Blue & Red max stack labs problem with top lab idle?

[Regicide]

Hello,

I just want to ask if someone else has problems with white cube productions starts to slow down because blue and red cubes running short due to sometimes top lab is idle (on a 15 lab stack).

I just tested this by setting up a 5 White Cubes per Second production with:

15 Blue
30 Red
40 Yellow
50 Purple
60 Green
75 White

Cubes labs.

I then let them all buffer cubes first around 1k, before firing up the white cubes.

Yellow, Purple and Green are all fine and buffer is always full.

Blue and Red start to decrease after a while, caused by the top lab being idle a few seconds now and then.

Since this only happens to blue and red and those are the fastest cubes to produce, I guess this problem is caused by resources are not reaching the top lab fast enough.

It's not a logistical problem, both tower are feeded with a MK3 belt, right next to it (both sides) with Sorter MK3 and an always full belt with buffer.

Regards

[Nekogod]

Might need to see that save or some screen shots, 15 is 5 blue cubes a second only requires 5 magnetic coils and 5 circuit boards a second so you should be able to feed a stack of 15 with mark 1 belts and either 4 mark 1 sorters or 2 mark 2 sorters. Tested it with exactly that and it's working just fine. In theory yellow and green should be doable in the same way since they're also a 1:1 ratio. Red and purple require at least mk2 belts and either 4 mk2 sorters or 1 upgraded mk3 sorter.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2569489769

Also tested the same setup but with mk3 belts and sorters and also seems to be fine, top lab has 20 of each and it never drops.

Not tested the red cubes.

[Regicide]

All of my towers are fed by MK 3 belt and MK 3 Sorters, and they are sometimes idle on blue and red, so it's not a problem with feeding the tower itself.

Questions is: How long did you test it? Like said the idle thing is only a few seconds sometimes, not all the time so it's really minor. But if you let it run for ours, the buffer of blue and red drops.

Here's a screenshot of my blue tower with top lab idle.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2569641968

one mk3 belt on both sides, directly feeding with one MK3 Sorter. Blue Cube output is on the second belt with 1 mk3 sorter out.

btw: How did you checked if your top lab is full? I can't reach it with Icaus, even when I fly.

[Evil Tidings]

hold your fly button like you're trying to go into sail mode and he'll lift up a bit, if you're near the tower you should be able to click the top tower at that point.

[Regicide]

Originally posted by Vispher101:

hold your fly button like you're trying to go into sail mode and he'll lift up a bit, if you're near the tower you should be able to click the top tower at that point.

Okay I will try this out and then hopefully see what's the problem on the 15th. lab

[Nekogod]

Originally posted by Regicide:

Originally posted by Vispher101:

hold your fly button like you're trying to go into sail mode and he'll lift up a bit, if you're near the tower you should be able to click the top tower at that point.

Okay I will try this out and then hopefully see what's the problem on the 15th. lab

I left it quite a while about 15-20 mins and it didn't stop at all.

Only other thing I can think of is you're not getting items out fast enough, but that seems unlikely, I'll test that though looks like your output is a distance of 2 away so the sorter will be at half speed, though an upgraded mk3 should still be ample. (I'm assuming you have researched cargo stacking)

Could it be power related? Sorters won't work at 100% speed without 100% power.

[Regicide]

Originally posted by nekogod:

Originally posted by Regicide:

Okay I will try this out and then hopefully see what's the problem on the 15th. lab

I left it quite a while about 15-20 mins and it didn't stop at all.

Only other thing I can think of is you're not getting items out fast enough, but that seems unlikely, I'll test that though looks like your output is a distance of 2 away so the sorter will be at half speed, though an upgraded mk3 should still be ample. (I'm assuming you have researched cargo stacking)

Could it be power related? Sorters won't work at 100% speed without 100% power.

Neither of it. For out, I even use 2 MK3 Sorters to match the belt distance. And There is enough power.

When I run two towers instead, one with 10 ond with 5 for blue, and 3 x 10 for red, everything is fine, and buffers are all full.

It's only when I stack them up to 15 it's causing problems. Well *shrug* Then I stick with 10lab towers for those two, that's okay. But still very wierd

[Nekogod]

Originally posted by Regicide:

Originally posted by nekogod:

I left it quite a while about 15-20 mins and it didn't stop at all.

Only other thing I can think of is you're not getting items out fast enough, but that seems unlikely, I'll test that though looks like your output is a distance of 2 away so the sorter will be at half speed, though an upgraded mk3 should still be ample. (I'm assuming you have researched cargo stacking)

Could it be power related? Sorters won't work at 100% speed without 100% power.

Neither of it. For out, I even use 2 MK3 Sorters to match the belt distance. And There is enough power.

When I run two towers instead, one with 10 ond with 5 for blue, and 3 x 10 for red, everything is fine, and buffers are all full.

It's only when I stack them up to 15 it's causing problems. Well *shrug* Then I stick with 10lab towers for those two, that's okay. But still very wierd

Definitely strange, would love a peek at your save, if you don't mind of course

[Evil Tidings]

It's possible that the blues are just so fast made that the top tower cannot get the resources before they're used. I believe in most people's builds they keep blue's and reds shorter because of the speed making it unnecessary to have so many. But I am unsure. I myself have full towers but my don't even use half of my full production because purples and greens are usually limiting everything overall...

[Regicide]

Originally posted by Vispher101:

It's possible that the blues are just so fast made that the top tower cannot get the resources before they're used.

That's my guess, too. Since it only happens on red and blue, and those blue cubes have the shortest production time.

@nekogod: I can try to upload my save for you, yes, though I'm using some mods, so you might need to install them yourself to not break the save? Dunno for sure.

If you want you can post a Screenshot of your setup of red and blue, and I can try to run both side by side to see what happens

[Regicide]

@Nekogod, Vispher did also some testing and well, it looks like this problem is really on my side, though I have absolutley no idea why. But to be honest, it's not that big deal, since it only affects blue and red science, and those, too don't need much towers. So when I have to stick with 10lab stacks for the moment, I'm totally fine with that. I have other problems to solve that are more important :D

But thank you very much for your help!

[Nekogod]

Originally posted by Regicide:

@Nekogod, Vispher did also some testing and well, it looks like this problem is really on my side, though I have absolutley no idea why. But to be honest, it's not that big deal, since it only affects blue and red science, and those, too don't need much towers. So when I have to stick with 10lab stacks for the moment, I'm totally fine with that. I have other problems to solve that are more important :D

But thank you very much for your help!

I may post some screen shots later, or possibly a video on my youtube, if you're interested. I ran the setup for a good 20 minutes to be sure and the top lab never went idle.

It could be some weird mod interaction, but at this point it's got me pretty stumped!

If you do upload it somewhere, drop a link and I'll take a look, I'd be intrigued to see if it's a setup issue to unique to your save or unique to your intstall/mods.

Otherwise if you do figure it out, do let us know, hate an unsolved mystery lol.

[Regicide]

Okay I need to switch the setup back to the 15lab stacks and upload it then (do you prefer any uploader?).

Will do this tomorrow

[Nekogod]

Originally posted by Regicide:

Okay I need to switch the setup back to the 15lab stacks and upload it then (do you prefer any uploader?).

Will do this tomorrow :gearthumbsup:

Google drive or dropbox is pretty good, you can share it without exposing any of your personal stuff.

That said, you may not need to as I may have another layer of intrigue to add to this. I had to recreate my setup as I didn't save and immediately the top lab started to have problems using up the circuits and mag coils before they were replenished, until after a minute or so it went idle.

So I swapped from 1 MK3 sorter to 4 MK1 just to make sure cargo stacking wasn't causing the issue, and the issue persisted for a while then corrected itself.

I think I can see the cause and it's to do with number of sorters and over filling.

The bottom lab has 20 items, it passes 1 up (it won't pass anything up if it's at 19 or less) it then gets 1 item from the MK3 sorter then it passes 1 more item up and repeat

With the MK 1 sorters as soon as the bottom lab drops to 19 all 4 sorters load in their item and the count of items shoots up to 23 and 4 items are immediately passed up the stack and it gets another 4 items 0.666667 seconds later.

For some reason the way the game works, 1 item every the bottom lab drops by 1 is not as smooth as 4 items every 0.666667 seconds and it eventually leads to the top lab being starved. Though I was able to get it to work with MK3 sorters by not having an output and letting the labs fill up with cubes and materials so they all had 20 of each item. This seems to cause a compatible resonance.

Could also be affected by FPS and the Unity engine if it's not at 60+ fps or 60 for the engine speed (ticks per second? not sure).

[Regicide]

Originally posted by nekogod:

Originally posted by Regicide:

Okay I need to switch the setup back to the 15lab stacks and upload it then (do you prefer any uploader?).

Will do this tomorrow

Google drive or dropbox is pretty good, you can share it without exposing any of your personal stuff.

That said, you may not need to as I may have another layer of intrigue to add to this. I had to recreate my setup as I didn't save and immediately the top lab started to have problems using up the circuits and mag coils before they were replenished, until after a minute or so it went idle.

So I swapped from 1 MK3 sorter to 4 MK1 just to make sure cargo stacking wasn't causing the issue, and the issue persisted for a while then corrected itself.

I think I can see the cause and it's to do with number of sorters and over filling.

The bottom lab has 20 items, it passes 1 up (it won't pass anything up if it's at 19 or less) it then gets 1 item from the MK3 sorter then it passes 1 more item up and repeat

With the MK 1 sorters as soon as the bottom lab drops to 19 all 4 sorters load in their item and the count of items shoots up to 23 and 4 items are immediately passed up the stack and it gets another 4 items 0.666667 seconds later.

For some reason the way the game works, 1 item every the bottom lab drops by 1 is not as smooth as 4 items every 0.666667 seconds and it eventually leads to the top lab being starved. Though I was able to get it to work with MK3 sorters by not having an output and letting the labs fill up with cubes and materials so they all had 20 of each item. This seems to cause a compatible resonance.

Could also be affected by FPS and the Unity engine if it's not at 60+ fps or 60 for the engine speed (ticks per second? not sure).

To be honest, that's what I exactly expected next to be the reason, that it's caused by the stack sorter (since this also causes sometimes rare problems due to stacking elsewhere) and because Vispher had running 2 x Mk3 Sorter for input and his top lab wasn't idle either. So this really maybe causes if you just or only use 1 MK3 sorter for input.

Do you still need my save or you think the mystery is solved :)

[Play For Fun]

Did you do your research for the sorters ?
I think they increase your sorting too.