Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Add "Ligistic update planner" tool that will allow bulk-change combinator signals same way as update planner can change entities.

What ?

Imagine you created combinator contraption that computes whatever u need and you want to do the same for another signal ...
currently you need top copy-paste your contraption and manually change signal with another (= 4+ click on each combinator)

Planner could work simillar to update planner but instead of items it would swap signals; it could also have switches, that would specify:
- apply to : arithmetic c., decider c., constant c., inserter, ... (anything that can have condition)
- change signal: left input, right input, output

It would probably need to ignore Everithing/Anything/Each signals because theyre special.

Given change could be done via logistic bot (immersion; not make it like cheat) as construction bots do with items.

Why ?

Manually changing signals can be tedious specially when it is repetitive operation, that can be automated.

If you need to copy/paste a circuit that way I guess you should try to use a more flexible circuit, where you define the signal that needs to be looked at in a constant combinator. So you can see in alt-view, what this circuit is configured to. It’s sometimes hard and a quite complex puzzle (and it blows up the size of the circuit in some cases), but till now I found no situation where this wasn’t possible.

Have you also thought about this: signals contains two values: an item-type and a value. Your suggestion would change only the first one, but it’s very likely that you need to change also the second...

Besides that this suggestion is a typical mod, because I think this is a very special use case...

i was trying to create requester chest (request send via signal) that when fullfiled will send its content via belt to another location (provider chest in different roboport network - didnt wanna to merge them)

ended up with 9 combinators for single signal (couldnt figure out how to use "each" signal for that - maily due 0 == NULL logic) and then i wanted to clone that logic for another signal ...

PS: After discovering, that filter inserter grabs only first 5 signals i scrapped whole idea and merged networks ...