How do you balance the three ores on your first space station?

[Hanni]

I built my first space station for ‼space science‼ but I haven't figured out how to "balance" the input.
My four grabbers all put their stuff into the hub, from there three crushers fetch the meteors and put everything back into the hub, then it goes out to the labs.
But I always run short on ice. Anyone got a nice idea how to balance this?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3360795672

[Nico]

Check the tips and tricks ingame. You can simply throw away stuff if you have too much of it.

[Glyph]

They're infinite. Just toss extras overboard.

[Khaylain]

You can put things into space and it'll just be gone. So you can move things out if you have too much of it. Dunno if you can hook the space platform up to the circuit network.

[Marosh]

I use the new belt reading feature. Connect an inserter to a belt with a red/green wire and choose the "read whole belt" on that belt. Circle this belt around and let the crusher pick what they need. If you get to much of one stuff, throw it with that inserter into space. With that you always have space on the belt to put more of the stuff on from the graber. That solves the balancing part.

To get more Ice, built a wider (not taller) platform. That is the only way to increase the spawn rate other than traveling through space.

[RiO]

I run a sushi belt around my platform hub and attached cargo depots. Wired to read full belt. Then I set up a decider combinator and constant combinator to output a set of signals for the asteroid chunks that I have too little of on the belt, and I wire those to the collectors as their filter.
The asteroids end up on the outside of the belt, being side-loaded there. The crushers pick from that belt at a distance of 2. With a normal inserter outserting chunks that didn't crush properly, onto a piece of belt that sideloads those back into the outer lane. And with a long-handed inserter that outserts the actual finished results onto the inner lane.

For moving platforms, which will also require ammo production to deal with larger asteroids, the finished product from the crushers is instead direct inserted into chem plants for fuel, oxidizer or water, and into furnaces for iron plates that go into ammo. It's then the ammo which ends up on the inside lane of the sushi belt running around the hub.

[Hurkyl]

For variety, you can filter the asteroid collectors, so you can have pure belts of you want.

[Margonian]

Throw it out in space is the simplest no doubt. if you want to be non wasteful you can set a logistic request to send excess down below. Free iron! Just do remember to set filters on inserters so you dont get carbon on your science lab belt.

[BlueRock]

In addition to what has been said there is a later tech that can help with re-balancing products produced from ores that have already been collected.

[god bless you]

Originally posted by Hanni:

I built my first space station for ‼space science‼ but I haven't figured out how to "balance" the input.
My four grabbers all put their stuff into the hub, from there three crushers fetch the meteors and put everything back into the hub, then it goes out to the labs.
But I always run short on ice. Anyone got a nice idea how to balance this?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3360795672

read hub contents. <-(green line)-> constant combinator( set all types of asteroid chunk as minus 5) <-(green line)-> input to Decider combinator ( filter anything < 0 ) -> output to red line -> Asteroid collector ( choose 'set filter') -> send everything to hub without further settings.

If crusher output asteroid chunks, deliver it to hub directly. Then there will be all kinds of materials in your hub anytime. Moreover, there are still many free stacks in your hub.

[Hanni]

Thanks for your answers everyone!

[Aestrea]

Really depends how you build it. I set 2-3 different belts from the collector to their crusher and have 2 inserters on the side that reads the contents of the collector and if it stocks too many, they will toss them out into space to avoid a overflow clog of a single asteroid.

[Dertin]

Easiest, non logiccable way: Let all asteroids that you catch run over one belt, put 3 spliters with filters (sorts them) and then on each of that a second spliter where you put one output to priority (the one you work with for doing stuff) then let the "overflow belts" (the ones on the not prioritized output of the second spliter) mergen and be tossed overboard. this way you get a full belt but no clogging

[MechBFP]

Stuff like that is part of the fun. Don’t ruin it by immediately giving up. Give it an honest go on your own first. :)

[RiO]

Originally posted by god bless you:

read hub contents. <-(green line)-> constant combinator( set all types of asteroid chunk as minus 5) <-(green line)-> input to Decider combinator ( filter anything < 0 ) -> output to red line -> Asteroid collector ( choose 'set filter') -> send everything to hub without further settings.

OP, ignore the above. It is poor advice.

Using the hub as a switching point will screw you over long-term. Asteroid chunks have stack size 1 which means you are absolutely destroying the transport capacity of your hub for ferrying material between planets and keeping a low buffer limit of asteroid chunks to try to counter this deficiency, is likely to cause you to hit a drought mid-flight once you start transporting.

Instead, run a sushi belt around the hub and its attached cargo depots.
Attach a green wire that reads whole belt content to the sushi belt and input it to the decider combinator. Then put the amounts you want of each chunk type (metallic, carbonic, oxide) into a constant combinator and connect that to the decider input with a red wire. Don't bother making the amounts negative. It's not needed at all.

Make the logic of the decider combinator:

Input:
{{each}} (red) > {{each}} (green)

Output:
{{each}} Input count (red)

Connect the output red wire to your asteroid collectors and use the signals as their filter configuration. Done.

If you have problems with wire reach to attach to all the asteroid collectors, then remember that you can just attach wire to additional spots on the sushi belt and leave all circuit-related functions unused (this is a new thing in Factorio 2.0 -- it does not disable the belt by default anymore) to use them as range extenders.

Do not use the platform hub for this.
You will later need to send signals to the hub to assist in setting up more complicated traveling schedules, in which case you want to keep it clean of any of the other signals being routed across your platforms.

[BKo]

It really feels like circuit network knowledge is required this time around even though I never used them before. I would be having massive headaches if not for circuits at this point.