Hey folks, I'm trying to make a capacity indicator for a group of storage tanks with combinators. I've set that up, but so far I have to manually set the number of tanks on a constant combinator, and then the mechanism will do the math to determine the % use capacity for the combined tanks.

This isn't terrible, but this is also factorio, so I want to automate that, so that I can just add more tanks and it'll all update. I think the best way to do this is by placing a zone in the area I'll put all of the tanks in, and then use a zone and tile scanner to count the # of tanks, and replace the constant combinator with that output.

So far, I've placed the zone scanner and hooked it's output up to the input of a tile scanner, but that only seems to scan one tile at a time, so it'll never see more than one tank. How would I make the time scanner scan the whole zone and determine the number of tanks?

You'd have to loop through every x%3 y%3 position in the zone and add 1 to a tank counter if there is a tank there, save the result at the end, clear the temporary counter and then repeat. I would not recommend this at all, it's a huge UPS cost for something that can be done a different way. In your blueprint just add a constant combinator linked to each tank with a value of 1 tank so each added tank also adds a tank signal, or you could save combinators by having 1 combinator per column of 5 tanks with a value of 5, something like that.