Ability to read recipe craft time from crafting machines

[Lunar3098]

TL;DR

Crafting machines should be able to output a signal for a recipe's crafting time in seconds.

What?

Crafting machines can output a number of useful bits of information to the circuit network, including the ingredients for the recipe and its contents, but there is no way currently to get the time the recipe will take to complete. An additional circuit connection output value with a customisable control signal will provide an extra avenue for crafting automation.

Why?

Given an additional value for the crafting time, circuit networks would be able to calculate the number of machines required for a given production rate of an arbitrary recipe, which is currently not possible without the crafting time.

[Hares]

+1 on that. Would allow better job handling for automated malls
Could also add this data to the selector combinator BTW.

[DeadMG]

I agree on this; I wanted a mall where I didn't need to use shift click, but the 2.0 features don't currently allow this. The "read ingredients" signal doesn't produce the same results as it doesn't account for the craft time of the recipe, just the literal ingredients.

[MrNukealizer]

I'd also like some way to get recipe time. It would probably make more sense for the selector combinator to have that as a mode like stack size and rocket capacity than for the machine itself to output it, but either way. In addition to multiplying requested ingredients by the number of times a recipe can run in a certain time, it's also useful for distributing crafting a certain set of items among multiple machines. There's a big difference between setting an assembler to craft a certain number of copper cables vs the same number of processing units, yet they have the same relatively similar stack size and rocket capacity is too arbitrary. Being able to calculate how long each batch would take would allow assigning far more machines to processing units than copper cables so they can finish in a somewhat similar time, instead of ending up with most of the machines finishing early while one is just getting started on a big stack of slow stuff.

[dododome]

Came to the same conclusion as the others in this post.
Wanted to create a smart Mall, and got stuck at the point where i wanted to allocate the amount of crafters, since it makes no sense to allocate the same amount for T3 Modules/T1 Belts, based on the amount, there needs to be a way to get the crafting time for this to make sense.
Since we already have the stacksize output for the new combinator, it would make sense to add crafting time there aswell.