in the smart chest chain requires a smart inserter linked to that chest, that won't pass items on unless there are zero of that item left in the chest. Each smart inserter can obey only one less-than or equal-to based on the state of the circuit network. Thus, you need another smart chest in the chain for every ingredient being handled. Thats a chain of fourteen smart chests and inserters, plus a fast inserter to start the chain - a chain 29 long.

Without a smart inserter passing items to the next chest ONLY when copper cable reaches 0, if there's a backup in unloading cable, then the smart inserter will stop, and the smart chest will begin loading up on cable, and the inserter will pass it to the next chest, and the next, until it reaches the reverse factory meant for generic things, that can't handle being fed an inexact amount of cable.

To unload to belts, I was using an inserter on the side, then two underground belts, (rising up then dropping down,) to carry away the offending items. That makes this array 29x4, but multiple rows are stackable.

To take advantage of the inserter stack size bonus, I could add a chest here, but it would need another inserter to unload the chest, then belts. That would make one string of chests 29x6.

EDIT: I missed your comment about decider combinators. I will have to investigate that - it could compact things significantly. I would still worry that a backlog of unloaded items would take a year and a day to clear with only one (two if you unload from both sides of the chain) inserter unloading every type of offending item - but I shouldn't. Even with my longer chain (I built the ugly beast) a single chain is rarely unloading in two places, and never for long. One blockage cuts off supply for any other backlogs.

I also worry that the fast inserters, which tend to fall into a perfect sync in these situations, will constantly pick up the offending items before the smart inserter grabs them, being slightly faster than the smarts - that means with a constant supply crossing the chests from fast inserters, with no backups, a single item might pass right by several inserters meant to winnow items out before the 'blocker' smart inserters. Still, even eliminating this step completely would shorten the line, though I would still have the task of splitting one belt into fourteen different supply lines without mixing items. Not insurmountable, especially with less than fifteen recipes that produce multiple products.

It's about time I investigated combinators properly. My new plan is three chests in series, each surrounded by combinators, with enough space only to unload offending items left and right. It will be wider, but much much shorter, and I may be able to stagger them somehow so that I can fit belts through a first rank, and then feed a second rank of three, too. If, only if, I can make those combinators make sense.

Just realized something else to add, where you have the 3 chests with smarts moving stuff to the side, have then insert into a wagon (how you orient the wagons depends on if you want long or wide setup). from that wagon you can have many smart inserters draw each their own item type towards the disassember for that item.