ok i have found my crafting combinator, and it seems that it will work with most "items" but not most recipes,

example, i have bio industries and i can make charcoal from either wood pulp or wood, but i can only select charcoal as a recipe, not which variant, not sure how this could be implemented, but i can see the recipe in my crafting menu.

perhaps decider combinator functions could be added to this unit and then create your "if, then" functions inside that, with possible 2+ different recipes, but at least 2 for functional purposes.

That is exactly the reason why there are the 'virtual recipes' aka virtual signals generated from recipes that don't have matching name to output.
Problem is tho, that right now this system only works for 'normal' assembler recipes so you may be able to set the cokeries recipe if it has the same name as the result (the one using wood pulp) but you can't use the other one because in the prototype it's actually named "bi-charcoal-2".

That being said, I think it shouldn't be too hard to expand this mod to work for all the crafting structures (including refineries and such) so if you stay tuned a bit longer, this will likely be resolved.

Cheers TRK

oh i will i have been looking for a mod like this for sometime, but i lack the skills to make it myself, i have however figured out how to modify some aspects of some mods to suite my personal desires

thank you for your contributions and keep up the great work

Philip, you may find Dynamic Assemblers more to your liking - it just assigns a number to each recipe (though, the numbers are not really directly meaningful at all), so all recipes are signaled the same way.

Hey, I have added support for all the different machines (hopefully modded too). You can find the recipes that have multiple variations or so under the virtual signals tab.
Hope this is going to work for you!
Cheers TRK

i have had some time to play with this a bit more and found that the recipes are located in the circuit signals section to aid anyone else that is looking for making items with mods that can make the same output but different inputs