Conveyor Rail Thermo Sensor can be blocked by small packets

I'm not sure if this is a bug, exactly, because all of the mechanics of the themo sensor and heat exchange simulation are working as intended. What _might_ be a bug, however is the fact that miniscule packets of metal are being generated at all, weather or not lies in the volcano itself or how we have our steam rooms setup, I am not sure yet. The metal volcanos are generating 

 

That said, I was also experiencing this same problem with metal volcanos (though for me it's always the same one aluminum volcano on the forest planet). To get around this, I had to add some extra automation to the sweeper arm and conveyor loader so they are less likely to pick up the microscopic metal pieces. However, since there is always a chance for it to all happen within the few seconds that signal goes green, I still get the tiny packets of metal, albeit less often. After learning from this yet again, my latest tamed volcano is now using a weight plate and double sweeper arm/loaders to make absolutely sure that nothing smaller than 20Kg gets loaded onto the rail.

same here; the small packets do not exchange heat at all and can go through rail loop forever as their temperature stays high.

one option - make small packets to immediately exchange the temperature.

does not allow sweepers to pick up smaller than 1kg - it is more difficult - I noticed that a sweeper starts picking metal when a volcano erupts but the new portion of hot liquid metal dissolves the previous portion which the sweeper has already started picking up and then the sweeper picks up just this tiny amount. The problem mostly with iron volcanos and I do not have the same problem on gold and Al all due to different setups.

third option is to make rounding {integer} 

There are probably other things in the game besides volcanos that can produce small packets, or at least packets less than a 1 kg minimum (polluted dirt, oxylite offgassing, rot piles, food, etc) so any attempt to hard-code a minimum pickup weight for all conveyor loaders would probably cause bugs elsewhere. If it was configurable on the loader that would be great - could set it only in places like this. 

The volcano's in particular are probably harder to deal with. Even if they emit metals in 1kg increments they might still cool in fractional units, not sure. Seems like the easiest solution would be just to let these packets pass through the sensor.

@BallisticBuddha - Do you have a  screenshot of your workaround? Do you mean that you have one conveyor drop off on a weight plate and then a second one picks up off the plate? I think if that's what you mean it might be a good option, curious to see it. I'm already consolidating all volcanos into one place for the final cooling so that would be easy enough to add. Thanks.

That's exactly what I'm doing, yes. So there's one auto-sweeper inside the steam room that just picks up any iron it sees in front of the volcano and puts it into a conveyor loader, you can do this one immediately with no real need for any automation unless you want to optimize the power used by the auto-sweeper arm (because the sweeper can sweep faster than a loader can place onto rails).

 

Then this 1st rail goes strait to a conveyor chute where it drops all of this iron onto a weight plate configured at >199Kg, and that weight plate is connected directly to the next auto-sweeper so it won't pick it up until there is 200Kg (give or take a few milligrams I guess because that was happening). That second auto-sweeper then loads it onto a 2nd conveyor loader that goes through the cooling block (very similar to yours, with metal tiles and radiant pipes).

 

I started a new world since the new update, and I was like 3000 cycles deep in that game so loading it back up can take a while, so I'd rather not grab this screenshot. But hopefully that explanation helps.

Changed Status to Known Issue

Last year during testing Spaced Out internally we tried allowing temperature exchange between small ores (less than 10 grams) but discovered some issues right before launch so it was reverted. There's an ominous comment in the code from years ago "if we deal with numbers that are too small things explode" and unfortunately the context behind this change has been lost.

A few sim temperature bugs have been fixed since then so we're willing to give it another shot. In the next update to public_testing (prefix EX1 S11) this will be re-enabled. We might disable it for release if issues crop up and fix this bug in a different way.

It's live on public_testing, please let us know if you encounter any issues.

 

I had to revert the change for now due to instability.

 

@EricKlei, @KonfigSys  I ended up changing the conveyor rail thermo sensors in my game to timer sensors with 1 second on, 29 seconds off. This is fast enough to keep up with all the volcanos over time while also slow enough that the 1 packet per 30 seconds that goes through (Whether it is 20 kg or micrograms due to this bug) doesn't come close to overhwelming the cooling. As a workaround it is fine. I tried the weight plates but found this to be simpler. Got past the immediate problem at least

17 hours ago, Tiru said:

@EricKlei, @KonfigSys  I ended up changing the conveyor rail thermo sensors in my game to timer sensors with 1 second on, 29 seconds off. This is fast enough to keep up with all the volcanos over time while also slow enough that the 1 packet per 30 seconds that goes through (Whether it is 20 kg or micrograms due to this bug) doesn't come close to overhwelming the cooling. As a workaround it is fine. I tried the weight plates but found this to be simpler. Got past the immediate problem at least

I have a very long cooling loop and so far I did not get it completely blocked by these small packages. I can see like 10 of them cycling but when new ones come they may combine to create bigger packages that are ok with the temperature exchange.  I left it running without interfering for a while to see if it blocks the loop but so far no blocking.

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only iron volcano make this in my setup but gold and Al are free from this problem