Factorio Forums

Being able to disable input or output on individual transport lines would be super helpful.

Specifically, I would like to be able to do this in 0.12:

(Screenshot of working 0.11 mod)

But I'd like to do it without having to entirely re-implement splitter logic in Lua and run on_tick events tracking and updating every modded splitter and its connected belts.

+1 for this, with the actual code, splitters -one of most powerful entities- is a bit useless, only can modify the speed and... color?

Maybe with a Input_box and output_box with direction maybe a bit hard, if we can edit the tipe of entity to move, not only item-on-ground...

It would be awesome if they could connect to circuit system and all the conditions could be controlled by signals.

A dummy (i.e. invisible, non-colliding) entity with a wire connection can be used to connect a splitter to the circuit network and provide logic control. The current problem is that all you can do at the moment is basically turn the entire splitter on or off.

GotLag wrote:A dummy (i.e. invisible, non-colliding) entity with a wire connection can be used to connect a splitter to the circuit network and provide logic control. The current problem is that all you can do at the moment is basically turn the entire splitter on or off.

The off state means that the belts in the splitter don't move or that it doesn't split?

Both. If the lines aren't moving then there's nothing to split.

Before 0.12, I had a mod that added splitters that output only one lane per output belt:

Unfortunately this relied on using collision boxes to block the unwanted lanes, and conveyor items are no longer subject to collisions.

Could we please get some additions to the TransportLine interface to allow per-lane disabling of input or output? In other words, the ability to tell a specific transport line to not accept incoming items and/or not pass items to the next line downstream?

I can see this being useful not just for separating lanes but also for making switchable conveyors (controlled by a logistics network, for example), conveyors that only allow one side to pass, and I'm sure there are other uses as well. I know smart inserters can do a lot of this but it seems more fitting (and more performance friendly, although that's just a guess) to perform this operation with belts, for bulk materials.

Do you know about the underground belt trick?

Yes, but that's an ugly hack which looks like it shouldn't work. it's also rather bulky for what should be a straightforward operation.

Bump on making the modding of splitters more extensible.

See viewtopic.php?f=6&t=21121 for a suggestion on a more generic solution which should allow to implement all of the requested cases.

I'm not really fond of wanting to abuse stock splitters for such applications at all, what's really lacking is an interface to the belt system which doesn't default to "rush through" in the first place.