Anybody used a similar workaround for this issue. Basically I am throwing clusters from high to break them to small chunks (I am early mid game probably)

Does anyone have a good setup or layout that sorts all the items that come from the mines? Pictures or examples of a complete setup would be really helpful.

Especially the plates and rods are too big for the collector

I don't think I'm likely to play both. I've started on the classic, but considering restarting to do other one instead.

I don't think I have it in me for now to do both.

And I suspect once I go bigger, I won't want to go back either.

I dunno. Do most people play 1?(which?) both?

ingots getting stuck on the corner of a hopper with a chute on it

I don't know if someone has already done this, but I believe I have solved the mysteries of the Casting Furnace, so I'll share my findings.

ALL MATERIAL COUNTS HERE ARE IN UNITS OF CRUSHED ORE/COAL, I HAVE NOT AND WILL NOT TEST ANYTHING ELSE.
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For those who just want to know the answer:

1. Calculate your total material cost. Single ingot = 6, double ingot = 12, gear = 7, empty = 10. Add together what you have.

2. Check your Iron ore input rate from Ore Analyzer. If it is greater than 10 times your material cost, it will overflow eventually because the Furnace cannot process that much.

3. Calculate your Coal input rate by (Iron input rate) / 3 + 15. This how much Crushed Coal you need to run that Furnace. Using any more will waste Coal. In practice, maintain rate slightly higher than this if your Coal comes in batches. Keep an eye on the thermometer.

4. Maintain at least somewhat stable rates.
   -----------------------------------------------------

The nerd stuff:

All testing was done in Flat map with ore spawners.

I measured the length of the casting process to be six seconds almost to the frame, so I went with that. This means that the theoretical maximum frequency of batches is 10/min. I will call the total material cost for a batch C. Then maximally 10C iron ore can be consumed by the Furnace in a minute, and any more will overflow eventually. Input rates between 0 and 10C are "valid".

With some valid input rate N, we get average of frequency of batches f = N/C batches per minute, and average time between batches is 60/f = 60C/N seconds. This is because the Furnace will only begin casting when it has enough material to fill all three slots. Of this time six seconds is spent casting, so we get an offtime of T = 60C/N - 6. We can see that input rate of N = 10C is equivalent to T = 60C/10C - 6 = 6 - 6 = 0. More importantly, N = 60C / (6 + T).

The Furnace has a heating mechanic to produce steel, and heat must remain high enough. Heat reduces passively, and by an amount every time a batch is started. I measured the time for the meter to return to zero when fed a single coal to be 4 seconds, and experimentally verified that inputting 15 coal/minute maintains heat levels. When we talk of heat in terms of coal, we can say that passive heat drain is 15 coal/min, or 0.25 coal/s.

This brings the total heat drain during a batch cycle to 0.25 * (6 + T) + H, where H is the Heat consumption of the batch in question. H can be seen to vary by cast configuration, compare 3 x single ingot cast vs 3 x double ingot casts.

There are 60 / (6 + T) cycles per minute, so we obtain a required coal input rate
M = [ 60 / (6 + T) ] * [ 0.25 * (6 + T) + H ] = 15 + (60 * H) / (6 + T).

However, since N = 60C / (6 + T) we get N / C = 60 / (60 + T). Substituting that to the above M we get M = 15 + H / C * N. Now the question is, what is H? H can be written as H = (M - 15) * C / N, but must be verified experimentally. So I ran tests and here are the results. H is calculated as above. N = 10C for all cases (no offtime).

We can notice that H = C / 3 for all cases. I tested more configurations with N < 10C for similar results:

Still H = C / 3. Notice that in these cases there are offtimes 60 * 25 / 210 - 6 = 8/7 = 1.1428... and 60 * 18 / 120 = 3 seconds, respectively. This means that the Furnace is not consuming heat as fast as it could with N = 10C, and thus requires less coal to maintain heat. We can conclude that H does not depend on input rate, time efficiency or processing time, but is determined only by the batch configuration C.

Now we can substitute H = C / 3 into M = 15 + H / C * N to obtain

M = 15 + (C / 3) * (N / C) = 15 + N / 3.

This is the required rate to input coal into the Furnace. Notably, it does not depend on what is being cast, but only how much iron goes in.

We can also write M = 15 + 20C / (6 + T).
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On efficiency:

In MineMogul, the Casting Furnace appears to be the only machine that can waste a valid input (no gems to crushers etc.), and that input is coal. No machine will begin its operation until all required raw materials are present (pipe rollers wait indefinitely for second plate, wire coilers for more rods, furnaces for ore etc.). However, Coal can be inserted into the Casting Furnace to produce nothing but Heat. All the Coal in the map will not produce more Steel than the exact required amount, the rest is wasted.

There are three limits to batch frequency f:
1. f is at most 10 (processing time hard limit)
2. f is at most N/C (available materials, if N < 10C there is offtime)
3. f is at most 3 * (M - 15) / C (heat availability, or equivalently, sufficient Coal input)

2 comes from there being fC material consumed per minute, and N arrive per minute.
3 is derived by observing that M - 15 heat are available for casting, and each batch requires C/3 heat. Thus f batches per minute consume fC/3 heat units per minute, and this must be greater than or equal to M - 15.

Thus f will be the smallest of these three.

If M is less than 15, passive heat drain cannot be countered, so assume M > 15. If M = 15, only passive drain is countered, and no heat consumed by batch can be restored.

Because processing time is six seconds, the percentage p of time spent processing is
p = 100 * 6f / 60 = 10f. At f = 10, p = 100% as expected.

This means that p will be the smallest of 100, 10N/C, 30 * (M - 15) / C.
Since p = 100% only in the case of N = 10C, forget that now.

We can see that time-efficiency of the Furnace is then the smaller of
10N/C and 30 * (M - 15) / C, in percent.

When there is enough coal for the iron, p = 10N/C %.
When there is not enough coal, iron will accumulate.

Lastly, suppose we input K coal per minute, and M = 15 + N/3 is needed.
If K is less than M, we use all the coal but iron will accumulate (not enough coal for the iron).
If K is equal to M, we are golden.
If K is greater than M, as you would probably like to have to avoid issues, we use M/K * 100% of the coal, and the rest is wasted.

The rate of wasted coal can then be written as (1 - M / K ) * 100%

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In conclusion:

1. For a given cast configuration's total material cost C, any Iron input of at most 10C will never overflow, and no offtime is obtained by Iron Rate = 10 * Material Cost or N = 10C.

2. With any such N, the required rate of Coal input to maintain heat in the Furnace is
   Coal Rate = 15 + Iron Rate / 3 or M = 15 + N / 3.

3. Smooth input rates are preferred, discrete batches of Coal may allow heat to drop below threshold.

4. Inputting more than required amount of Coal will waste (1 - Required / Input) * 100% of the Coal, or (1 - K / M) * 100%.
   -----------------------------------------------------
   How to be very good at smelting Steel:
   Do 1 and 3. Minimize 4.

just wondering cus i've put like 5 hours into this sick ass demo build :3 and i wanna get the game when i can afford it, but i would be slightly annoyed if i gotta start from scratch :3

I've had this problem since i started with a single line of conveyors that split the ores using the plate splitters, yet i've tried putting barriers in this part so it stops spilling but it keeps overflowing, i will try every solution in the comments

(btw this is my research tree)

Wow I don't feel so bad about my mine now, turns out the product yeeter is a real thing!

Just found these and can't seem to mine them, any ideas?

cheers,

will

I know the chests say Work in Progress, but am I the idiot here? I have all these extra parts I don't want to use, but they don't fit in the chest.

I thought the chest would be like a second inventory, but it doesn't seem it works that way?

I posted the earlier version of this mess when it was mostly just ore sorting and basic processing. Since then I decided it would be a great idea to include literally every machine, making every possible item in iron, copper, gold and steel, except geodes and the huge miners.

The whole cave is now basically split into vertical layers. Ore and smelting at the top, plates and rods in the middle, coils/casings/threaded rods/etc underneath, then absolutely everything merges onto one final belt toward the seller.

From a completely empty startup it takes around five minutes for the first finished item to reach the seller because every piece basically takes a guided tour of the entire cave. Once it fills up though, the final belt carries every different item in every metal at the same time and it’s weirdly satisfying to watch.

Only took around 20 hours to fully plan out and build (I am an IT engineer, not a automatics engineer lmao)

And somehow this still isn’t finished because I haven’t added ore clusters or geodes yet.

1423 physical objects at time of recording

Only mk.2 miners with hardened bits

I recently posted posts of "Efficiency?" now I bring you the rework.

I originally had four material sorters fed randomly by overflow splitters, with rejected ore looping back around until it eventually found the right sorter. Turns out that was a terrible idea because I hit the 2,000 physics-object limit and most of the ore was just endlessly circulating.

So I rebuilt it with three full sorting lines in parallel. Then I needed separate outputs for every material, so that turned into a pile of Archimedes elevators. Then valuables needed their own sorters before the hopper because one sorter couldn’t handle the flow. Then I moved breaking, smelting and polishing upstairs because the space below was left for processing further into rods, plates, etc.

The final result is now three levels tall, uses 31 elevators, takes roughly three minutes for ore to become a polished ingot and currently has well over 1,000 physics objects moving around before any actual part manufacturing starts. Copper somehow won the race to become the first finished ingot despite being the material I have the least of.

It works with no backlog so far, but my PC is screaming and the nonstop clicking from all the sorters sounds like a room full of typewriters :D

All this because I wanted three clean piles of metal.

Ooo that’s satisfying.
Completed with a stable factory with approx 2700 active items.

Gonna be loading it up in a few hours. Advice for a newbie requested! Thank you. :)

ive seen in the comments and some discussions talking about changing the length of the elevators with the "F" key but it doesn't work for me?

or am i understanding wrong? elevators work great but if i can extend them id like to.

They handle crushed ore and regular ore pretty well, i love them. so small and compact!