Short circuits, depth and delay

One red message, Short Circuit or Max Depth, covers two different problems.

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One red message, Short Circuit or Max Depth, covers two different problems.

PROBLEM RULE

Short circuit Power wired in a loop. A loop of 8 or fewer parts is blocked. A loop of 9 or more is allowed but useless, and a battery in the loop counts the looped power as active usage, which costs 20 percent for nothing

Max depth No more than 16 parts, counting the source, on any path from a power source to a root combiner. The longest path is the one that counts

To find a depth problem, trace each input of the failing combiner back to its source and count every part it passes through.

Pair sources into a pyramid, put combiners close to the sources and use the full wire length instead of extension parts.

One wiki entry says admins can change this with ioentity.backtracking (default 8), while the handbook calls 16 a hard limit. Expect 16 on a normal server.

The game runs electricity, water and industrial on separate single-file queues, so long chains of busy parts add delay. Counting steps: a passthrough part such as a light takes 3, a splitter 5, a branch 4, a memory cell 4 and OR, AND, XOR or a combiner 2 to 3.

ORDER OF ACTION RULE

Branch Power out first, then branch out