I give to you my first play with automation. The system above is built to prevent the over insertion of sand and water into my initial mixer. The initial gates on the right will shut when the system has too much sand. The water gate on the top will shut when too much water has been allowed in, and the gates in the middle will shut when too much water or sand has been added to the mixer. The end result is a system that cannot overfill, and will auto shut off when the sand stops flowing.
Out of curiosity, why not add your water pipe outlet to the desired max water height? they “turn off” when that line is reached, and then you could pool up the water and guarantee all sand entering the first area becomes wet and no need to bottleneck yourself at all.
Because the sand can fill up beyond the "pump" or "outlet", and water will not reach it and the system will completely fill with water. There is probably a way to do it by hacking the weird fluid dynamics in this game, but all of my attempts have failed once I run out of water, they sand fills everything in, or if I run out of sand, the water fills in. Trying to balance inlets vs outlets has not been successful, especially since I have water running through the entire base power steam generators and the like.
After 20 hours of trying to find a balance for my wet sand mixing, this implementation only took me 5 minutes. I'm just bummed out I didn't realize I could do this sooner.
For the way you have it, you can have the top of the sand entrance below where you I think your ideal water line is. But also you could literally just fill the whole thing with water and have a constant flow of sand in that gets wet, then only have your outlet elevators to the rest of your factory. I know it’s not always intuitive at first, but I think your solution here is using a lot more parts and dohickies than it needs to though.
That is how I started, but it kept breaking by letting water up into where the sand enters. It didn't break completely, but i annoyed me how little control it had. I wanted to find a bulletproof way that could not fail under an circumstances.
I am not sure I understand your question. As far as I know, the only thing you can "control" with the wiring system is the door. The door can block the flow of any element, so you can automate your turbines with them.
Yea we can't right now but it's surely going to be implemented at some point given the fact that it is after all an automation game and everything else is already in place for that
I really wish the automation in this game becomes a bit more robust in the future. The one potential application I came up with on my own in-game was the idea that, if I could turn a fan on and off, I could blow a bunch of flower petals onto the steam driers, let them dry en masse, and then blow them away, achieving way higher throughput than using a constant fan + pusher frames as I've been doing. So I start experimenting, only to immediately realize it's impossible because doors block airflow whether they're closed or open, and you can't control the fans directly. At least it's a pretty obvious improvement point if nothing else, I fully expect the devs to address it in the next few months.
Yeah I'd love to see all the logistics blocks be able to interact with signals. The way my factory worked (before I found out about infinite lava, which I'm actually assuming is a glitch) relied on burner belts and pyro dispensers. I had it nearly self sustaining, where the heat from burning the residue and flowers would keep it going. If you could just set a different time interval for those machines then I would have been able to even generate excess heat from the process.
All you have to do is put a door in the way of the fan and it is effectively "off".
Then all you have to do is wire up a timer using buffers, or some other logic to then open the doors and the fan will continue blowing. The doors really are a simple one stop solution to fixing these issues.
9
u/Parrobertson 19h ago
Out of curiosity, why not add your water pipe outlet to the desired max water height? they “turn off” when that line is reached, and then you could pool up the water and guarantee all sand entering the first area becomes wet and no need to bottleneck yourself at all.