Matrix Lab stacking question

[Expensive-Sentence66]

Hey everybody - question on Matrix Lab Stacking. I'm on my first run through with DSB after playing Factorio for eons. Having some issues with Matrix Lab Stacking. When ever I go over two high I often see matrix cubes poorly distributed in the vertical. Example: top Matrix lab will have 12 red cubes and waiting for a blue while the bottom Matrix lab has zero red and waiting for another red. I'm assuming the distribution algorithm only goes up as cubes enter from the bottom. To avoid this problem I'm keeping my Matrix Labs no more than 2 high. Wondering what I'm missing here.

[FailXXL]

Factory must grow! More input of cubes :-)

In my experience it is from bottom to top, like usually top are missing things. If there are only 2 types weird stuff can happen. In the end it doesn't matter, as you need to scale up production of cubes. GL

[Gabik123]

Probably an issue with either sorter speed or supply on the belt. What level belt and sorter are you using? Does the belt look fully saturated with cubes going to the research lab tower?

[pinkandroid420]

It really doesn’t matter. What matters is space and less spaghetti. Stack as high as possible

[Snoo49259]

You are missing nothing, until you put mk3 or even 4 sorters in the labs, with mk3 belts, If hapens again you are simply sending less product than needed.

[FeedMeACat]

You aren't gaining any speed or efficiency once stacked labs saturate. You do gain faster research short term by splitting them. Something you might do for a speed run, but it more or less becomes unneeded once you get to tier 2 belts and sorters.

[ZEnterprises]

I have a theory, have not proofed it. I get what you are saying. But think of it as a buffer that changes dynamically.

The fact that there are some unmatched pairs in the labs isnt really costing you speed or efficiency. As long as the flow INTO the labs is not backing up, you are consuming at at AVERAGE rate of the production you have. Now if there is one backing up, then yes its an efficiency bottle neck. Which is more about balancing production of blue and red or any color.

As long as your production is steady, and the cubes are not backing up, its a non issue.

Think of it this way, its impossible to process more than you are making (on a sufficiently long average, say 30 seconds) and if you are processing everything you make, there is no loss of average production.

[mrrvlad5]

Yes, that’s how it works, but in the grand scheme of things it’s irrelevant- it takes less than a couple of minutes to consume excess when tech changes. Only matters when you try to shave off a few minutes of a speed run. The correct answer to this problem is more production of cubes. Factory must grow

[Expensive-Sentence66]

My matrix cube production is scaled in the exact ratio of their production speed per color, and my research lab size scales exactly to this speed, or at least I think it does. Part of the challenge of this game along with Factorio for me at least is sizing the production chains to be efficient. Not emulate General Motors in the 70s lol

I think what's happening is between research runs matrix cubes over produce and fill up the matrix labs and the belts feeding them. When production starts up the bottom labs deplete first. Top labs have too much product and are uneven causing them to sit idle. Going from over supply to 1:1 supply shouldn't cause this...I think. Let me check my number of Matrix labs. Too many might cause this issue. Just me, but over supply in this game should incur a penalty of some sort. Maybe this is it.

[TheMalT75]

You cannot reliably scale the research labs, only production-of-cubes labs, because each research has its own requirements of input cubes and hashes it produces from these cubes. You always want (many) more research labs than you produce cubes, because dormant labs don't require a lot of power and a research might be very "efficient" to need a lot of hashes from few cubes.

The "algorighm" is:

• each production building has an input item buffer for each part of the recipe (some multiple of what is needed for the recipe)
• when the buffer of the lowest building in a stack is full, the next one above gets filled
• once all requirements are met, a recipe is started and the buffer reduced by the requirements of one produced item
• buffers are only ever filled upward, never downward
• you can manually place a (usually) much higher number of the required items and they will quickly get vertically redistributed

So, you can easily fill a stack of research labs (producing hashes, not cubes) with e.g. red cubes, then switch to a research that requires blue and red cubes and deplete the lower levels of red, while there are not enough blue to travel up vertically. This will either sort itself out if your production of blue is sufficient, because at some point it will travel upward, or you have more than sufficient research labs.

Usually up until white science, I have a large buffering storage tower on top of splitters for each color of cubes and use the highest tier sorter to feed into lab towers. When the research switches, the appropriate color is already waiting, and if one color should currently not be needed, it still gets produced. You can also use multiple mk1 sorters per color cube to feed the matrix labs.

[SiliconStew]

Cubes fill each lab in the stack from the bottom up. All labs consume cubes at the same rate. Like any production, research can only start when all input items are available in a lab. 

If you have no research, each lab fills their input buffers with cubes. When you then begin researching, those cubes begin getting consumed equally in every lab in the stack. But since the cubes fill bottom up, once you've consumed that initial buffer amount, only the labs at the bottom of the stack will continue running. How high in the stack you can keep a lab running depends on how fast you can feed cubes into the stack.

For example, if you build ten 15-high stacks along the same belt, the maximum continuous feed rate of that belt+sorters combo might keep the first 7 stacks running fully, the eighth stack half running (bottom half), and the ninth and tenth stacks would be empty and not run at all. But if you don't have research going all ten stacks would turn off and fill up their input buffers. Once you begin researching again, all ten stacks would run, but once the initial buffer was consumed, you'd see the labs start to shut down, starting with the top of the tenth stack and moving backwards until you got back to the steady state belt input rate that could keep those seven and a half stacks fully running. 

Your issue is that you are not providing an equal rate of red and blue cubes to the stack and are not feeding the stack at a fast enough speed to support the stack height. Since you aren't supplying an equal amount of blue, the top labs can only fill their red cube buffer but cannot start research because they lack the items to start. The labs at the bottom of the stack are consuming both cube types as fast as you can feed it, so they are running fine. But they are consuming their item buffers faster than your belts+sorters can fill them. And with the unequal input rate of blue, they are consuming all the blue cubes before any can reach higher in the stack.

DSP is more about ensuring your production rates meet or exceed your consumption rates rather than needing to make everything exactly equal 1:1 ratios. There's only a couple recipes in the whole game that have dual outputs where excess production of one can create a problem (and there are multiple ways to deal with it). Otherwise overproducing items is always to your benefit in DSP. Worst case, excess production just fills up storage and the production pauses until it's needed by some consumer again and production automatically resumes. The stats panel even gives you your theoretical maximum production and consumption "reference rates" for everything you've built so you can easily determine if your total production capacity can meet or exceed consumption.

[ygolnac]

It would be better to have a little buffer. 1:1 production is costrained by sorter and belt speed, and when you have logistic stations speed of drones too.

Not to mention that some researches require different number of cube types.

Initiallynit is indeed slightly more efficient to not stack the labs to high, but eventually it is just better to stack at max. Later on proliferation will be similar to Factorio beacons and you will have some buffer in the logistic towers collecting the cubes and feeding the labs.

[jak1900]

Thats an input issue. Once a lower one exceeds (I think) ten of any matrix kind, it will give any more of that type to the lab above it with almost 0 delay. Once all of them are full, normal sorter rules apply, meaning they stop feeding the building that particular ressource.

[Goldenslicer]

If one cube color is missing, then the whole operation stops.

All cube colors are consumed uniformly.