Hello!

Long story short, I love the mod, its great, I notice it has some restrictions i.e. regarding uranium and etc which is neat. What I was wondering though, is why am I not able to connect the refinery with a cable? I refine items which take a very long time on a very long line of refineries where it loops back to the start and goes back around. The inserters just keep filling up the refineries and over 80% of my refineries are just empty and slowing everything down, I tried to use a cable to make the inserter not pick anything up if something was in the refinery, but alas, you can't connect it with a cable.

Am I missing something? Is this a bug? Is this an intended feature? Would it be difficult to add such a feature or would it have heavy impact on game performance? Don't take this wrong, I know nothing about modding so I have no idea what the situation is, hope I can get some enlightement, either way thanks for the awesome mod!! <3

Hey, thank you for the kind words ^^ and sorry for the late reply.

No circuit wiring is intended but definitely very annoying in this circumstance. Under the hood it functions the same as a furnace and recycler, it's a crafting machine that picks its own recipe. Neither of those two are able to be circuit wired and I don't know if mods can even allow circuit wiring them without much hassle.

How many items inserters put into refinery is governed by the automated insertion limit. You can refer to the wiki page on this. As far as I've seen it's 2 - the minimum - on most of the refining recipes. Inserters can bypass this were you to have one that has stack size of more than 2, so even a fast inserter could put 5 items in a refinery that'll be inactive for long - when it drops to 1, that's below insertion limit so inserter swings for 4 more.

I think I'm able to change that insertion limit and I'll make it go down to 1 for long recipes. I'll check if 0 is also possible, since having a few seconds of downtime for something which takes minutes to refine is probably still ideal. For now set inserter stack size to 1 if you haven't already.

I'll cover the change in the next mod update hopefully within the next few days. I've been busy :(

Heya! Thanks for the response!

I didn't even consider checking the "automated insertion limit", and I really goofed when I forgot to change max stack size on inserters. Its not really an issue at all regarding small/fast recipes, but if I were to e.g. refine railgun turrets with no modules or anything, it takes about 25 mintues per railgun (albeit I have tons of refineries active at once) but then the issue was that as it looped around, the same inserters would stuff it with 4-5 of the same rarity railgun into one refinery and dry out the other refineries.

Changing the max stack size on my inserters is definitely going to help, even if they still throw in additional items, at least its only a couple instead of 5 railguns :P

Also no worries at all, take your time, if you're busy then by all means focus on other things first, take care! <3

Hey, turns out the best I can do is lower it to 1 instead of 2... which sounds placebo as hell, but it'll still help out for super long recipes. With 0.8.16 it'll force item limit 1 if refining takes 180+ seconds with base crafting time.

I can imagine people running into this issue again however, and this isn't good enough for me. I'm gonna make a tutorial entry next update to remind them of this specific interaction. I'll also look into circuit wiring the Refinery.

Awesome! I very much appreciate the time and effort you're putting into the mod. Lowering it to 1 is already a massive improvement regarding long and expensive recipes, and circuit wiring with refineries would be an absolute game changer.

I'll eagerly keep an eye out for future updates :D

Things changed with 2.0.35: we can now define circuit connections to furnaces. I'll be making an update to bring this for Refinery shortly

Circuit connections for Refinery was added in 0.8.17. It needs Factorio 2.0.35 which is in experimental, you'll need to opt-in to experimental updates for the time being

Nice. I was just going to say, looks like they added the circuit connection. I think this mod is a good idea. Great use of the gravity assembler from that graphics pack.