Factorio Forums

TL;DR

You should be able to set the filter on a splitter to only split off items of certain stack heights

What?

Splitters allow us to filter off certain items from a belt, and Space Age added the ability to split of all items of a certain quality.
It would be really nice to do the same with stack sizes, so that I can remove from my belt any item on the belt which is not a stack 4 high
This would be useful to do to improve throughput when merging belts together
You can achieve this currently by just dumping everything in a box and then using a stack inserter to place it back on belts, but that seems like an inelegant solution if my belt is already 99% fully stacked.

I specifically want to do this on Fulgora, because while recyclers try to output full stacks they frequently don't which messes up my belt throughput, so I want to pull all the partial stacks off and restack them

Why?

It feels like an odd omission, unless it's for performance reasons.

Also see Stacking option for filtered splitter.

I spotted that one while looking for duplicates, but I don't think it's proposing the same thing.
That one wants splitters to act as stack inserters and stack things up, whereas mine wants splitters to separate out certain stack sizes so that you can then separately stack them up yourself

So we have filters by item type that also supports quality filter. I already saw requests for splitters support spoil percent, now this about stack height. I am not seeing issues implementing this but selection of the filters is quite arbitrary and the condition is not a simple "passes filter? yes/no". For a stack height filter an extra value would have to be given what stacks should be filtered (is it only those of size 1, or anything below 4, or maybe anything below currently researched level. This does not convince me, i am going to reject any such ideas that would explode on GUI complexity while having a dubious usability or ones that can be implemented relatively easily using slightly different methods and circuit network. For recyclers and stacking there is at least one solution of recycling into a chest and only pulling those items out that reached inserter stack size so inserter taking out of chest to a belt will be guaranteed to drop full stacks. Alternative available in experimental branch is reading content of recycler itself and taking items selectively (not using the dropping output).

Thanks for the answer!

To answer your question about what, I was imagining the same 6 operators (<, <=, =, !=, >=, >) as for quality, and then either a drop down or text box to enter the height. I figured it could go either next to the quality options or underneath.

However given that my game design experience is zero, and every UI I have created has been universally considered to be awful, I'll leave it to the professionals!

Also, thanks so much for all the hard work on Space Age - I'm having a huge amount of fun!