SDB Silo - Best Practices? How do YOU use it?

[Rattlehead]

Starting up a materials processing facility for my moon base. My plan is to have various drop-offs for ore and ices but they'll all go via chute to the same system.

The chutes will go through various sorters to pull individual ores to the appropriate silos. So, all the iron ore will go to one silo, all the copper to another, and so on.

Beyond this, I'm not sure. Thought I'd ask how you guys have been using the silo. What ways have you automated it? What other things might it be good for?

It seems to be First In-First Out, so maybe not great for storing multiple types of items when you want to call up something specific from storage, but looks really good for bulk storage of a single type of item.

[RazgrizBlackwolf]

I've got two lots of silos and a single silo elsewhere.

The first lot are used just as a buffer for my arc furnaces so I don't need chutes a mile long to hold all the ores, these are permanently open.

Further down the line i've got bulk storage silos for all the processed ores so they are stored separately, these are just manual release for the time being as i'm rubbish at the IC programming so will take a while to figure out how to get them set up to send the required ingots to the manufacturing facilities.

The single silo is part of my recycling setup and is used as a holding facility to stop the recycling machine from jamming up if I want to recycle lots of stuff, this is rigged up to lots of logic chips to switch things on and off as required. :)

On a side note I send all mined items into an unloading room using the SDB hopper that is a vacuum so the ices don't melt until they reach their individual melting rooms. :P

[Rattlehead]

Thanks for the info!

My current plan is to do 13 silos, one for each ore/ice, and have a sorter for each, as well as a stacker so they (in theory) only end up with stacks of 50 in the silos. I've done this once already (yesterday) in a multiplayer game with a friend, but my single player save I'm about to do it all again.

The head of the sorting system also has an unloader and a sorter that rejects anything that isn't ore/ice. Whatever gets rejected (mining belts or whatever) goes out to a vending machine. The theory is that you can just drop your mining belt(s) into the chute and it will hold the empty belt in the vending machine for when you're ready for another mining trip.

Once that's in, I do plan to do a hopper drop-off as well, for bulk drops, and a third entry point into the system for the robot to drop at (if I get that far).

In the multiplayer game, it worked pretty well. So the next stage is setting up a system to feed stacks of ore to the advanced furnace at the press of a button.... It's going to be quite the project.

I may end up doing another set of silos for smelted ores as well, but not sure about that one.

[RazgrizBlackwolf]

Sounds like a good project to work on, if you're like me when it comes to mining you will end up needing those silos XD. I think my iron ingot silo is about 40% full of stacks of 50 and there are a lot still to smelt :P.

Also if you haven't already you could put two unloaders in series with a good length of chutes between them (mine is about 20ish sections) then you can have a backpack full of mining belts and just throw the whole backpack in for unloading :)

[Rattlehead]

Neat idea! I might try that...