Matter Mover Mass storage IO ports

[MalloryMcGuffin]

Are great! Did you know you could have three filters attached to them? Run a whole production line off a single port. And you don't need to filter stuff anymore when you're feeding it into storage - feed the whole mass storage from a couple of belts. Brilliant. Best thing if FF if you ask me. They are a bit energy intensive for handling ore though - the controller could use a bigger energy pool.

[Cellfire]

FYI you can fit more then 3

[Elriel]

Just build a mk4 (or mk5) battery right next to the controller and the energy pool should be plenty big enough.

EDIT: or perhaps under would be best. That way it won't be in the way.

[MalloryMcGuffin]

But even with a full T4 battery it still only unloads a cargo lift at 78 units a tick - can't refill the controller quick enough

[Elriel]

I suppose that's the limit for just one controller then. I wonder if you can get more capacity by using multiple controllers.

[MalloryMcGuffin]

I've got a spare one - I'll try

[jey123456]

an inductor in between your controller and multiple batteries would probably do the job since the inductor can transfer an humongous amount of power per tick. It should act as a funnel for all your batteries toward the controller.

[Elriel]

induction charger is limited to 1250PPS per connected device. In this case the Mk4 Battery was giving out 5000PPS to the controller.

[MalloryMcGuffin]

Nope - didn't work. Only one controller will attach at a time to a mass store. The only solution to faster unloading of lifts would be to have multiple smaller mass stores connected to a bigger one.. which is silly. I currently use a combination of hoppers sandwiched between the lifts and the blast furnaces and mass storage for load balancing - works fine.

[Elriel]

That's probably the only way for now, the 78 items per tick limit (how many ticks are there per second, by the way?) sounds like it's enough to unload the hoppers while the elevator is busy getting more, though.

[Cellfire]

Lifts offload instantly all their items but an IO can only take 78 items in 1 go. You will need walls of hopper to have the lift take off instantly.

78 items is 64 power per item - this drains the 5k storage in 1 shot

Once it has been repowered it repeats.

This is around the same speed as the best MM @ 4800item/min.

Also FYI an IO does not pull or push items to a hopper.

[Elriel]

Originally posted by Cellfire:

Also FYI an IO does not pull or push items to a hopper.

Yes, that was one of the first things I tested. It does function as a hopper for every manufacturing device I tested though. You just need the manufacturing device and one IO port. It'll take what it needs from the mass storage and then push the results in there through the same IO port. So the whole mass storage will function as one big ass hopper if used that way.

[Cellfire]

Originally posted by エリエル:

Originally posted by Cellfire:

Also FYI an IO does not pull or push items to a hopper.

Yes, that was one of the first things I tested. It does function as a hopper for every manufacturing device I tested though. You just need the manufacturing device and one IO port. It'll take what it needs from the mass storage and then push the results in there through the same IO port. So the whole mass storage will function as one big ass hopper if used that way.

to a hopper i said not a machine

[Elriel]

I finally got around to setting up the mass storage based ore transfer system. I've got it working with 2 trenchers now in two veins. One molybdenum vein and one chromium vein. Molybdenum vein is ~70 meters from the elevator and the chromium ~200 meters. At each trencher, I set up 6 regular mk3 mass storage input ports along with a 6x4 plot of mass storage right next to them.

At the elevator I've got 3 Matter Mover IO Ports. One port with 3 mechanized conveyers and 2 regular pipes and 2 ports with just pipes. That's enough to output 900 ore per minute, which is slightly more than the trenchers are able to output.

I could also have placed the IO port next to the lift, but I already knew there's a 78 items per tick limitation, so I decided to build a huge mass of pipes to fill hoppers with instead. You can cut the number of IO Ports in half if you use mechanized conveyers on all sides for each IO port, but they lack the filtering, which is needed to ensure balanced output.

With the filters, you can output 250 items per minute from a single IO Port and with mechanized conveyors 500 items per minute. Alternatively, you could use matter movers too, but given the hopper size of just 100, I'm not sure if it really makes sense to use the faster ones.

I initially only had improved cargo lift to use with them and while using that I found out a few things:
1. Regular Mass storage input ports seem to ignore distances when you're not looking at them. The mass storage quickly got filled to the brim. I expected the regular input ports to only be able to fill the areas close to the trenchers. There was ~400 items per minute of transport capacity taking the ore out afterall.
2. Unfiltered IO ports will only output the closest stack. So I ended up having to replace half the output pipes with advanced filters set to chromium ore to ensure a balanced mix. Now that I've upgraded the cargo elevator to bulk version, this is probably not really needed anymore.
3. If you don't have enough transport capacity to keep the mass storage empty, the closer trencher gets the first pick and the one further away only gets to fill whatever capacity is left after the first one.

[NathanHoltBeader]

How did anyone figure out how to use these ports? It would never have occurred to me that they might magically read filter settings for a filtered conveyor, and I've found no documentation on them except here. I made one and couldn't get anything but copper out before reading this.

[steveman0]

They work like hoppers. It tells you that. Treat them like hoppers and it'll all just work.