Factorio Forums

I'm looking for a way, if possible, to design a combinator network that will only take the first "N" (or maybe just the first) signal out of a network in the order that they are usually taken by the game itself, such as when a stack filter inserter sets its filter. If I have 10 different item signals, the inserter will take the "first signal" determined by some deterministic (but seemingly arbitrary) order until that signal is equal to zero. For example, if I have 100 * Red Belt and 50 * Yellow Belt, Yellow Belt is always taken until that signal goes away. I'm not sure if there's a way to somehow use combinators to filter in a similar manner so that if the input to the circuit design is 100 * Red Belt and 100 * Yellow Belt, the output of the circuit will only be 100 * Yellow Belt until that signal decreases to 0. Anyone have designs for this, or perhaps a mod which adds a new machine to accomplish this?

The "anything" wildcard in combinators only outputs one value. That's the green one.

DerGraue wrote: Wed Feb 03, 2021 7:26 pm The "anything" wildcard in combinators only outputs one value. That's the green one.

Ah, indeed it does! For some reason I was thinking that wasn't available as an output signal; I think I was remembering Arithmetic combinators instead of Decision. "Anything > 0 => Anything" works exactly as I was hoping

It wasn't available as an output signal until very recently; this was added to deciders in 1.1.13

torne wrote: Wed Feb 03, 2021 10:00 pm It wasn't available as an output signal until very recently; this was added to deciders in 1.1.13

That would explain it

It turned out to be incredibly useful for my robots > LTN adapter station design.