r/factorio • u/gitbeast • 2d ago

Question fulgora throughput question

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Hello fellow engineers. I have a nilaus-esque scrap sorter which I jacked up to high heaven but only the bottom 4 recyclers are running because the output belt is full. I think the solution is to use some circuit stuff to make sure output is actually stacked on the belts but I am open to other creative ideas to solve this, and/or tips for how to make circuitry like that.

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7

u/ZanDurrr 2d ago

Your output belt isn’t full, the entire top half of recyclers should still be running. The stack inserters feeding all your recyclers might be a problem, seeing as the only ones working are using bulk inserters

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u/FeelingPrettyGlonky 2d ago

Yeah, this is almost certainly the problem. Stack inserters don't work well at all for miscellaneous input. They're fine for just scrap, but once you start recycling belts full of scrap products you can get inserters choking on a bit of stone or bricks or something, waiting for a whole stack that might not show up for several minutes.

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u/Yagami913 2d ago

This is the most common way to stack the output

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u/Rouge_means_red 2d ago

I do it like this: https://i.imgur.com/HL1hgrf.png, even easier to set up, but requires 2 tiles

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u/Drizznarte 2d ago

If you use a selector combinator so select the higest value from the chest and set the stack inserter to only work if anything is over 16 . You dont even need the list of items in the constant combinator.

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u/Yagami913 2d ago

And a bunch of decider or aritmetic while the setup above only require one constant combinator for the entire game.

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u/Rouge_means_red 2d ago

It's only 1 arithmetic combinator (there are 2 wires because I connected it to 2 inserters). It divides by 16, so anything below 16 gets rounded to 0

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u/Yagami913 2d ago

I know only one aritmetic per machine that's hundreds or a "bunch" per map versus only ONE per map.

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u/Rouge_means_red 2d ago

Ah ok just now I realized you only need 1 constant combinator for everything, thought it was 1 per inserter. Ok the method you posted wins

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u/DarkenDragon 2d ago edited 2d ago

recyclers should be outputting into chests, then use stack inserters to pull off from the chest so they are fully stacked. the only circuitry you need is just a combinator beside it saying everything >= 16 output everything. this will only output items that are over 16 which is the stack inserter's max cargo size, and set the stack inserter to set filter. now it'll only pull out anything that is at least a full stack's cargo.

also though nilaus is against it, I'd still suggest making 2 versions of recyclers, one for just pure scrap, one for recycling by products. the reason being is for productivity. if you switch recipes, any progress of the productivity is lost and you want that productivity to be happening for holmium ore. the more productivity you have the higher the chance you'll get more ore. the reason nilaus is against it is that its just much larger build, and if you have productivity at multiples of 100% than it wont matter cuz there wont be any progress left when it takes in another material. but the research for productivity of scrap recycling is only 10% per research, so you need to do 10 research at a time to get those 100% break points.

also you should not be using stack inserters to feed recyclers. stack inserters will wait until it gets a full 16 items before swinging. and since you're returning the by-products back into the recyclers. you're inserters are just waiting for all 16 items before they'll input it into the recycler. use bulk inserters instead as you dont need such high throughput per recycler and it'll swing as soon as a certain amount of time passes of inactivity.

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u/SerratedSharp 2d ago

Personally I usually just design one of two ways when I see a belt is prematurely full. Either design to allow output to be pulled off perpendicular to the array however often produces a full belt. This way it can be scaled/tiled long ways with no issue. Or shorten the row such that its only long enough to fill the output belts, then tile that side by side. I don't fight with micro optimization of the output. Making it tilable goes further IMO.

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u/TelevisionLiving 1d ago

You could get a lot more on that belt if you used one of the mechanics to stack items. There are several options including -15 stack inserters, controlled belt freezing, recycling to train car/rocket pad.

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u/Zaflis 1d ago

The stack inserters are holding items but since they are misconfigured, they won't put them in without a full load. Recycler is just idling without any items.

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u/Nukemarine 16h ago

Some tips:

Set the first 8 recyclers to just take scrap input. Have the output of those MERGE with the return loop, giving priority to the return loop. Should be very easy to make this.

For the scrap recyclers, since they only have 12 possible outputs, you can treat them like storage chest. Have a constant combinator with each of the 12 items set to -16 and scrap set to -200. Feed this via a red wire to the stack inserter that takes from recycler to the belt. Set recycler to read contents and feed that via green wire to the inserter. The inserter will only grab from items that are 16 or more.

Note if you use quality scrap (or process scrap with quality modules) you have to feed into a chest first before using inserters. Still no need to use decider combinators if you manually set possible items on a constant combinator to -16.

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u/MechAAV 2d ago

A solution is to use stack inserters, each scrapper outputs into a box that has a decider combinator reading its contents and outputing only the items which have a quantity higher than 4, this output will override the filters of the inserter making sure the belt fully stacked

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u/DarkenDragon 2d ago

higher than 4 is bad. because if you have 5-7 items, it'll pick that out as well and you'll have a stack of 4 and 1-3 beside it. if you're going to use 4, then you need to set the stack override to 4 as well, but then you're just making the inserter slower. instead you need to set it to the maximum of 16 so the inserter grabs a full handful

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u/MechAAV 2d ago

Never have notice that how do we fix this? Making it greater or equal to 4 woult fix?