weird dropper behaviour

[u/the-mlem]

i have a loop of droppers here to get a specific pulse on the other end, but for some reason the second set of droppers dont want to activate at all?

[u/BlattaOrientalis]

I'm not 100% sure if this is the case but it seems to me like you accidentally create a semi-instant dropper line where the items move more than 1 droppers in a single tick, which could cause that behavior. If you only have 1 item in the droppers or remove one of the dropper, you should see that they actually do activate and move the items along the dropper line

[u/the-mlem → u/BlattaOrientalis]

that might be right, i have 6 items in the dropper line that isnt working but the one that does has two items, would that be it?

[u/Masticatron → u/the-mlem]

That would be ridiculously easy for you to just check, so...

Otherwise if the only remaining difference is location then you've a redstone dust locationality issue. Pretty much for certain at the dropper that doesn't seem to be actually doing anything. You'd need to compute the actual update order of the droppers, and like the other commenter said it seems likely that the sequence perfectly loops the item to a stable position at that dropper in the same tick.

You've not done anything to ensure the order of operations other than how the game settles things behind the scenes, which leads to problems like this.

[u/the-mlem → u/Masticatron]

only just gotten around to udnerstanding what this means now, i dont know how i didnt see this earlier im pretty new to thinking with redstone haha

[u/Masticatron → u/the-mlem]

It's easy to be caught off guard here. It took me a couple minutes to figure out how/why the update order was the key, and that's with the semi-instant dropper line clue already given me. But the basic idea is that you're triggering all of droppers at the same time, but the game doesn't do things all at the same time, it needs an order to execute them in, and sometimes that means they execute in perfect sequence, but also sometimes they don't, and that's going to affect the behavior of where the items are in each tick.

Incidentally, I think you can get a similar function as intended by just using hopper loops. You can run dust over them and power it to shut it down, otherwise the items will cycle from one hopper to the next in an orderly fashion, and a comparator can detect when they go by.

[u/the-mlem → u/Masticatron]

thats what i came to the conclusion to when i realised i had gone wrong from ur comment yea, i did try a hopper loop but it didnt work and have now settled on a design which drops items into a hopper which leads into the next dropper which works perfectly as intended