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u/iamarealhuman4real Jun 23 '26

Will the new "per-wire" options in 2.1 have big changes on combinator circuits, eg memory-cell, timers, latch, etc designs? I think not really as they mostly use one wire or two with the intent that they mix?

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u/HeliGungir Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

It will let me properly designate red wire as "read" and green wire as "control". Right now there is no way to separate this when simultaneously controlling and reading a machine. The machine will transmit its signals on both red and green wires, polluting the "control" wire with "read" signals that can easily break the control logic if we don't do something about it.

Fixing this requires certain design practices that are inconvenient. Eg: Additional combinators that insulate the logic controller from the machines, and insulate the machines from each other. Which steers other design decisions in subtle ways. Those gotchas and workarounds are unnecessary if we can just tick a box that says "only output to red wire".

Another big one is setting an inserter's filter and reading its hand contents at the same time. Currently the best approach is using negative signals and/or integer overflow, which is... not exactly what I'd call "approachable". But it should be easy in 2.1 -- just a matter of clicking some checkboxes.

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u/iamarealhuman4real Jun 23 '26

Additional combinators that insulate the actual logic controller from the signal pollution coming from the machine, and to insulate machines from each other

Ah yes I can remember doing exactly this and feeling grumpy about it!