My brain is always mush by the time I get to arcospheres, so here's an automatic balancer. Just hook the input side to a chest with arcospheres and the output side to a gravimetrics facility set to "Set recipe" on the wire and let it rip.
How to use
- Wire a chest holding your arcospheres to the combinator's input side, with the chest set to read its contents.
- Wire the combinator's output side to a gravimetrics facility with Set recipe turned on.
- Have inserters move arcospheres between the chest and the facility as usual.
That's it. No extra wire back from the facility is needed.
What it does
- Fractures first: whenever the chest holds 4 or more unpolarized arcospheres, it fractures them so fresh collector output joins the pool quickly.
- Then folds: it picks the folding or inversion recipe that best evens out the eight polarized types (λ ξ ζ θ ε φ γ ω), and idles when nothing would help.
- Counts the whole pool: arcospheres inside the facility (loaded, finished, or mid-craft) count too, so loading the facility never fools it.
- Never interrupts a craft, and waits for a new choice to hold for two checks before switching, so it doesn't flip-flop.
- Only uses recipes you've researched. Hold Alt to see the current recipe above the combinator.
- Works with any crafting machine that can set its recipe from the circuit network, and more than one machine can share the same combinator.
Not perfectly balanced, never deadlocks
It won't keep your arcospheres perfectly even. A few types may sit one or two above the rest, and if something else is using arcospheres (naquium tesseracts swap λ ξ ζ for the other types), the mix will always lean one way while the two machines trade back and forth. But it never deadlocks: it only picks recipes it has the arcospheres for, and always has a way back toward balance.
Unlocking
Unlocked by Space Exploration's Arcosphere folding research.
Mod settings
- Update interval: ticks between checks (default 60, once a second).
- Minimum imbalance to start folding: how far apart the most and least plentiful types must be before a new fold starts (default 2).
Compatibility
- Factorio 2.1, Space Exploration 0.7.64 or newer (which made the gravimetrics facility circuit-wirable).
- Survives Space Exploration spaceship launches.
- Pairs nicely with WePlay: Steady Arcosphere Collection, which removes the diminishing returns on arcosphere collectors.
Credits
The code was written with AI (Claude). The thumbnail is AI-generated (Grok).
Source on GitHub, released under the Unlicense.