Factorio Forums

I'm trying to get a working system for trash in the inventory in the late game. Lets look at a specific example: copper plates

-I always want exactly 100 copper plates in my inventory
-To get this I request 100 plates from the logistic network
-And anything larger than 100 gets trashed with auto trash

Now I want to feed left over copper back into the main bus. If I have a requester chest next to a provider chest this creates an infinite loop where copper gets picked up from the belt and robots move it from the provider to the requester which puts it on the belt again.

Infinite loop, not good!




So we want this specific provider chest not to provide to the requester chest. Solutions with storage chests are bad because they don't filter. I found a way around that by using circuit network:


(Pic is missing an inserter from the steel chest to the belt)

The storage chest can only request copper plates because there are already copper plates in the first stack of the chest and the rest is closed off. The circuit condition prevents the last stack from being emptied because the stack inserter only functions when there is more than x items in the chest. x being the amount of items the inserter can move in one operation (in my case 12).

Problems with this setup:
-robots insert items in the chest very slowly - as slow as the inserter works due to the 1 stack maximum. I have not found a method to ensure at least 1 copper plate remains in all the stacks of a chest.
-you cannot have storage chests for general storage, only specialized storage like this. For instance I'd like items like wood to just be dumped but now i have to make storage chest with circuit conditions for wood linked to a regular steel chest.


Any improvements/ other ideas?

IMO by the time you get to late game having a belt buss only has decorative value.

Aside from the colossal waste of all the resources lying around on belts, belts are an extremely inefficient means of transporting materials from A to B compared to the "as the crow flies" method of logistic bots.

Logistic bots are much better, provided you plan your base properly to make sure they're not travelling too far, separating networks where necessary.

In this scenarios furnaces have their output transferred to main storage, and so the loop you are referring to doesn't happen, as assemblers are supplied either direct from main storage, or from passive providers nearby.

Long distance transportation is solved by rail, which also offers a neat way to run circuit cables for finer control of resources.

For example I now run a red cable from a roboport at the main base to every station so trains can use the circuit system to know when to deliver ore - very simple - no combinators required

I am increasingly adopting a modular approach, where satellite factories in outposts supply the rocket launch site in the main base.

This is partly due to my preference for playing maps with low resources and large bodies of water, which tend to limit the expansion of factories due to space issues, but also strongly influenced by watching Zisteau's Factorio Meiosis series, and to a lesser extent Bentham's Towns.

I personally think belts are the way to go for high throughput over medium distances. If you have to transport 3 blue lanes worth of iron over 100 tiles I'd stick to belts instead of like 1000 robots. And yeah I've seen Zisteau's meiosis, but you'll notice he uses belts.

Irrespective of whether it is more efficient to use belts or not I still want to use them coz they add to the game. Ideas?

wzzl wrote:(...) Irrespective of whether it is more efficient to use belts or not I still want to use them coz they add to the game.

I agree. In fact, whenever using logistic bots, to me personally, that feels like 'cheating'. I know that's absolutely ridiculous, but somehow I feel that the core of the game are transport belts,
and I always set my own challenge of doing ALL of my productions with belts. I guess that it helps that I love to mess with circuits.

I have dealt with and tried to solve the very problem you describe. Unfortunately I always end up with some kind of loop ... Your idea with the capped storage chest is a good'un though. I'm gonna give that a try.
This same issue was posted in a different topic a short while ago. The author suggested having a specific Trash-Chest for this purpose, which would indeed solve the entire problem.
Perhaps someone in the Mod community could look at this....

I found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... s/d6lfksx/
http://imgur.com/a/dpvyR

Looked promising, and the author claims that you could also put excess back on the bus, but I couldn't get it to work

It has a requester chest that requests everything that's in the logistics network minus what's in the provider chest. But it triggers bots moving between the chests. Maybe I did something wrong. It's not 100% clear what the inserter is connected to

Serenity wrote:I found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... s/d6lfksx/
http://imgur.com/a/dpvyR

Looked promising, and the author claims that you could also put excess back on the bus, but I couldn't get it to work

It has a requester chest that requests everything that's in the logistics network minus what's in the provider chest. But it triggers bots moving between the chests. Maybe I did something wrong. It's not 100% clear what the inserter is connected to

the inserter is connected to the logistics network. the top of the second window attached to the inserter says logistic connection at the top