By 'big' I mean in terms of conveyor length and total number of Component Factories/Refineries on that length. At a certain point (not that many/long) the Silos far upstream no longer receive control signals from Fabricators, at the opposite end.
A limit to the complexity of crafting setups is necessary, and it can be seen, as the little white light/lightening pulses don't flash on crafting blocks beyond the limit. This limit was tested here, in some detail.
However, the problem I'm describing in this thread seems to occur before that absolute cut-off. For example, mid-way through Fabricating a missile (Hawkeye/Venture were tested) the crafting system will just stall. Mostly it doing a Silo dispatch dither when that happens in the example show in video, here (but also I swear I've seen it just refuse to allocate Component Factories):
(Save attached, at start point shown at start of video. Tech from this Community Help thread.)
The dispatch dither only happens part way through Fabrication, with Silos that previously worked. It is fixed by changing the connectivity of any crafting block on the system (so it re-evaluates and does a kind of soft reboot of the AI).
A couple of the things I suspected in this setup were:
(1) The Conveyor to the side of the refinery (necessary to circumvent the Refinery jamming bug) - that the 2 output directions were presenting 2 alternate, parallel routes, like with the "multiple refineries causing dispatch dither" bug. To be sure, removing this conveyor piece allow the setup to craft fully. However, it doesn't necessarily cause the bug....
(2) The second feed-in branch of (empty) Silos. Again, I show that cutting this off also allows crafting to complete successfully. But the system, can work OK with it there. So it's some kind of overall burden thing.
Note: adding just a single additional Component Factory to the line in this setup stops the furthest silo (Erudite) being 'seen' at all. So it's right on the cusp, despite being open loop and only having 10 CFs.
Dispatch dither was happening with this (otherwise correct) base in this thread report, too (arguably the same issues occurring). But that was looped, so was much worst for the game to analyse. And there was a lot more resources skipping Silos in that setup, while only a few do here (again, seemingly randomly). So maybe think of these two faulty bases as different case studies...
A limit to the complexity of crafting setups is necessary, and it can be seen, as the little white light/lightening pulses don't flash on crafting blocks beyond the limit. This limit was tested here, in some detail.
However, the problem I'm describing in this thread seems to occur before that absolute cut-off. For example, mid-way through Fabricating a missile (Hawkeye/Venture were tested) the crafting system will just stall. Mostly it doing a Silo dispatch dither when that happens in the example show in video, here (but also I swear I've seen it just refuse to allocate Component Factories):
The dispatch dither only happens part way through Fabrication, with Silos that previously worked. It is fixed by changing the connectivity of any crafting block on the system (so it re-evaluates and does a kind of soft reboot of the AI).
A couple of the things I suspected in this setup were:
(1) The Conveyor to the side of the refinery (necessary to circumvent the Refinery jamming bug) - that the 2 output directions were presenting 2 alternate, parallel routes, like with the "multiple refineries causing dispatch dither" bug. To be sure, removing this conveyor piece allow the setup to craft fully. However, it doesn't necessarily cause the bug....
(2) The second feed-in branch of (empty) Silos. Again, I show that cutting this off also allows crafting to complete successfully. But the system, can work OK with it there. So it's some kind of overall burden thing.
Note: adding just a single additional Component Factory to the line in this setup stops the furthest silo (Erudite) being 'seen' at all. So it's right on the cusp, despite being open loop and only having 10 CFs.
Dispatch dither was happening with this (otherwise correct) base in this thread report, too (arguably the same issues occurring). But that was looped, so was much worst for the game to analyse. And there was a lot more resources skipping Silos in that setup, while only a few do here (again, seemingly randomly). So maybe think of these two faulty bases as different case studies...
