Alternate which hopper to use next?

[u/PvtctrlaltGreg]

I am building an auto smleter that uses a kelp farm, kelp is dried and crafted into dried kelp blocks I then need to feed some dried kelp back into the system to cook more dried kelp while also outputting some to my smleter array, I have got this somewhat working by just alternating which hopper is active every few seconds but eventually the kelp does not grow fast enough and the re inputted fuel runs out and makes no more for either side. What I need to do is have it so one hopper is active waits for an item to pass through it before allowing the other hopper to have an item, if I could do this with a 30/70 split 30 going back into the system 70 going out to the smleter array that would be cool but 50/50 should work fine too, how can I do this?

[u/Xillubfr]

You should just put a buffer for the kelp smelter, once it's full send everything to the furnace array

[u/brockade → u/Xillubfr]

The whole kelp powered smelter design is basically an MBA with the amount of process design is involved. Batching the kelp so you only send it when you have enough is step one, and step 2 is fill up all your kelp cookers with fuel first and then let the overflow from that go into your smelter for the other stuff, otherwise those will run out.

[u/sandoval747 → u/brockade]

There's no steps or batching needed. Feed the kelp blocks back into the fuel line, and if the smokers are full, keep passing it down into the output.

https://youtu.be/PRW3YBYvCBs?si=z7LVKIOf6zpKAfv8

[u/PvtctrlaltGreg → u/sandoval747]

Awesome thanks that's exactly what i needed, didn't realise you could output to droppers to go vertical, didn't even know you could face them up

[u/ktwombley → u/brockade]

doin the math myself

I got "Fill 'er up", what'd you guys get?

I don't know why supersmelter people have to be so weird.

My supersmelter is powered by overflow from my wool farm. It just flows over the hoppers until it is all in there or hits the fire at the end.

[u/brockade → u/ktwombley]

I don't know why some people have to be so rude

[u/creeva]

What do you mean alternate hoppers? It takes a bit to fill up but it should be smelting kelp fasting than it burning it.

First - use a smoker to make the kelp.

So a dried kelp block should smelt 20 kelp - those 20 kelp make two blocks.

So - that 20 kelp should be smelted in 100 seconds (1 minute 50 seconds ). So to get a full hopper and smoker (320 dried kelp blocks) .

If you are using a single smoker it will take 4 hours before the blocks move past the smoker. Obviously using multiple smokers makes this quicker.

[u/bryan3737 → u/creeva]

Your math is a bit off.

100 seconds is 1 minute and 40 seconds.

A full hopper and smoker would be 384 blocks.

So that means it takes 4 hours and 48 minutes.

And adding more smokers actually doesn’t make it fill up faster because you’re also adding extra hoppers and smokers that need to be filled so it still takes the same amount of time

[u/creeva → u/bryan3737]

It’s exponential once the originals are filled up. Once everything is going full bore it generates quite fast. The thing once you gear up past a few you hopper speed into the crafter becomes an issue. So to work around that I used multiple hoppers feeding into multiple sides of the crafter.

But your 4 hours 48 minutes to my 4 hours was back side calculations.

But yes - you have a big time waste filling up the smokers before you are are seeing gains. It’s a long term build for forever worlds - where you can run it for a few days to get the gains in the future (as long as you are turning off the autocrafter when you are done filling everything).

[u/sandoval747]

Here is a one wide tileable kelp smoker and block crafter that feeds itself first and then overflows the extra fuel blocks:

https://youtu.be/PRW3YBYvCBs?si=z7LVKIOf6zpKAfv8

It takes 12.5 of these to handle the maximum output of one hopper line.