Sorting Machine: Sorting the same item 3 different ways

[Jesse Benoit]

Here is my issue:

I have a 64x64 quarry set up. I am going to be getting a significant amount of cobble and i want to process it in to different items. (sand, stone, sand to fertilizer, glass, and then have some cobble left over) so i want it to be sorted in to three different processing lines. 1. maceration 2. Smelting and 3. Straight to barrels.

The sorting system is divided into 5 lines, each line from the sorting system goes into item tesseracts which send items to the various processing areas. (i hate excessive piping )

I have a sorting machine set up to handle JUST cobble distribution. I have the first three columns of the sorting machine going to those 3 locations respectively. However i can NOT for the life of me figure out how to make the sorting machine move through those columns one at a time and send cobble out colored 3 different ways. I run cobble thought the system with all the combination of settings i could think of and its not working.

Things i have tried:

Setting up more than one sorting machine to pull cobble each pulling a different color. doesn't work well because one sorting machine always becomes dominant and that line gets the vast majority of the cobble. I could up the speed of the quarry but then only cobble would have the processing bandwidth to get through the system unclogged. everything else would back log trying to make it through.

I would prefer to not have to use a timer to make the sorting machine pull from an inventory because i have minor lag issues so i cut down where i can. I want to have it inline, however if it is the only way i could do that.

What i am trying isnt groundbreaking stuff so i am sure someone else had this issue at some point. I tried searching the forums already but i got tired of reading every thread with "sorting machine" in it.

 

[Bibble]

I think you should just need to have a single sorting machine on the sequential stack mode (the one with the leapfrogging arrows, I think).

 

[ewsmith]

The pneumatic tubes send items evenly when the destinations are an even distance away. One sorting machine sending to one color with relays at the end. Direwolf20 has made some in his videos. Season 5 recyclers use it.

 

[Larroke]

I would suggest just creating an iron or gold chest or a extra-dim barrel in a cache area to store the basic materials you have mentioned, and when your system detects it needs a more refined material have a retriever pull it, or use logic gates to trigger the refinement. I use a similar system to keep an iron chest filled each of Stone, Bricks, glass, Basalt/bricks and Marble/bricks, the basalt/stone/glass lines are all fed off a cache barrel tucked away in a production mezzanine. I'll eventually get some extruders to trigger when the barrel gets below 1/2 full to make sure I always have enough materials.

Then, when those cache's are filled, dump the rest or recycle it.

 

[jumpfight5]

Yeah, just void it all and use Igneous Extruders. One can handle scrap production, sand, glass, stone, stone brick, and about 9 magma crucibles (running at around 25 mj/t). But make two

 

[DZCreeper]

Just find out what sorting machine mode you need. Then you give each place that the item should go to a color. You match the sorting machine to those colors, put however many cobble you want to go down each path into it. Then let it go. Direwolf, if you watch his video's, recently built a IC2 solar factory using this feature.

 

[Jesse Benoit]

Larroke, man i was thinking i might be able to make it 'simpler' but i might have to go that route at some point. I want full automation in my workshop. Ideally all of my favorite building materials should be stocked and project tables should be full. I even have golems for my project tables that keep it full of most materials (less efficient i now but alot more fun to watch)

Jump, have a mental block with that one. Theres something that feels wrong about voiding all of the resources i gather from quarrying just to recreate them later with a machine. If i am getting them in and using power to sort them even if its to a void pipe, id rather just keep them and use it to fill the coffers. But for a magma crucible i might do that at some point, my nether is at a severe lack of extra large lava pools. And i have a penchant for bright glowy liquids so i use it like its going out of style.

Dz, i found the correct settings, they just require a chest and a timer to send pulses. I would rather have it inline but this way is working for the moment. I was hoping there was a combo of setting that i hadn't tried that was going to help. Ill have to go back into that video of DW and check what he did. I remember the one you were talking about.

 

[jumpfight5]

I guess you could store your cobble as barrels, and pull them out by filters when needed, but that would add more lag and more complexity.
You could auto crucible it, but that would take tons of energy and tons of magma crucibles to keep up with the cobble you receive. 1 crucible needs 30 mj/t just to function. And, depending on your quarry's speed, you may need upwards of 20 to keep up with cobblestone.
I view cobblestone as energy, you can't lots of energy very well (especially BC Energy), so you make it and spend it.

 

[Zivel]

Just use a diamond pipe? Redpower sorters are overly complicated for this are they not?

 

[Jesse Benoit]

Hey Jump, i might do that with some of thecobble, I just tapped my huge nether lake and i have to find a new source, in the mean time i could set up a couple of them inline to the barrels and let the sorting system fill the crucibles and pump the rest straight on through

And Zivel, i have used those in a few places in the sorting/processing system. I hesitate to use them straight from the quarry output because of the lower intelligence of the buildcraft pipes. The huge output fromt he quarry (running at a paltry 10mj) occasionally clogs the system up and then i would be spitting stacks and stacks of cobble into the world...my lag wouldnt thank me for that one. But the diamond pipes have their uses for sectioning out sand from the macerator and iron from the furnaces for refining.

 

[Zivel]

never had a problem with a diamond pipe straight to my quarry, do it all the time with voiding the cobble. If you are concerned, throw a wooden golem there and he will pick up the scraps

 

[Dravarden]

make a line of pipes that the first tesseract (after a filter with cobble inside) goes to the barrel, the next tesseract in the line goes to the smelter and the last one to a macerator, no need of a sorting machine.

I preffer using igneous extruders in any case.