Automation

[[STUD]Burt]

When connecting a silo to a refinery, is there no other way to control the flow than placing the right materials in the upper left and descending? I was hoping that it would be possible to queue different orders in the refinery, and have the correct raw materials automatically be used from the silo.
Also, is there a way to connect the various crafting stations to some storage, instead of having to manually fetch the materials and dump them in the station?

[Sturmlied]

yeah that would be better. hope they do that.

[Willa Grey]

That would be nice, something like the previous game.

[Vicarious]

Originally posted by STUDBurt:

When connecting a silo to a refinery, is there no other way to control the flow than placing the right materials in the upper left and descending? I was hoping that it would be possible to queue different orders in the refinery, and have the correct raw materials automatically be used from the silo.
Also, is there a way to connect the various crafting stations to some storage, instead of having to manually fetch the materials and dump them in the station?

Probably the most frustrating thing for me once I get established. It's the reason I typically start a new game after a while.

I'm hoping that will be a part of an early access Quality of Life update. They'd be foolish to launch 1.0 without that feature.

[Armitage Shanks]

Yeah, automation is pretty much non-existent right now. Without the ability to filter items, split outputs, etc. only the simplest "automation" is possible. Sometimes machines just stop working too so you have to reset whatever they're crafting (eg. my refiner will just go idle even though there's enough raw ore in it and the correct recipe is selected in it).

Hopefully they are working on some addition more advanced conduits that will make ACTUAL automation (like what you can do in TT) possible. Otherwise bases will just be big flat slabs where you store your crap and nothing more.

[Vicarious]

Originally posted by Armitage Shanks:

Hopefully they are working on some addition more advanced conduits that will make ACTUAL automation (like what you can do in TT) possible. Otherwise bases will just be big flat slabs where you store your crap and nothing more.

I'm definitely keeping my fingers crossed for something similar, but not the same, as Satisfactory or Factorio

[Armitage Shanks]

Originally posted by Vicarious:

Originally posted by Armitage Shanks:

Hopefully they are working on some addition more advanced conduits that will make ACTUAL automation (like what you can do in TT) possible. Otherwise bases will just be big flat slabs where you store your crap and nothing more.

I'm definitely keeping my fingers crossed for something similar, but not the same, as Satisfactory or Factorio

TerraTech automation is extremely similar to Factorio/Satisfactory. It even uses conveyor belts to transport resources/items. It has filtered belts, splitters, etc. and crafting stations can request resources from your storage when you queue up a crafting job. I can understand why Payload moved away from belts with this being multiplayer, all the resource entities moving around would cause server resource related issues. But they can surely apply the concepts to the existing conduits.

[Vicarious]

I've noticed now that if you try to automate the scrapper the machine will only ever send the output to a silo from the first slot of it's own output area. The other 3 don't seem to get touched at all

[Mavor]

Splitters, mergers and all that kinda stuff are on the list - just not in yet =)

[Armitage Shanks]

Originally posted by Vicarious:

I've noticed now that if you try to automate the scrapper the machine will only ever send the output to a silo from the first slot of it's own output area. The other 3 don't seem to get touched at all

You need to connect conduits pulling from 4 of the input/output "sockets", each one corresponds to one of the output slots in the scrapper.

[[STUD]Burt]

Originally posted by Armitage Shanks:

Originally posted by Vicarious:

I've noticed now that if you try to automate the scrapper the machine will only ever send the output to a silo from the first slot of it's own output area. The other 3 don't seem to get touched at all

You need to connect conduits pulling from 4 of the input/output "sockets", each one corresponds to one of the output slots in the scrapper.

Still, it doesn't really give us any control on what to send where, so yeah the automation system really, really needs to be enhanced. It would almost have been better if they had just left the whole thing out of the game, and not introduced it until they were ready to give us more control. People expect much more from automation systems in games these days.

[Vicarious]

Originally posted by Armitage Shanks:

Originally posted by Vicarious:

I've noticed now that if you try to automate the scrapper the machine will only ever send the output to a silo from the first slot of it's own output area. The other 3 don't seem to get touched at all

You need to connect conduits pulling from 4 of the input/output "sockets", each one corresponds to one of the output slots in the scrapper.

Do you mean that you have to set up 4 different silos as outputs? because there are 4 slots but one will have to be the input for the silo I use to dump everything into when I get back to base.

[Armitage Shanks]

Originally posted by Vicarious:

Originally posted by Armitage Shanks:

You need to connect conduits pulling from 4 of the input/output "sockets", each one corresponds to one of the output slots in the scrapper.

Do you mean that you have to set up 4 different silos as outputs? because there are 4 slots but one will have to be the input for the silo I use to dump everything into when I get back to base.

No, you just need a medium silo minimum, because they have 4 ports on them. As does the large, only one that doesn't is the small, but you technically could use 2 small silos as they have 2 ports. My current scrapper setup is 1 large silos to input parts into the scrapper and another large silo with 4 conduits connected extracting from the scrapper. Scrapper has 5 ports on it.

this is the best I could do for screenshots for the setup I'm using because the camera controls are kind of bad
https://i.imgur.com/uFPSyn0.jpeg
https://i.imgur.com/3HeT1ty.jpeg
If you want to see a better representation I could screen share on Discord if you like.

[Vicarious]

OOOOOH wow...

Ok, sorry, my brain struggled with the concept for a second but that makes perfect sense. Thanks for correcting me I appreciate it

[DarkRayan]

or u can connect 2 silos, coz u still need to manually take out resourses from it
https://i.imgur.com/M3nClia.png

[Vicarious]

Originally posted by DarkRayan:

or u can connect 2 silos, coz u still need to manually take out resourses from it
https://i.imgur.com/M3nClia.png

That makes a strange sort of sense, thanks for the tips