Factorio Friday Facts #384: Circuit Network Makeoever & New Combinator - FFF Discussion & Analysis

Factorio will finally have removeable landfill! This Friday Facts discusses mineable landfill and a new quality of life feature, Super Forced Construction.

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Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories.

You will be mining resources, researching technologies, building infrastructure, automating production and fighting enemies. Use your imagination to design your factory, combine simple elements into ingenious structures, apply management skills to keep it working and finally protect it from the creatures who don't really like you.

Join forces with other players in cooperative Multiplayer, create huge factories, collaborate and delegate tasks between you and your friends. Add mods to increase your enjoyment, from small tweak and helper mods to complete game overhauls, Factorio's ground-up Modding support has allowed content creators from around the world to design interesting and innovative features. While the core gameplay is in the form of the freeplay scenario, there are a range of interesting challenges in the form of the Scenario pack, available as free DLC. If you don't find any maps or scenarios you enjoy, you can create your own with the in-game Map Editor, place down entities, enemies, and terrain in any way you like, and even add your own custom script to make for interesting gameplay.

[selecks]

Are you kidding me the selector combinator is ground breaking, it's really complicated to do what it does with the current combinator, this will be amazing for train logistical networks

[dehbue]

I didn’t really understand circuits until I set up train stations in Nullius that used a global network to deal with byproducts.

[tedg]

The most important thing to get further added is being able to define what constant gets output by the decider. My suggestion is to replace the 1 xor input count selector with the same UI for value selection that is used on the input side. This lets the user set the output to a constant or the input value from whatever signal they want.

[CasualGamer-ehoh]

I pray that they get around to a Blueprint Editor.

[PfreddMudd]

The new Decider combinator is a game changer!

[NickCombs]

Looping a list is ubiquitous in coding. The built-in methods like sort and length (no filter?) are convenient, but most players will want to use it to reduce complexity by reusing the same operations on each item in the list rather than duplicating combinator setups.

[hershy]

If I understand it correctly, the selector signal could be really useful for telling a train stop that has multiple outputs when each item is ready for train pickup, and you can tell how many of each train should/can be ordered. I haven't been using circuits much outside of power and trains stops because I use LTN. It could also be useful if you have a bunch of different things hooked up which is lagging the most behind

[StickerWyck]

I want a way to filter signals in one combinator and be able to toggle between whitelist and blacklist. If they add red/green input selection to arithmetics, it would go a long way towards that.

[tincantiltman]

Why did they not add a possibility for multiple calculations in the arithmetic combinator when the decider now can do multiple decisions ?

[jdedrington]

A gimmicky unserious use for the selector combinator would be to use the random input number to create an in-game LED that animates and changes colors.

You should also be able to use it to assign random numbers and stash them in a memory cell, if you find yourself needing such a thing. I can't think of a point where THAT is the optimal solution...but maybe it can be used to subdivide networks in some way.

[rtificial]

Hahaha i dropped "why isn't it like the trains gui" and so awesome to see it be made like the trains gui.

Very simple, very intuitive

[redeamed]

hands down my favor FFF so far. so excited for this.

[PerTrygveMyhrer]

With the elevated rails you do not need any combinator for safe train crossing

[michaeldejode]

I love these changes, and many frustrations I had will be gone because of this.

[S_Black]

Being able to select the wire color is great. Now it's another one of those things where you sometimes need to add another kinda useless combinator doing +0 just to isolate two signals.

[Lightndavoid]

Imagine if you could use the selector to measure maintenance requests per minute for a specific logistics network and then once the rate reaches the deired threshold it would output a signal. You could chain it to other combinators to set logistics requests, set special alarms, activate belts, turn on lights, etc..

[arthurmoore]

Personally, I feel that one of the largest problems with the circuit network is it's unique in terms of design from a CS / EE standpoint. It's not binary logic, but it's also discrete and not analog. Still, the way updates work is closest to digital logic design, since everything operates in parallel every tick. However, we're also dealing with more than one value at once.

The best way I can think of modeling the circuit network is using VHDL and defining each possible signal as a std_logic_vector. So, you can treat it as a giant bus of all possible values. Even excluding VHDL though, there's a reason why there are multiple undergraduate and graduate courses on digital logic design.

I mentioned VHDL, because the changes feel like a graphical programming language, but it's still parallel and tick based. Thinking about it a bit more, it reminds me of the Elder Scrolls scripting systems, where every script is executed every tick.

Given everything else, I just feel like the selector combinator would better be served by an actual "CPU" that runs a stripped down set of Lua commands and explicitly executes every tick where a value changed.

Heck, given just what's in this FFF it might be worth it to model each circuit network as some sort of script / intermediate representation instead of actually using the regular entity update logic. Imagine if you could have tens of thousands of these combinators, but it would take up almost no CPU since it's just a Just In Time compiled piece of code that's run every tick.

[killerbee.]

I can see some use for "get the largest signal value" for some things but overall I imagine that the single most significant use of the selector combinator will just be to multiply the stack size by the size of a chest/train to get the capacity in a more readable way. Sure, you could just memorize (or fill up a train car and check) 2000 ore per train car, but if a train car also carries circuits you need to remember to change it. It's a lot simpler and less error-prone to just let the game calculate it for you. It'd actually be nice if there was also a "capacity of container" setting.

[lucidmoses]

Being a software developer I don't have a problem with circuit networks but I don't much use them. Some small things like train counters and UPS for my furnaces. Not against them, these seem like good improvements. It's just to much 'my day job' and not what I play Factorio for.

[fasddfadfgasdgs]

That index function sounds like if u got a list of materials like a city block buildings in a list that has to be put into a train