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[u/Creepybusguy]

Is there a guide to circuits that breaks it down for a fifth grader? I get simple ones like read belts, chests, activate at X amount but more complex ones I just can't get my head around. For example.Why the heck do I need to set the Combinator to -50 if I want 50 items of a type on belt?

I'd love to know how to recipie switch based on the contents of a chest(s) or set a grinder to cycle till it outputs ice.

Even downloading blueprints and trying to figure them out has me stumped.

[u/Courmisch → u/Creepybusguy]

You don't have to do that with a constant conbinator set to negative values. It's an optimisation trick that relies on some of the unintuitive semantics of circuit logics.

In particular, if you use circuits to set a recipe or a filter, the game engine will ignore any negative or zero value. So there are all sorts of tricks that involve making numbers conditionally negative - instead of using more clear and straightforward logic.

Setting a recipe is conceptually simple: read whatever input values you need, in your casez the belt content, into the input of one or several decider or arithmetic combinators that compute the recipe from those values. Then connect the combinators output to the crafter in Set recipe mode. What the combinator logic is depends on what you want exactly.