Working out how many recyclers I need to "fully process" 240 scrap per second

[woven cobalt]

If I need X recycles to recycle Y scrap per second, does anyone have a good way to calculate how many recycles I need to "fully" recycle all the produced items? As in keep recycling till they no longer exist?

(I'm actually up-cycling to legendary and keeping normal and uncommon stone and holmium, but ignoring that seems like it would make it easier)

[young thunder]

Calculate your expected output from scrap
Check the recycle time on each of those outputs and see how many recyclers are needed to handle each item
Repeat for those outputs until close enough to 0

[woven cobalt]

ah I started trying that and hoped there was a hack

Thanks - back to the spreadsheet

[young thunder]

Once you get to items recycling into themselves you can probably swap to math to calculate the infinite series
But like, eh

[woven cobalt]

it returns something when recycling 25% of the time right, so that would be 1.333.... times the recycling of one item to fully remove it

[flat mantle]

Since you will want to separate the scrap results (because changing recipes makes the recyclers wayyyy slow) and use tricks like hazard concrete and steel chest, i dont think theres a good shortcut to calculating this.

[woven cobalt]

I'm not seperating the results at all, I agree it results in a bit of machine downtime, but it's not to crazy and I'd rather make the setup larger by whatever % of downtime that is than complicate it to fix

That wasn't so bad actually, I think this is about right

Numbers here are for rare recyclers with 3 quality 4 modules in them, so I would need 104.5 such recyclers running continuously in order to process 240 scrap

and better yet it's easy for me to remove the stone and hol ore that I won't be processing from the equasion - so that's 103.3 after doing that

[somber storm]

only for self-recycling items

[woven cobalt]

hmm good point, I guess I could work out all their products and add those processing times, but at this point just experimenting might be simpler

[somber storm]

You could get yourself a calculator like Helmod or Factory Planner.
Otherwise I agree, trial and error is quicker. Also, it's almost no extra cost to build a few extra recyclers.

[woven cobalt]

I'm already using both - but I don't think there is a way to get them to answer these questions.

oh god experimenting shows that each recucler is only going through 0.7 scrap per second

[woven cobalt]

It's very much not no extra cost what this is gonna take XD

For the scale I wanted this will take 11 thousands recyclers, and 44k rare quality 3 modules

[somber storm]

Scrap recycling takes 0.2 seconds, Recycler has crafting speed 0.5.
Each normal quality recycler goes through 2.5 scrap per second.

[woven cobalt]

by "go through" in this context I mean what I've called "fully process" as in keep recycling till it's all ledgandary or gone

[somber storm]

That's poorly worded then, scrap is a specific item.

[woven cobalt]

I feel like the context of that being the whole question at hand makes it quite clear.

[somber storm]

Are you recycling only? Or do you craft stuff as well?

[woven cobalt]

I'm not sure what you mean - of course I'm also crafting stuff?

But this block that I'm trying to build is just recycling.

[somber storm]

11 k recyclers for a stacked green belt of scrap seems excessive

[woven cobalt]

I'm not trying to do 1 stacked belt, I'm trying to do 32 stacked belts

I ran the experiment with 80 recyclers and got this

[somber storm]

Must've missed the 32

[woven cobalt]

I didn't say the 32? I just said "For the scale I wanted"

[somber storm]

Why did you ask for a single green belt when you want the answer for 32? Getting the goalpost shifted isn't fun.

[woven cobalt]

Because I usually work in full belt units, then build a block to handle those, then scale up to whatever size I wanted.

I'm sorry you didn't find that fun, is the answer in any way changed by the fact that the question is about a block in a larger unit?

[somber storm]

Yes, because that raises doubts about everything else you said. I'll remove myself from this thread.
One last thing, why use rare modules when you have access to legendary? That would allow you to significantly cut down the machines.
Even legendary T2 would be better than anything non-legendary T3.

[woven cobalt]

Because this is to make the stuff for getting to legendary, right now I only have rare at any scale at all.

" that raises doubts about everything else you said" I have no idea what you mean by that.

[somber storm]

If you change something about the question halfway through the conversation once, you might do it again.
So basically, we can't be sure anymore that what you say is true.

[woven cobalt]

I feel like you are for some reason approaching this in a very adversarial way, I didn't say I only wanted to process 240 per second - I wanted to know how many I would need for 240 per second.

if someone asked how many assembers on red circuits for 1 on blue circuits and later revealed that they wanted to use more than 1 blue circuit assembler would you bizzarly question their trustworthyness?

[polar nexus]

I think the amount varies based on tech since there is scrap productivity research if I recall?

[young thunder]

only for the first step of scrap->items
items->items doesn't use that, which i think they're more focused on

[polar nexus]

I think to get the answer they want there would be 2 stages of the calculation.

1. Breaking everything down into separate components through recycling.
2. Voiding the basic products.

Step 1 pretty much is a start from the top and work your way down sort of problem as there are no loops in the calculation.
Step 2 is more complex because of the loops. Due to the loops it likely makes some sort of geometric series which may be able to get rid of the recursion in the calculation.

[pseudo spire]

You just work on expected. So 25% of input. Which means it converges to 0

[polar nexus]

Yes, but to calculate that without iteration means some sort of geometric series or similar.

[pseudo spire]

Compound interest

[woven cobalt]

Yeah that's why I started it as if you need X to recycle the scrap then what Y do you need to fully void
That way if you can calculate from X to Y you can do that by just checking X in a calculator and then find Y for any given quality of recycler, or prod bonus

[woven cobalt]

Once you have it down into self recycling items that series converges on 1.333... I believe
As in 1.333 times the time to process an item once will be enough to entierly void it