Miniloader (Redux)


UPS-friendly 1x1 loaders.

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g Advanced Miniloader features

3 months ago
(updated 3 months ago)

I haven't drilled down into the implementation here, but classic Miniloaders allowed decoupling belt lanes so, for example, a different filter could be assigned to each, producing a belt with distinct items on its two lanes.

Given the direction 2.0 has taken with circuit networking, it might make sense to offer the option to distinguish red and green wires connected to the miniloader for purposes of independently assigning filter sets per lane.

Another non-default classic Miniloader option is to unlock inserter stack sizes. This has two benefits and one drawback. The benefits are that researching non-bulk inserter capacity upgrades reduces the cost in two resources: power usage and UPS. The drawback is that if stack size is unlocked (and the lanes are not split) a miniloader no longer behaves as a perfect lane balancer in circumstances where the multiple pickup of its individual inserters makes a difference. IIRC classic Miniloaders treated this as a save-level global option, but it might be advantageous to make this an entity-specific option.

I'm a big fan of these features, personally, though I never really could use the split-lane feature properly due to bugs — to wit, lane configurations were very likely to be unintentionally reversed across a save-load cycle, making this amazing feature lamentably impractical.

Are there any chances of supporting these features? (... and if so, does that chance require implementation assistance?)

3 months ago

Yes-ish; all of those would first require a custom GUI. That is doable; the bigger problem is that the internal implementation is "two inserters, one loader" where the inserters put items on the loader. Technically, this could even be just a simple transport belt except that the loader can use different graphics for "input" and "output".

So the Gui would have to coordinate the state of the three entities. and you can not use the "per lane" filter as the inserters actually bypass the loader logic (same reason why I can not use the loader for energy consumption. It will happily continue to send items out as losing power only disables the "loader" part, not the transport belt (this is intentional and categorized as "not a bug" by the developers).

There a number of good solutions for per-lane filtering with other miniloader implementations such as Loader Modernized. The unique thing about the original miniloader (and this implementation) is that it can pick up items from a belt and that it can be moved around without resorting to teleportation tricks. My factory builds rely heavily on the former which is why I chose to first poke into porting the original miniloader (and then basically rebuilding it).

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