Factorio Forums

Greetings, I have a short question - does the game engine allow a recipe that can take any ingredient and produce the stuff basing on the raw ingredient composition?
What I basically want is to make a machine that takes anything and produces shredded junk of different types (ferrous junk, non-ferrous junk, plastic junk, general junk) that can be re-processed later on. If I put in an inserter the machine will give me metallic junk, but if I put in an assembly machine it will give me general junk) - something like this.
I can specifically write recipes for all the tech I want to recycle but wonder if it's possible to create a shredder that eats anything automatically.

Not directly, but yes.

You can use the same logic as a furnace to make a free-form assembler entity that takes anything that works for a recipe. Similar logic is used for Flare stacks and clarifiers and proabably other stuff.

You do however have to have a recipe for each item you want to "Recycle". This can be done by some clever data scripting I imagine.

So yes, sort of. Its not a single recipe, but it is possible to do what you want without active scripting