[TIP] [Automation] When a negative result is positive

[Saturnus]

This tip may help some new players starting out with making more advanced automated controls. I think most people that have played for a while knows this already.

Say you have a liquid buffer like the below. And you only want to pump from it if all these conditions are met:

1) water in the top is less than 500kg/tile
2) water in the bottom is more than 500kg/tile
3) temperature is less than 30C

So you build an automation with two AND gates for that. Ensuring that only if all 3 conditions are met the pump turns on. Like this.

But hold on. You could also make it like this with OR and NOT gates and have the same result.

Here's where it starts to get interesting as the OR gates aren't needed at all here. If two automation output share a wire it is effectively the same as an OR gate. So we can make this and still have the same result:

 

Then we're back to using the same space and materials as with AND gates, although we have a bit more freedom in where to place the logic gates with NOT gates. Notice however the NOT gates on the sensors. What if we just said the output of the sensors should be true with the opposite result of what we originally said then we can eliminate all but one NOT gate. Like this:

 

And that is my tip. Sometimes it is better to have a negative result than a positive one when it comes to automation.

 

NB: I know the top images show an atmo sensor and not a temp sensor but it's not really important for illustration if it's one or the other. And yes, I didn't have to drag the automation wires out into the insulated tiles on the last image but it's done for better illustrating the connections.