Smart and programmable splitters have been a few times in recent patches.
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Previous situation : you can only set a single output for any kind of item.
- Interesting behavior used by most players : the explicit rule for one item is read by the splitter first, so the "All*" rule allows everything through as long as you didn't set an explicit rule for these items on another output. It's read as "everything else".
- Unwanted behavior : if you set the right and left outputs to allow "steel pipes", all the pipes will go through the right output but will never split 50/50 between left and right. Even if the right output is clogged.
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After the first change : any kind of item can be sent down several lines.
- Interesting behavior : you can now send still pipes 50/50 on two outputs or 33/33/33 on three outputs as you'd do with a basic splitter
- Unwanted behavior : the "All*" rule can now allow items through even if you set explicit rules for them on other outputs. There is problem with this behavior because it changes with the number of sorting operation per minute. If you have few items going trhough then they all go to the outputs with specific rules. If you have many (over 250) sorting operations per minute then the "All*" output will allows items through. So at low speed it's stil read as "everything else", but at high speed it's read as "everything".
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Last change : there's a new rule "any unfiltered"
- People interested in the first behavior of the "All*" rule should use this new one since it will always be read as "everything else".
- The "All*" rule can be interesting on some situations as it allows picking a type of item for feeding machines / stroring yet avoids clogging the whole mixed conveyor when that machine / storage is full.
It's not perfect yet because the behavior of the "All *" rule still varies with the number of sorting operations per minutes. At high speed the splitter consider some outputs are clogged when they're not.
Conclusion :
1) Only use "All*" when you're trying to avoid a clogging issue, use "any unfiltered" on other situations
2) If you want to use "All *" rule anyways, then lower the number of items coming through. You can do so by adding a piece of mk2 conveyor before the splitter, or a more elaborate setup to slow down items to somewhere between 120 and 250 per minutes. (The speed on the conveyor used to feed the splitter doesn't matter, only the number of items arriving per second /minute).
