Infinite Crafting? Recursive Crafting?

[Robosole]

I'm working on a rig that crafts deuterium rods (miner/pump/FAD/refinery). I can queue up the construction of a massive amount of deuterium/clean water, and water/carbon is consumed as fast as it is collected (the miner/pump are set not to fill the chests), so the containers won't fill up with anything other than deuterium. However, the only theoretical bottleneck of this machine besides the capacity of the chests is the queue size of the machines: I can queue up 4x999 water at the FAD machine and 3x999 rods at the refinery, but the machine will eventually stop if I stop managing it.

If I could queue up an infinite stack of water in the FAD machine and an infinite stack of deuterium in the refinery, the machine would be totally automated. Of course, this also means that, if you want to produce only a single product from a machine, the size of the queue would become irrelevant as long as the machine's inventory is routinely emptied out. Breaking queue size limits is probably not how the developer intends for the game to be played.

Another option would be for the refinery to automatically queue 20 clean water at a connected FAD machine if there isn't enough water and that FAD machine is idle; This would make the queue size of the FAD machine irrelevant, but the queue size of the refinery would still matter. You could go a step further and make it so something like a deuterium generator queues up the production of a fuel rod when it has no more left (while still consuming the last one); This would make it possible to fully automate some stations like this, but it would still not produce a surplus of fuel unless a player occasionally queues up rods at the refinery. Similar logic could be applied to all manufacturing machines, so medbays queue up fabric/herbs, armories could queue up ALM at another armory, and so on.

I'm especially interested in being able to build automated contraptions like this, so I wanted to put in my two cents. Automatic crafting recursion Is probably the least game-breaking of the two options, since the developers obviously intended for the queue sizes of machines to matter.

[BCP Labs(YT)]

you can. a viewer told me when you enter a manual number just enter 999999 yes 6 9's and it will stay constant. i have mine setup like that.

EDIT:
just read the entire post lol. im all about automation.
heres my storage system
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-5COLzegT0

and my production setup
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4D5KIeRiG8

[Haerken]

I found my water pumps and miners stopped but not my printers or refineries, when I got out of the base area at some distance. Unless this changes you can't run a continous automated production setup, when you are gone. I didn't know about the 999999 thing, so I will be putting that in.

[BCP Labs(YT)]

as far as i know it "should" update any machine when you return to a chunk. but when i hit my mines i have to camp there for a few days to fill the container.

[dahni.uru]

I also find it a problem that all mining operations either stop completely or open the queue section to include all possible ores; i.e. I want only Carbon, and set my queue for C; then when I go to another base, or log out and back in, I find that the operation changed to all ores instead of just Carbon, or shut off entirely and I have to go from machine to machine and reactivate each one separately.

I would like to see two changes, at least:
1) When I select an ore preference, don't change it for me.
2) When I start a mining operation and leave for another base, don't shut off my operation until the limit I've set is reached.

This is not a 'flame' at all, but a suggestion which would increase my appreciation of the game.

[johndai]

Totally agree with your comments dahni, well said.

Devs, can you look into this please.

[Robosole]

Originally posted by dahni.uru:

I also find it a problem that all mining operations either stop completely or open the queue section to include all possible ores; i.e. I want only Carbon, and set my queue for C; then when I go to another base, or log out and back in, I find that the operation changed to all ores instead of just Carbon, or shut off entirely and I have to go from machine to machine and reactivate each one separately.

I would like to see two changes, at least:
1) When I select an ore preference, don't change it for me.
2) When I start a mining operation and leave for another base, don't shut off my operation until the limit I've set is reached.

This is not a 'flame' at all, but a suggestion which would increase my appreciation of the game.

I have also noticed that mining rigs and water pumps sometimes resume filling other containers after you have unchecked the, "use connected containers," checkbox. The bug here is that all the settings of a particular machine may be lost when that machine unloads/reloads.

I have another idea relevant to this topic, but slightly different, so I'm going to start a new thread; Look for it.