How do you use the smelter to make stainless these days?

Support & Bugs & Help & Requests
#1

It seems that the mixer can now only hold just shy of 7 units of molten metal, so if you put more than that into the smelter it will deadlock because the mixer can’t take more of that metal, and can’t use it up without enough of the others. The smelter also now will process an entire stack in one go so even when I threw in 5 of the other metals first, then 30 iron, it sits there chewing on the iron until it’s all done, then the mixer can’t take it all at once. It used to do it one at a time so the mixer would keep consuming it as fast as the smelter would spit it out so I used to just add 10 of the other metals, then 30 iron and walk away for a while.

So how do you make this work effectively?

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#2

Put a quadruple Pipe inbetween the Smelter and the Mixer? That should be enough capacity.

Also the Smelter does a whole Stack? Is the Smelting Recipe REALLY that fast to warrant that speed??

#3

That’s only going to buffer another ~8 units of each per pipe segment.

No; it takes quite a long time to smelt 30 iron, but that’s what it does. The tooltip says it can process up to 1000x in parallel.

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#4

Oh shit that was meant for Fluid Heating, so that might be an issue, well unless you use Droppers or Hoppers to do the Job more slowly.

Also you could always use a better Material for the Quad Pipe, or make a longer Pipe. :wink:

#5

How can you set up hoppers to only add small batches of the right metal, in the right order?

I guess you can set one hopper to feed into the smelter with 4 more hoppers on each side set to only insert a specific amount and… maybe use redstone with a comparator to let them all insert only when the central hopper is empty?

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#6

Have multiple redstone buttoned regular Hoppers go into a Queue Hopper, which retains order of Items inserted.

#7

Well alrighty then! I think I tried a setup like this once using a redstone comparator to measure whether the queue hopper was empty and the other hoppers always seemed to feed in two batches before the redstone signal stopped them, but this time testing in my creative world I used an item-o-meter on the queue hopper feeding the smelter and one hopper feeding into the side, then another hopper on top with 3 hoppers on their sides all redstone wired to the item-o-meter and set to output exact stack sizes in the right proportions and it’s all working out quite nicely. I’m not sure its even needed, but now it appears that fluid pipes and drums get a bonus to temperature handling ( they didn’t used to ) so a quad invar fluid pipe between the smelter and the mixer works to add a little extra buffering capacity and the system is working like a charm.

It’s a bit complicated to set up, but I think it is more fuel efficient than using the multiblock steel crucible and requires absolutely no supervision!

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