Picture unrelated to question; built for style, not functionality. I’ve learned that the most efficient (and boring) platform design is a spear.
I think of all the planets, I like Fulgora the least. I have tried two or three approaches to dealing with the sushi belts of parts; my biggest issue is the monomanical logic of inserters, which – given a storage chest of a dozen different items, seem to get stuck on one item for extended periods. For instance, unloading a train of random stuff, I’ll get 15 inserters all pulling out gears for several minutes, ignoring everything else in the chests. It’s frustrating beyond belief, so I think I’m not looking at this the right way.
The biggest issue is buffering. I’ll get nothing but gears for a few hours, but then they’ll dry up and I’ll get nothing but low density structure for a few hours and almost no gears. If I were paranoid, I’d think the devs did this on purpose to maximize jamming.
What I’m going to try next is building a train system with per-item trains, or maybe cars, and see if that helps. Transport raw to an island, recycle it, and load up trains with product and send them to a big factory island. I suspect it’s simply going to get jammed up at the recycling center and I won’t be any further ahead, but maybe I can mitigate that by just having one, really long train that stops every 12 cars and every series of 12 cars has each car containing a single item.
I don’t know. Fulgora just feels stupid, or makes me feel stupid. How do you folks handle Fulgora?
Update edit
I completely redesigned everything on Fulgora, and it doesn’t get jammed, and I’m only having to “throw away” steel (the plate, not the girders; I’m not sure why the game calls “girders” “plate”, but whatever).
My solution, as it is, is based on the suggestion of having a recycling plant rather than recycling at the miners. I’m using trains: I mine ore into trains and ship it to a recycling island, where the output is filtered into train cars - one type per car. I run the trains full of product to wherever I have factories set up, and pull specific items needed there. I avoid sushi belts and sushi boxcars; my production islands are consequently much simpler, and as yet I’m not having to waste product.
I will point out that I initially used recyclers to reduce the amounts out items, but found I had to keep changing what I was recycling because what was overflowing kept changing, and by recycling I was regularly running out of items; this, again, is related to whatever the RNG is doing to me. Honestly, I have a mind to actually keep a counter, because it appears as if I’ll get a run of copper coil, where it’s the dominant item mined for dozens of minutes, then it’ll be blue chips, and so on, cycling through each of the items. It swamps me with one thing that I can’t even manage with belt weaving, then suddenly that’ll dry up and I’ll get only a trickle of that thing for the next couple of hours. I’ve frequently had launches completely stop because I had to recycle one component to built rocket parts, and then it dries up and I have to built an assembler to produce the product until the RNG deems me worthy to have it start being a mined item again. If the cycle happened over a period of less than hours, I’d record it. Although, the fact that the inserters (almost) all get stuck on the same item pulling from sushi boxes, I could easily show. If I, of anyone else, cared enough.
In any case, with trains and enough storage boxes I have it set up to weather the droughts and floods of specific items, and am assuming either it’s coded this way on purpose, or only doing it on my machine because I don’t hear anyone else complaining about it.
The Nilaus Master Class for Fulgora scrap recycling on YouTube explains this idea really well. Technically, I think he uses storage chests instead of buffer chests, just so that he wouldn’t have to check “Request from buffer chests” on his requesters. The one exception is that he uses active providers for holmium ore to push it into an “infinite” array of buffer chests instead of relooping it. You never want to recycle holmium ore – it’s the whole reason to be on Fulgora.
My initial design for Fulgora was much less efficient, but “worked” well enough to move on to the other planets. (Fulgora was my first destination.) I was recycling into storage chests and had a big grid of buffer chests for each product. I then set up arrays of recyclers with requester chests for each product that was clogging up the scrap recycling. So, for example, I started with a bunch of gear recyclers. I used circuit conditions on the inserters to only feed those recyclers when the buffer chests were near full (but I wasn’t recycling buffered stuff, only from the first stage storage chests, to keep the scrap recycling flowing).
After retooling my solution into the belt-based filtered splitter model, I managed to increase my scrap per minute from about 5k to 17k per minute. So, while the bot-based solution works, it was way more complicated and slower than the belt loop. (Also, after retooling, I think my logistic bot usage dropped from about 1500 at all times to about 180.)
Edit: Oh, another trick that I learned from the Nilaus video is the importance of “compressing” certain high volume and/or slow-to-recycle items on your return belt. Don’t loop stone, turn it into landfill and loop that. Feed a couple of iron gear recyclers into an iron chest assembler (directly, no inserter required), then put the iron chests on the belt. Turn concrete into hazard concrete, then immediately recycle that (into 25% of the original concrete). Turn steel into steel chests, since they recycle so much faster. Ice and solid fuel should run through recyclers before going on the return belt since there’s so much of both.