Item-sorters

[t-heta]

has anyone ever been able to make a good autosorter design? this design can be chained super far and even move either way vertically, but its just so painfully slow and because chutes delete things that move between chunks (from what i can tell) it requires you to afk for hours just for it to move an actual fair amount of things and at that point it'd be faster to just manually sort things

it uses crates as a filter, with each item going down into a crate if it matches the items in the crate as crates only have 1 slot, so it makes them better at this than a chest with an item in each slot
i'd love to make a good item sorter! it'd be fantastic for survival playthroughs of any kind, i just cant find a way to make one thats actually fast enough to be worth it with ingame mechanics

[Demoncyborg]

i don't think it's deleting items between chunks, they're probably just getting stuck. horizontal transport stops at like, 3 blocks out? so you'd have to make it step down to preserve momentum.

[Vratislav]

I have built two these item sorters in my worlds. For the new gameplay, I was fiddling with this design in 1.22 creative, particularly to find designs covering more segments, e.g. having chutes going over doors or so. I was also testing the Archimedes screw with waterwheel - i hoped for reliable solution, but results were not convincing, as there is limit on straight horizontal movement of items, so designs with more segments laid horizontally are generally not working.

The best I got as practical, was to have design about this size as pictured (2x8 crates in my case), stacked on two layers, so covering about 30 distinct items in two layers. Then, items were not stuck or delayed. It is not much, but good enough to throw stuff from inventory after returning from trip, with good chance that less than half ends in the overfill in a minute or so. Also, good item management helps, as it is practical to put most frequent items in first crates. 

Stacking more layers shall increase the capacity, I can imagine like 2x8x8 =~ 120 distinct items sorter in two to three-storey hall or building. 

 

Edited July 13 by Vratislav

[t-heta]

fair enough, my main issue really was just the speed at which it moves
unfortunately chutes are pretty gimped in actually moving items? really most the time i just use them to put things automatically into containers and to take out
for anything that requires any form of actual distance its not reliable at all because of how they delete items between chunks, and their slow speed, combined with the distance limiter

[t-heta]

6 hours ago, Demoncyborg said:

i don't think it's deleting items between chunks, they're probably just getting stuck. horizontal transport stops at like, 3 blocks out? so you'd have to make it step down to preserve momentum.

yeah, no, the items in this example do make it to the end, i am fairly certain based on testing that if a chute in a loaded chunk tries to move something into an unloaded chunk the item it moved just vanishes into the ether

[Vratislav]

1 hour ago, t-heta said:

i am fairly certain based on testing that if a chute in a loaded chunk tries to move something into an unloaded chunk the item it moved just vanishes

1 hour ago, t-heta said:

. horizontal transport stops at like, 3 blocks out?

I can confirm from experience, that there are both these issues, although I cannot confirm the exact mechanics. Unolading chunks during sorting causes item loss. Horizontally item movement without change of direction stops after 3-4 blocks. These limits are hard for item sorter design and usage.

[Mongster]

I had no idea that items could continue to move after a change in direction, I thought it had to move down only. Though part of me wonders if you had the items move downward if it would speed up?