So I was setting up (or more accurately, spaghettifying but that's neither here nor there) Arrival, and I saw that the Active Biopolymers had a 1 hour spoil timer, and I thought "Oh, that's cool, you can use the fact that spoil time transfers from the ingredients to make it so the Active Biopolymers spoil into normal Polymer." This became an entire rabbit hole as I notices that sometimes the Bacterial Cultures crafted with 19 seconds left on their spoil timer, and sometimes they crafted with 39 seconds left, which led to a lot of fiddling with clocks and latches and such to try and alternate it between grabbing the bacteria after 19 and the 39 seconds.
The alternating 19/39 spoilage times might've been caused by some part of how spoilage interacts with crafting that I'm not familiar with because sometimes it did come out with a full 1 minute spoilage timer left.
In the end I managed to get the final spoil time of the Active Biopolymers down to around 20 minutes, at which point I got tired of experimenting and tried to find how anyone else has tackled this problem, to which the scant results showed me that the best way to solve it was: An hour long buffer, which was easier and also could have a higher throughput due to needing to wait less.
Which feels lame, and feels like it goes against the spirit of what is basically meant to be a Factorio overhaul meant to be a challenge to veteran players. It isn't a very interesting solution. I don't know enough about game design to come up with a better challenge centered around trying to time out the spoilage to shave down the hour-long spoilage issue.
I definitely feel like using a clock to try and catch the bacteria just before it spoils might be interesting. Maybe shortening the spoilage time of the bacteria so it's cycling through much faster, and you can have a clock controlling all the inserters in the row to only activate every 2/3 seconds to insert it with just 1 or 2 seconds left? Idk.
