Overview[]
Transportation Machines in Assembly Line move items from one place to another. They can take input from any direction and push items to one or more destinations. With the exception of transporters, this all occurs within a 3x3 grid with the transportation machine at the center. Any item that exists any type of machine and does move into a tile occupied by a machine able to process it will despawn almost immediately and cannot be recovered.
Transportation machines can receive input from the same tile they output to. This functionality is commonly used in compact designs. For example, a selector can be set to the output of a crafter so that all materials of the finished product flow into the crafter while the finished product exits out the selector path.
Many of the transportation machines exist in both versions of the game, however some do have different behaviors or names.
Transportation Machines Common to Both Games with the Same Behavior[]
Rollers[]
Rollers are basic conveyor belts that behave very similarly to other factory management simulators. They move items from a given input to the tile adjacent to the roller's arrow direction. Rollers are commonly chained together with other transportation machines.
Selectors[]
Selectors come in 3 varieties; Left Selectors, Right Selectors, and Multi-Selectors. Each has an input marker (for reference only), a generic output (always forward), and 1 (or 2 in the case of Multi-Selectors) selected outputs. Left and right selectors output the player selected resource to the selected direction (perpendicular to the reference input, either left or right as dictated by the name). Multi-Selectors allow the player to pick different resources for right and left (note - the selector will not function as expected if both selected resources are the same. Any resources besides those selected move forward.
Transportation Machines with Different Behaviors in Each Game[]
Splitters[]
Splitters have a marking to indicate an input direction, though it's for reference only (as all transport machines can accept input from any direction). The splitter will output items to both tiles perpendicular to the reference input. In AL 1, the ratio of items moving to either direction. For example, if the player select 2,3 then 2 items will go to the tile left of the reference arrow followed by 3 to the right. The count will be kept regardless of how much time passes, even on very slow cycles.
Assembly Line 2 splitters do not support player selected output ratios. Items will alternate left to right 1 at a time.
Left and Right splitters behave exactly as the basic splitter although instead of splitting perpendicularly to the input, one output will be opposite the input while the other will go in the direction of it's name (ex. a left splitter splits items between the forward output and the left output relative to the reference input). Assembly Line 2 left and right splitters carry the same restriction as standard splitters in that the player may not define the ratio.
The Three-Way Splitter in AL1 is analogous to the Advanced Splitter in AL2. In both versions of the came, the player defines the ratio for left, center, and right.
For all splitters, on first use or after the game resets entity data, the outputs will trigger first from the left, then center, then right, then the pattern will repeat (skipping any directions not supported by the given splitter).
Transporters[]
While transporters exist in both games, their behavior is different. What they have in common is that they come in 2 parts that are required to be built to operate - an input and an output. The player selects a number, which is the transporter's id. This is used to match up inputs and outputs. The input may receive resources from any direction and (like any other transportation machine) take 1 second to relay them to the Transporter Output. The output will then move items into an adjacent square corresponding to its arrow, based on its rotation.
Transporters are described in greater detail on the Transporter page.
Transporters in Assembly Line 1[]
Transporters can operate on the same or different lines provided the input and output transporters have the same id. Transporters can move items within a single assembly line or across different ones.
Transporters are essential for larger builds such as AI Robots should the player wish to produce them at any reasonable speed. Since a single assembly line has a maximum of 56 starters which can produce 3 items per second, if a player was able to maximize the usage of space and not waste any inputs, the could at most create 1 AI Robot in a cycle of just under 51 seconds using a single assembly line. The transporter exists to solve for this sort of use case.
Note - Assembly Line 1 only actually processes the line the player currently has loaded. The behavior of other lines is simply based on what happened in a fixed time interval before the player moved off that line. For this reason, resources output by a transporter may not exactly align to what the source line produces. When looking at products with low cycle times (such as 1 per 10 seconds or less), this is noticeably less pronounced.
Transporters in Assembly Line 2[]
Transporters in AL2 come in to versions - Transporters and Advanced Transporters. Standard transporters are only able to operate within a given assembly line and can't transport to other lines. Advanced Transporters are not held to this restriction. Additionally, transporter ids are not required to be unique. Duplicate inputs fill all feed to the same output. While outputs can have duplicate ids, this will not result in either splitting or duping items. Only one output will receive the item.
As AL2 keeps more aspects of assembly lines processing even when the player doesn't currently have them loaded, the performance of Advanced Transporters operating across lines is substantially improved.
Transportation Devices Found in Only One Version[]
Timed Roller[]
The Timed roller is exclusive to AS1. It starts in the position defined by the player and repeatedly flips after a number of seconds defined by the player.
Robot Arm[]
Filtered Robot Arm[]
Timed Splitter[]
The Timed Splitter is a new feature introduced in AL2. Like the Advanced Splitter, it allows for output in 0 to 3 directions that the player can configure, however instead of switching to the next output based on quantity of items, it outputs based on time elapsed. The time frequency for each output can be set in half-second steps. Any output can be toggled off by setting the time increment to 0. When viewing the Timed Splitter's interface, a progress bar will empty out for the amount of time the currently active output is set to. When the bar is empty, it will switch to the next output.
Like all splitters, the Timed Splitter has an input indicator which is for reference only. It can more accurately be though of as the only direction which has an output locked at zero. As the player has the ability to rotate the Timed Splitter in any direction they like and toggle on and off any output, a great deal of customization is available. The only restriction that may not be obviously apparent is that the outputs can only cycle in a clockwise direction.
While there is most likely a maximum value of time that an output can be set to, it appears to accept very high numbers - significantly higher than it is practical to test and validate. If the text becomes too small to display in the interface, it switches to scientific notation. With very large values, some text will be cut off, though the value can be viewed by clicking the number which will open the numerical keypad on the user's device. For example, if you input 157,766,400 (the number of seconds in 5 years assuming only 1 was a leap year), the interface will display 577664E+. Clicking the number itself will open the numerical keypad and display 1.577664E+08. This is not an arbitrary error and does in fact return the original value when put into a converter.