Agree it’s an issue, but in my builds most of the complexity in telling how things fit together is because of chains of several combinators.
It looks like the update is going to allow for much more complexity to be expressed in a smaller number of combinators, which should mitigate the issues somewhat.
As a software dev, the biggest thing for me in this update is that it makes combinators more like how I think of things in terms of programming paradigms. When I first came across combinators, I tried to treat them like logic gates. Eventually, I realised they’re a different thing entirely.
On the one hand, it looks like an interesting game mechanic and I can see it being fun to chase some legendary gear.
On the other, it all feels a bit Fortnite-esque, especially with the names they currently have.
The graphics look really awkward too. All those legendary inserters don't look at all good IMO.
The naming and graphics are presumably easier to change than the core mechanics, so hopefully things will evolve a little there before the final release.
That one’s actually really easy to prove numerically.
Not going to type out a full proof here, but here’s an example.
Let’s look at a two digit number for simplicity. You can write any two digit number as 10*a+b, where a and b are the first and second digits respectively.
E.g. 72 is 10 * 7 + 2.
And 10 is just 9+1, so in this case it becomes 72=(9 * 7)+7+2
We know 9 * 7 is divisible by 3 as it’s just 3 * 3 * 7.
Then if the number we add on (7 and 2) also sum to a multiple of 3, then we know the entire number is a multiple of 3.
You can then extend that to larger numbers as 100 is 99+1 and 99 is divisible by 3, and so on.
Agree it’s an issue, but in my builds most of the complexity in telling how things fit together is because of chains of several combinators.
It looks like the update is going to allow for much more complexity to be expressed in a smaller number of combinators, which should mitigate the issues somewhat.
As a software dev, the biggest thing for me in this update is that it makes combinators more like how I think of things in terms of programming paradigms. When I first came across combinators, I tried to treat them like logic gates. Eventually, I realised they’re a different thing entirely.