How do hoppers choose which conveyor belt to feed?

[Yoshitsuna]

I am setting up a filtering station for my quarry and want to use the rocks mined by it to feed a hivemind, make paste or macerate it otherwise.

Since I could not find a machine to feed all of those while setting a priority for a certain destination, I'm using storage hopper to do that. It seems to me that they have a prefered exit direction when fed slowly however at faster feeding speed, it seems to depend on the orientation of the exiting conveyor and some other factor I'm currently missing.

I would welcome any help for my priority problem or just the decision process of the hopper.

[steveman0]

hoppers don't have a sense of priority. They feed any open attached conveyor. They have a round-robin type system internally to do it but it'd be a bit of a hack to try to take advantage of it. You're better off using turn-tables for the job.

If you want proper priority driven systems you'll need to turn to mods.

[Highlation]

If the hopper has lots of items coming in = feed all attached conveyors, If not one side will take priority. (50 items/min rule) If you want true priority make a side faster than others. (Motorized conveyor)

Each hopper face will output 50 items/min to a conveyor/pipe

If you want to sort specific items use an advanced filter.

[Yoshitsuna]

Thanks to both of you, the round robin system made me think it was somewhat predictable but it explains the randomness of high feeding speed. I will use motorized conveyor, it's a very clever way to solve my problem.

[RedBlaze]

A friend of mine came to notice when you feed a hopper from the side and remove from the opposite side the hopper will pass the item through very rapidly. If you input from one side and have the output at 90 degrees the input, the extraction rate is decreased.

[John Hadley]

Originally posted by Highlation:

If the hopper has lots of items coming in = feed all attached conveyors, If not one side will take priority. (50 items/min rule) If you want true priority make a side faster than others. (Motorized conveyor)

This statement might be true for motorized conveyors. I can't tell you since I can't build motorized conveyors yet. However, it is not true in a general sense because you'll see from my screenshot there is no priority for a conveyor over a basic conveyor despite the fact that the conveyor can move 50 items per sec and the basic conveyor can only move 9 items per sec (on slow conveyor world settings).

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=814150522

[John Hadley]

In regards to priority I will tell you that the only priority with hopper outputs I am sure of that isn't subject to possibly changing when you save and reload the game after having built your network of conveyors and hoppers is that a hopper will output to open conveyors first before it outputs to adjacent hoppers. If you feed material to a storage hopper at the same or slower rate than it can feed a conveyor attached to it then all the output will go to that conveyor until that conveyor is full before it starts to output to an adjacent hopper set to add only. In that way you can make an overflow that prioritizes output to one destination until it gets as much as it can take then allow the other materials to keep flowing down the line to other machines.

[Highlation]

In your example what is cutting you off is the behaviour of logistics hoppers vs storage hoppers speed along with e belts. We assume neither slow conveyors or logistics are used in the goals required above.

[Dodgeball]

The only system that you can inherently have a priority for that I've found is to use minecarts, since they'll always try to stop at the first available unload piece on a track. You can get an "almost priority" by using a couple turntables where most routes go to the priority target, so that only 1 in 4/16/64 inputs goes to the lower priority unless it's full, but this can slow down the throughput of a system, which is crippling when you're trying to manage the output of something like a quarry.

[Yoshitsuna]

Originally posted by John Hadley:

In regards to priority I will tell you that the only priority with hopper outputs I am sure of that isn't subject to possibly changing when you save and reload the game after having built your network of conveyors and hoppers is that a hopper will output to open conveyors first before it outputs to adjacent hoppers. If you feed material to a storage hopper at the same or slower rate than it can feed a conveyor attached to it then all the output will go to that conveyor until that conveyor is full before it starts to output to an adjacent hopper set to add only. In that way you can make an overflow that prioritizes output to one destination until it gets as much as it can take then allow the other materials to keep flowing down the line to other machines.

Thanks for that idea, I don't think it will work for my quarry since it needs to handle high input but it will be very usefull to handle overflow from my organic / falcor farm