My personal use-case for doing so, were it possible, would be to eliminate the need for pumps in my nuclear reactor's steam output. Yes, that's a very specific use-case, but that's because it is my personal motivation for raising the issue; it's supposed to illustrate one potential practical ...

There is a valve (pumps) between heat exchangers and steam turbines+steam buffer. As default, it's closed.

Getting rid of the need for that pump is exactly what this proposal would allow me to do.

As far as I see the need for getting rid of the pump doesn't have enough positive impact on the ...

I just don't wanna deal with spoilage of science and all. Since you can't really make "demand-based" throughput in Factorio, I will have to deal with never-ending stream of AG science spoiling out on Nauvis

About dealing with spoilage - is it "I don't want" or is it "I don't know how"?

If it ...

This is quite difficult for a pure mechanical solution, because splitters and splitter combinations just create ratios with powers of 2. Kyralessa's solution works only if the belt isn't stalling and all output is being consumed.

Here a solution that actively counts moved items and really makes ...

If your use case is the nuclear power plant, here is proof it's not necessary to change fluidbox sizes or to enable temperature reading of heat exchangers or heat pipes to get fast and exact responses. Approach: keep fluid boxes full instead keeping them empty. If the standard state is full, any ...

I would be thoroughly shocked and surprised if there is any evidence to support the idea that more players aren't on steam than are on steam.

The vast, vast, vast majority of players who purchased the expansion haven't even gotten into the slightest bit of the expansion's content.

It doesn't ...

All my previous attempts were incompatible with copy/paste because I always had a turn-around at the end for exporting spoilage (I should have embraced active provider chests sooner obviously).

My rule of thumb is to have loops if a belt will carry spoiling items, and somewhere at the loop, no ...

The actual goal would be to pass signals from all the "input" belts to this, for those inputs which are supposed to be fully-saturated belts; then if any input belt is having throughput drop, once throughput has been continuously spotty (continuously <8 items on the belt) for a while, throw on an ...

So you want to check if a belt is fully compressed and throw an alarm if it isn't?
Is this belt carrying a single item (for example just iron plates) or does it contain a mix of items as found on a sushi belt?

If it is carrying a single item, you can do something like this:
- build a clock. This is ...

As food for thought....

[...]
There is a drawback in that it makes it a little trickier to jumpstart the system from the spoilage-to-nutrients recipe (and you may need higher throughput inserters to move nutrients from biochamber to belt), so definitely caveat emptor.

I also recommend prod ...

Intel extended warranty to 5 years after date of purchase, so this CPU can be RMA'd. Don't hesitate to do this, your symptoms suggest your CPU took permanent damage from the manufacturing flaw. No Bios update afterwards is able to repair, the CPU is permanently damaged. Do update the Bios when you ...

A central refueling station is quite useful before you get bots, because you need to provide fuel (via belts) just to one station. So I build one. Later, with the logistic network, it's definitely much less useful because it's sufficient to just place a requester chest and one inserter at every ...

I disagree with your assertion that having to quit the game to seek out help from some external source is not a bad sign.

It is the worst sort of sign that the game is not quite ready for consumption.

Yes, if you have thousands of posts on the factorio forums you probably have thousands of hours ...

Kovarex alone isn't the whole story.
A common issue is belt clogging because of the U-235/U-238 mix. Often happens in splitters that sort U-235 from U-238. Sometimes U-235 has no demand and stalls, sometimes U-238 has no demand and stalls. While one material stalls, the other might be blocked in a ...

I liked Gleba at first, but I also stopped playing after 10 hours on Gleba. Very cool concept but there is something about it that is just not working for me and I couldn't enjoy it. I found in space age for the first time I had to resort to watching youtube videos to figure things out - that ...

An overview about the role of the logistic chests, in their most generic form of use:

for crafting machine output, use a provider chest. A passive provider chest, if the intended output is less than one full chest. An active provider chest if the intended output is more than one chest. Items are ...

Not sure what you mean with "differently colored pipes". In my Factorio, I have one type of pipe which has no color.

I feel it important to point out that you should expect a craft-recycle loop to be an order of magnitude or so more efficient with regards to number of input items: self-recycling is really, really bad in this metric. So I do think it's worth putting more thought to the idea of doing craft-recycle ...

Nidan wrote: Sun Mar 15, 2026 5:18 pm Your repetition counts are far too low to have statistical relevance.

Definitely. I let my contraptions run for a longer time, but results were so varying I asked for a direct calculation because of that. Didn't want to run it all night long.

Many thanks to both of you for your efforts.

Who is able to do the math behind these 2 different crafting approaches for legendary fusion power cells?
I tried but failed. I understand the math in general, but I just can't seem to put all the pieces together.

My goal was to get the approach that requires the least amount of normal input items ...