I always try to do belt bases, as I prefer them. Gleba is damn near impossible. I tried to at the start but the spoilage and nutrients are just too much to handle for me. Bots to the rescue!
I always try to do belt bases, as I prefer them. Gleba is damn near impossible. I tried to at the start but the spoilage and nutrients are just too much to handle for me. Bots to the rescue!
I love hearing about this perspective. I 100% agree on bringing bots to every planet but found gleba to be the most belt intensive (not using the most belts but using the most belt tricks).
I think I only used bots to handle saving restart spoilage and removing eggs on factory shutdown/resuppling the initial one on startup
Could you elaborate the shutdown startup phase please? I have to do it manually at the moment.
For shutdown I have a few circuits monitoring the inputs/outputs to check if we’re getting backed up or running dry on either of the fruits. If that’s the case the input belts are stopped, egg->egg duplicator inserters are disabled and the chests that hold the one egg being recirculated go into trash mode.
There is a separate unit that constantly ensures there are at least a couple eggs avaliable and “requests” (buffer chest) any excess and is surrounded by turrets.
During startup (science below limit and ingedients on input belts) the spoilage->nutrient inserter is enabled which priority feeds just the first three chambers that make flux. Once any flux has been made (>0 flux on the belt || flux->nutrient machine working) the spoilage inserter stops. That’s enough for the flux->nutrient machine to start and the whole system becomes self sustaining.
As part of startup a requester chest requests 1 egg, the rest of the egg duplicators are setup in such a way that they propagate down the line (a direct inserter between them is enabled if the recirculating chest for the next chamber is empty and the egg->sci inserter gets disabled). Once there are eggs in the recirculating chests the startup is considered complete and the requester chests turn off.
There’s also a chest that pulls from the main nutrient line to make sure there’s always loads of spoilage ready for a restart.
Very interesting, thank you. I built something similar except for the eggs which I have to manually find and put into a chest to kickstart egg production. This is because if the factory is powered off there are no nutrients being made and spoilage eventually will finish and eggs will spoil. So I left that part manual.
I wonder if you found a way to produce nutrients even with the factory powered off.
There’s a small machine at the resource inputs that gets full resource priority and keeps a couple chests full of spoilage handy as well. Eggs decay fairly slowly so it doesn’t take that much to keep one circulating.
It’s not a perfect solution but saves needing manual intervention for at least as long as it takes me to look back there again