It seems like the developer intent based on spores and spoil times and farm space constraints is to harvest small amounts as needed and build just in time products. But the tools to do that a suck, and the best solution is just massively overbuilding all products and burning huge waste piles. If products stop moving, you are kinda fucked because there is no good way to distinguish between fresh and nearly spoiled goods other than simple inserter priority rules.
It all works but feels wrong and dumb.
Totally agree. I tried the JIT approach; I could never get it to work, and I've never seen anyone else do it either. The wisdom has always been to keep everything flowing and accept spoilage (or kludge it with lots of bots and then move on). This patch makes it a more feasible, I think.
I'd love to see splitter filtering by freshness (e.g. nutrients at >=80% freshness) but I don't think that's in the cards.
I just use small buffers. I don't know if that's technically JIT or not, but a smaller restricted buffer with high throughput works great for me.
> keep everything flowing and accept spoilage Yeah, I still have to do this too though.
> the best solution is just massively overbuilding all products and burning huge waste piles
Yes, you have figured out Gleba! Once you build with this mindset, you will achieve enlightenment.
I'll be honest: I don't like Space Age. It seems like the developers were focused on providing entirely new types of logistics challenges to solve, but I didn't want that. I wanted things which were fairly natural extensions of the existing logistics challenges, fresh but not too different. The only part of the expansion I enjoy is Vulcanus, everything else doesn't feel like Factorio any more to me.
I love it. Sad that we aren’t to expect another DLC