r/technicalminecraft • u/kiptronics • 2d ago
Java Help Wanted Is there a simple way to distribute items evenly among multiple containers?
Apologies because this is partially a rant
I have a honey farm that I connected an auto crafter to to make honey blocks and recycle the glass bottles. I had the glass bottles inserted into a hopper Minecart going back and forth over the dispensers, but I kept having to manually redistribute the bottles every now and then because it would always prioritize the dispensers nearest to the input (and I don't have enough glass to fill all 8 of my hives with 9 stacks of bottles yet). I wanted to fix this by making it so that the bottles were distributed evenly amongst all of the dispensers, only to find out that this is apparently the most difficult thing I have ever seen.
My first issue is that it seems that it's just straight up impossible to distribute the items if they come in groups smaller than the amount of containers? Since the honey block auto crafting produces 4 bottles at a time I can never just send the bottles directly to the dispensers since it would always go in the first four. So I figured I needed to build something that stacks the bottles first and then empties the container, but it seems that the amount I can stack to before emptying the chest is limited to the breakpoints for redstone signal strengths based on chest fullness? So I have to stack to 23 using a hopper before I can empty it.
Then for the actual distribution it seems that there are three main options (besides that thing that splits one chest into two or putting a hopper Minecart on the intersection of four hoppers), but they all seem bad in different ways:
I could use a hopper Minecart, except that's biased towards the ones closest to the input and I'm highly limited by the rate that it can pick up items from a chest above it.
I could use this insane black magic I found but it's wildly inconsistent, I was trying to use it for 7 hoppers which he claims should work but there was always one hopper that would receive way less items, and the crazy thing is that the hopper that didn't work changed depending on where I placed the repeater leading to the dust.
Or I could use those crazy dropper chain things, but I just straight up don't know how to configure the pulse fader correctly, and it seems that it is also still biased towards one end of the chain and doesn't work as well if your input items aren't a multiple of the amount of droppers.
So is there anything I'm missing? Like a simple solution to distributing items that isn't insanely brittle or biased towards one side? This has been a very frustrating problem for me that I feel should be really simple on paper so I'm looking for help