The clock in the first screenshot runs only when the lever is turned on and all four redstone torches are *off*. I used five ticks of delay both ways on the clock because that’s the delay needed to let 5 new iron ingots feed into the crafter before the next pulse comes in; if you have an ingredient that is used more than 5 times in the recipe you’ll need more delay, and if every ingredient appears less than five times you don’t need as much delay and can get away with using fewer repeaters in the clock.
The redstone torches are being powered by comparators reading the four input hoppers, ensuring that no crafting occurs until the ingredients get backed up due to every slot in the crafter being filled by a full stack. No slot ever gets emptied, so the recipe stays in the crafter forever (or until you go in and take it out).
The different input hopper pipes have different lengths between the hopper being read and the hopper directly feeding the crafter. This means that the amount of ingredients they need to be backed up by to start crafting varies. In the long run this doesn’t matter: once the hoppers become backed up, the machine crafts as fast as your farms feed it.
The little comparator setup in screenshot 4 is to turn off the clock once the output chest is full (it’s actually what’s deactivating the clock at the moment). This is necessary because, unlike droppers, a crafter facing a full container will still spit out its output, it will simply drop it as an entity which will eventually despawn, wasting resources. If you place a hopper *under* the output chest leading into a storage silo or into another crafting setup, this comparator will only turn off the clock once the crafted items get back up *all the way* to the output chest.
This setup does not work for recipes involving unstackable items, but it does work for *any* recipe made up of four or fewer stackable items (which is the vast majority of recipes).
This is probably not *the best* setup, but when I started testing out the crafter earlier I found out that it wasn’t working how I thought it was going to and needed to scrap my previous plans. I’m glad I found a relatively easy solution to my own worries.
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The clock in the first screenshot runs only when the lever is turned on and all four redstone torches are *off*. I used five ticks of delay both ways on the clock because that’s the delay needed to let 5 new iron ingots feed into the crafter before the next pulse comes in; if you have an ingredient that is used more than 5 times in the recipe you’ll need more delay, and if every ingredient appears less than five times you don’t need as much delay and can get away with using fewer repeaters in the clock.
The redstone torches are being powered by comparators reading the four input hoppers, ensuring that no crafting occurs until the ingredients get backed up due to every slot in the crafter being filled by a full stack. No slot ever gets emptied, so the recipe stays in the crafter forever (or until you go in and take it out).
The different input hopper pipes have different lengths between the hopper being read and the hopper directly feeding the crafter. This means that the amount of ingredients they need to be backed up by to start crafting varies. In the long run this doesn’t matter: once the hoppers become backed up, the machine crafts as fast as your farms feed it.
The little comparator setup in screenshot 4 is to turn off the clock once the output chest is full (it’s actually what’s deactivating the clock at the moment). This is necessary because, unlike droppers, a crafter facing a full container will still spit out its output, it will simply drop it as an entity which will eventually despawn, wasting resources. If you place a hopper *under* the output chest leading into a storage silo or into another crafting setup, this comparator will only turn off the clock once the crafted items get back up *all the way* to the output chest.
This setup does not work for recipes involving unstackable items, but it does work for *any* recipe made up of four or fewer stackable items (which is the vast majority of recipes).
This is probably not *the best* setup, but when I started testing out the crafter earlier I found out that it wasn’t working how I thought it was going to and needed to scrap my previous plans. I’m glad I found a relatively easy solution to my own worries.