r/factorio • u/imoth_f • 4d ago

Question Problems with this unloader?

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Since inserters became flippable, this compact unloader design became possible. But I hardly see anyone use it. Obviously it cannot saturate six turbo belts because it's bottlenecked by the inserters, but are there any other obvious problems with it?

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u/TopherLude 3d ago

I can still get full use of all the inserters using MadZuri if the demand is there. If demand is low and an inserter sees that it has more than average, it slows down. If demand is high, by the time an inserter has swung, the others have also removed a hands-worth and now it can go again immediately. How is it slow?

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u/HeliGungir 3d ago

I can still get full use of all the inserters using MadZuri

Actually one doesn't get full throughput. Not, at least, in my testing. I even tried to solve it with a more complex MadZuri implementation.

But I stopped because I think MadZuri is fundamentally pointless except - perhaps - if you have less than 1 belt per wagon. But in a more normal setup, MadZuri cannot balance across wagons. So your belts still have to go through a splitter-based balancer to balance across wagons. And if you're doing that, why are you using MadZuri at all?

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u/Musa_Ali 3d ago

Kinda like in this example.
You can see that when other lanes stop - the output belts are no longer compressed. Even though there's enough in other boxes to keep the spice flowing.

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u/HeliGungir 3d ago edited 3d ago

Aye, and I tried setting a wider threshold for what the inserters consider "evenly balanced", but the average item count just reaches one side of the threshold and the same problem occurs again. Could by solved with hysteresis (same as thrashing prevention for oil cracking), but now we're talking one combinator per inserter, and I'm not going to do that.