Baffling Automated Alveary problem

[malicious_bloke]

So I have a small group of Alvearies I use to feed honeycombs to my Mead factory (yes, i'm an unrepentant drunkard )

These Alvearies are as automated as is possible:

- Wooden transport pipes with gates extract anything that appears in the inventory
- A diamond transport pipe separates honeycombs and wax and stuff from new bees.
- Non-bee items get sent to the factory, princesses and drones get sent back into another loop of apiarist pipes to be fed back into the relevant slots in the alvearies.

Now this all works fine for the first 4 alvearies in the loop (bottom right, middle right, top right, top centre/right) but the other three stick.

As in, once the queen dies, the drones and princess and any combs produced sit in the inventory until I manually drag the princess from the output slots to the princess slot, then it's almost like it block updates and everything gets pulled out by the pipes.

I've double and triple checked all the settings on my gates and apiarist pipes and those are fine. I've checked they are all inside the same chunk (not that it should matter) and that's fine too.

I'm mystified as to what could be the matter. Any ideas would be gladly recieved...

 

[BlackFire]

Can you show us where you have the pipe hooked up to on one of the broken alvearies?

 

[malicious_bloke]

Can you show us where you have the pipe hooked up to on one of the broken alvearies?

Sure thing. This is the complete inverse side:

of the three you can see connected in sequence in the foreground, the leftmost one works fine and the other two stick until I trigger an update by touching something in the inventory.

The settings on the autarchic gates are identical, as are the settings on the apiarist pipes in the top row.

 

[netmc]

Out of curiosity, where are your chunk boundries?

 

[malicious_bloke]

The top corner of #1 Alveary (bottom right in the top pic, far top left in the 2nd pic) is at -22(15), 45(3). The other corner of the alveary over the other side is at -21(9), 44(5).

So they do cross a chunk boundary, BUT #4 Alveary (top centre/right in top pic and second from the left of the ones in the foreground in the other pic) is in the same chunk as the non-working ones and it is extracting just fine...

 

[netmc]

I guess what I mean, is there a chunk boundary between the pipes and the alveary? I've seen some weird things happen when the machine is on one side and the pipes connecting to it are on the other. This happened with my steam boiler, and it wouldn't output any steam until I relogged.

 

[malicious_bloke]

Nope, there's a good 5 blocks distance from the chunk boundary at the point where the sticking Alvearies connect to the pipe. The pipe itself passes through another chunk boundary but again there's a working Alveary on each side of that transition too.

 

[nilness]

I'd try breaking and replacing the gates. I've definitely seen gates stop working then work fine once replaced.
I'm assuming you have them set for "Items in inventory -> pusler", you might try "Princess/Queen missing -> pulser" to see if it works any differently. You would get "clumps" of items instead of at regular intervals, but this should be offset to some extent by the multiple alvearies.

Unrelated, but I think you could reduce the number of transport pipes used considerably. At each alveary you can go wooden pipe -> apiarist pipe which feeds bees back into the alveary and products up to a single pipe system running to your processing center. Use an iron pipe above each apiarist pipe to keep things moving the right direction, and probably move the wooden pipe up one block vertically so that the main transport pipes are one block too high to connect to the alveary so you don't need the sandstone pipe.

 

[malicious_bloke]

Cheers

Changing the condition on the gate to Princess/Queen missing kind of fixed it. Ultimately I changed out the normal gates to autarchic OR gates and put both Princess/Queen missing and Items in Inventory as conditions (to get around the problem of 20-odd stacks of honeycomb landing on my centrifuges all at once) and it seems to work now. I'm still not totally sure what was causing the glitch but i'll settle for problem solved