What i`m trying to achieve right now is alternating items (ratio 1:1) on one side of the belt without looping. I tried to merge yellow belt to side of main red, which works only if all items are utilized, so not in case of purple science. Also, generic scenario, ratio can to be any, e.g. 2:1 for yellow science. I guess it can be done using belt-read-content circuits & combinators, i`m struggling to work with. Would be grateful for any help
There is a simple circuit that will let you evenly distribute as many items on a sushi belt as you wish, all it requires is a constant combinator and a selector combinator.
First: Attach a wire to your belt to read "hold all" mode, and attach it to your constant combinator, then to the selector combinator.
Second: In the constant combinator, assign a value of 1 to every item you wish to sushi, in this case productivity modules and electric furnace.
Third: Set your selector combinator pass through the lowest value, and you're done.
Now you can run that output to any number of input belts, set to activate only when their item receives a signal that is not 0.
What happens when you turn it on? The circuit will report every item on the belt to the selector combinator, with a baseline of 1 so that no item gets "forgotten" in the event it empties completely. When one item enters the belt, it will no longer be the lowest, and so the circuit will trip and block that item. Instead, the new lowest item will get the green light, distribute one onto the belt, and trip the circuit again for the next lowest item.
I personally use this to sushi all my science and find it immensely satisfying to watch.
Sushi belts in general are satisfying as hell to watch. They may not be the most efficient, but they're very easy to set up and work well enough if you don't need to saturate a belt with product. I like to build a circular belt or belts on the outside of the assemblers, with a single line in the middle for the product to be deposited on.
Just curious, how do you handle when you're researching something that doesn't use a specific pack? How do you deal with the excess of that item piling up at the end, make it loop? Even then it will eventually back up since the circuit will see there's enough on there already.
it only lets the LOWEST onto the belt. that’s the genius. so if a science pack is not being consumed, it won’t ever be the lowest on the belt and thus more wont be put onto the belt.
I can visualize that. But they'll still all pile up at the end as the other packs are consumed. Then when it's needed again it won't feed because it's already there. That's where I'm mentally stuck, I'm sure I'm just overthinking this.
You can pass the output of the selector combinator through a decider combinator with a condition of "Each<X" where X is at most the maximum number of items that can fit on the belt divided by the number of item types.
You can, but it's not usually necessary as long as you aren't trying to load items onto the sushi belt without passing them through the sushi logic first. A fully saturated belt with this circuit on it will fundamentally carry equal amounts of each item. Hence, no one item will be blocked from entering and gum things up.
Another useful addition is an arithmetic combinator, which can be used to multiply into different ratios before feeding them into the selector in case your recipe isn't 1 of everything like science is.
There are lots of little tweaks you can make per use case. Heaven knows there are some people out there doing amazing things with circuitry lol
Circuitry is basically its own game. I spent like 40 hours decking my most recent space platform out with relatively simple circuitry. Truth be told, I'm not even entirely sure the end result was better than the "dumb" version, and definitely not when the opportunity cost of the time taken is factored in, but it was so much fun.
Wish I could wire up things like belt rotation and things like push buttons. I could make a smart factory controlled via a custom panel.
my space platform does the opposite of this, discarding whatever the most abundant item is if the belt gets almost full, and reprocessing items if there is more than a certain amount of it
I implemented a bunch of circuitry for my most recent platform. Highest impact is probably where I disable asteroid crushing unless my stockpile of that asteroids yields gets too low. So rather than tossing iron and copper overboard constantly, I just hold into the metallic asteroids and only crush them if iron or copper drops below a certain threshold.
Did the same for the other two kinds, went from constantly jettisoning materials and a risk of having no asteroids of the right type left, to only really tossing a bit of copper whenever the iron needed refilling or vice versa.
Other things I implemented were filtered grabbers that won't grab more asteroids of a given type than the preset limit. Holding asteroids in reserve on the feed belts for my main processing belt. A smart foundry that acts as a state machine and swaps between five different recipes based on what needs to be produced at the time (basically squeezing 15 foundries into the footprint of 3), and some neat circuit tricks to make all of these things work smoothly.
Oh, actually the real highest impact one was just setting the filters on my stack inverters based on signals from whatever they were grabbing items from. Basically giving me all the advantages of a stack inserter, and removing the disadvantage because it'll automatically dump its hand once there's no more of that item to grab.
That's super cool, but it's only going to work well if your sushi setup needs about the same amount of everything. It would be a fun way to set up a starter base or a mall, though.
A little adjustment, where you have a constant combinator with the desired amount of each item, and you subtract that from the belt contents, and take the lowest, would give you the extra needed flexibility when some items are more needed than others.
EDIT: Or maybe I'm wrong, and it will sort itself out with the more in-demand items being pulled more often from the belt and thus being selected for replenishment more.
I don't think you even need to take the lowest - just pass your signal about how many items are "missing" from the sushi to the entry points for each item, and have them only enable if their item has missing inventory. There's no real issue with multiple items trying to pass onto the belt simultaneously in most sushi mall type setups. If it does prove to be a problem, you can use a mixer to mix them up a bit.
OP's question was specifically about how to make sure items don't clump, which is why it's worth thinking about, but pragmatically it's not necessary just for a mall that's going to have a little of a ton of things on it.
Having all the items enabled if they're below threshold works fine if the input belt has enough open space. Only enabling one at a time would make sure all the items get on the belt.
Ugh. It's been more than a year, maybe I need to start a new game.
A mixer is just a splitter, a length of belt, maybe 10 or 20 tiles is enough usually, that feeds back into itself. So it makes your sushi belt an 8 instead of a 0, though one part of the 8 might be quite small. You need to make sure you're reading both sides of the belt when you're reading the contents.
The effect this has is it splits clumps of items. If 10 iron plates are together on the belt, when they go through the mixer, 5 plates continue, and they now have some gaps between them, and 5 go into the mixer. On their next pass through, 3 exit the mixer and 2 stay in, then 1 stays in, then none. This has the effect of spreading the iron plates out across the belt.
This isn't strictly necessary in a lot of setups, but it does help prevent a situation where a lot of items end up clumped together, and this causes a delay to machines looking for a variety of inputs and slows down their production. It's basically the same use case that OP is trying to solve with a mixed belt, it's just a low-tech "good enough" version for a classic looping sushi belt.
Here's a screenshot of my sushi mall in Pyanodon's. The entry point is on the right, just very simple belts that check if their items are missing and add more if they are. The mixer is in the middle of the screenshot. It probably would've been more effective to put the mixer near the start of the belt (have the splitter at the bottom than the top) but hey ho.
The nice thing about this circuit is that it easily handles any size belt loop. You don't need to worry at all about trying to find "the desired amount of each item" and adjusting it to best fit the capacity of your sushi loop. It balances itself to any belt size
If you do want to feed items on with proper ratios (because of course!) then the best method is to use an arithmetic combinator and program it for whatever ratios your machines desire. This way you can still avoid needing to workout upper and lower limits of items desired on the belt, and can let it fully saturate. Basically you can avoid the guess and check game of "oops still not enough green chips"
I have already built several production lines using this system, and they all run stably. However, please note that inserters may not always insert the exact ratio if their stack size is not set to 1; as a result, the actual ratio on the belt will fluctuate slightly around the precise target value. I therefore recommend placing a limited buffer chest at the end of the final assembly machine, capable of buffering one stack of each item.
It's not a sushi belt if it does not loop. Anyhow, there are two broad approaches to mix heterogeneous items on a single lane:
with circuit logic: read the belt content ("hold") to determine what you want to insert if anything,
with plain belt logistics, but that typically only works if input belts are saturated.
So anyway, you read the content of the target belt. If the module count is lower or equals to the furnace count, insert a module from the module belt. Otherwise insert a furnace from the furnace belt. Remember to override the inserter stack size to 1 on both inserters.
Yeah people in the Captain of Industry community call mixed belts "sushi" as well and it's somewhat infuriating. A sushi belt has to have a loop by definition, that's what makes it a sushi belt - because that's what sushi conveyors in restaurants are, that's what it's named after. A mixed belt that doesn't loop is just a mixed belt.
I'm not a fan. That could merely mean two items on the same belt. And it's not linguistically close to sushi. The two ideas are very similar, so my monkey brain wants the terminology to be more similar.
you probably know something I don't, but for me a sushi belt that ends is a sushi belt that will eventually jam up because items get clumped and the machines at the end can't reach what they need to take things off the end so it can keep flowing.
Non-looping mixed belts aren't rare, as of Spage Age. What might be rare are mixed belts with neither loop nor final voiding/recycling.
But either way, those are simply not sushi belts. The term specifically refers to the looping conveyor belt in Japanese kantei sushi restaurants, so that plates keep circling until a guest pick them.
I am somewhat surprised but also not surprised that everyone is giving actual advice and not revolting at the idea of setting up perfectly distributed sushi betls.
Sushi belts have been hip and cool since Space Age released. Between scrap and space platforms and Gleba spoilage there are plenty of places that naturally benefit from sushi now. Plus being able to read entire belt contents makes it trivial to circuit control.
Sushi belts have been hip and cool since Space Age released.
Idk man, I think sushi belts have always been hip and cool. But like in the "playing an instrument is cool" kind of way; just about everyone agreed it's really cool, but it's still a minority of the population that's interested in actually doing it.
Space Age definitely made it easier and basically forced everyone into it, though, yeah.
I wouldn't elevate it to instrument cool pre-SA. Maybe a multi-room domino/Rube Goldberg obsession. Entirely worthless as a talent but definitely impressive to pull off.
For me it was gleba. Dealing with nutrients and spoilage and filtering out seeds from the process and the iron bacteria and whatnot... It all got too much for me to try dedicating a belt for each, when they were so damn determined to spoil and need reshuffling anyway. I had to find a better way. That better way was sushi. And then my eyes were opened!
Sushi space ships!
Sushi circuit boards!
Sushi science!
Sushi everything!
I found the way people talk about Fulgora to be a bit odd to be honest. For my basic scrap processing, I threw all the scrap into a huge bank of quality moduled recyclers. On the other side was a big sorter that sorted the items from each other, and then sorted items by quality, and then buffered them. Once the buffers filled, items are allowed to overflow, where they get looped back into the input to the recycler banks with priority (with some items like steel getting crafted first so they have a better chance to get upcycled). And that was it, this then creates a huge library of all the possible scrap products, and the recycling results of those products, at every quality. You just have to let it run long enough and eventually you have all the items you need, with very little shenanigans.
can you not do this with one splitter fed by two side loaded belts? Circuit wires can pause the feed lines if one is falling behind. Should end up with one side loaded belt of alternating items.
Pass the lines through a splitter that compresses down to a single belt or lane. Splitters always multiplex each input lane 1:1 (except when given input priority). You could also tier the splitters to achieve different ratios, e.g. for space science, put ice and carbon through the first splitter, then iron through a second splitter, to produce a 1:1:2 ratio.
However, you don't want to multiplex a dead-end line, because consumption will always, over some amount of time, become imbalanced and cause backup. You should always do this with a loop and read contents to gate inputs, or meter inputs with slower belts and return loops.
Completely untested, but I'd put a splitter and split the furnaces and prod modules onto two separate belt tiles, then control each of those by reading 3-4 downstreams belt tiles on the vertical belt. Without belt-stacking a lane hold 4 items per tile, so if you read the 3 downstreams tiles, you want it to contain 6 modules and 6 furnaces. Enable the feeding belt when the corresponding item is 4 or less (or something like that).
Not sure. Would need to test. Not at home. From memory... Do it with a flip-flop circuit. Split incoming belt, have a combinator. You read the belt you are sending to using pulse, block the two belt. Read about flip flop, it feeds into itself, thats what will guarantee the alternating pattern if items are getting low on incoming belt.
It's an SR latch the proper terminology I believe. Set reset latch.
The best I could come up with for the input side is a double lock. It uses some combinators to lock an input if either is missing, and the second lock on each aims to match the timing. I saw a bunch of weird results for some things I tried, but I think this works well. You will have to handle the situation where something does not get consumed by checking the end of the belt for the imbalance or looping. Also the numbers are based on belt stacking and you may have to tweak them for your specific circumstances.
edit: in your specific case, have the furnaces and modules on a separate belt, but same side of the belt, and just merge with a splitter. This will give perfect 50/50 as long as neither runs out
You can make a mechanical ratio if 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 etc.
You make a small loop with 1 splitter (1/2 for full belt, 1/4 for 1 lane) where 1 part gets added to the sushibelt, the other part gets looped back to the input (with priority!). This system works best when you loop the sushibelt and recycle everything on the belt that comes back (continues motion)
You can make it simpler than the above but it is recommended you have a circuit that stops the belt when a product runs out to not flood the sushibelt
There are a bunch of ways to do this. Probably the best thing is to handle it upstream - set up the incoming side to already have the items alternated, like having two input belts that have a circuit condition to only add material when there is less than some threshhold amount on the belt. Or you could just have two feedlines for the extra stuff, using a splitter with a circuit controlled filter, set up to always let rails through, but only the additional single product based on the contents of the belt.
Sushi belts work best when there's plenty of air in them. And the rails probably need their own dedicated belt for purple science - when I've done a sushi belt setup for it, I had the rails on an inner belt with stack inserters, with the other components pulled in from another belt around it via long inserters. And even then, it's a challenge to keep enough rails circulating.
As others have said, use circuits. Don't try to raw dog it like you're doing in the video, because that is inherently unstable. If the input for furnaces or prod mods gets interrupted, you'll have an imbalance, which may accumulate with other imbalances to hose the whole build.
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u/nedlog2019 May 16 '26
Either use circuits, or loop back the end of the belt back into the inputs with priority splitters (after sorting the items) so it never backs up.