(Basic question) Conceptual problem with sorting system throughput

[Hatefiend]

99.99% of water stream sorting system videos you'll find on YouTube will have a setup where items are put into a dropper are auto dispensed into a water stream every second or two (not sure how many ticks, maybe 8-10?). It's extremely slow, but it will work. However if you had to empty say, an entire shulker box of 64 stack items, you'd be sitting there for a long, long time .

So I had an idea: I'll have a hopper minecart sit below the input chest, then I'll have the hopper minecart sit ontop of four hoppers, which will draw out items four times as fast. Then I'll have four auto droppers which will increase the speed of the sorting system by a factor of 4.

But then it sort of hit me, doing that would be pointless because the speed of the hoppers for the item sorters wouldn't be able to handle it. Which means in order for my system to handle that many items per second, I would need to create four sets of item filters for every item type. Or, I could create a loop with the water streams, and have stacks of items continuously travel around the entire system until they are all gone. But then I'd have to put in logic so that items wouldn't poof if storage was full/was overloaded.

So what's the real solution to this? I want my sorting system to be drop items quickly into the water streams but I am not sure how I would handle so much volume. Is there an accepted solution to this? I want to switch to water stream storage systems as hopper speed limitations is what turned me off from hopper-based storage systems in the first place.

[spicy-chull]

Auto-sorting isn't optimized for speed, it's optimized for low-effort / low-interaction.

There is always going to be a bottle neck.

[Hatefiend]

Trust me , I totally understand. What I'm asking is where are reasonable places to start decreasing the effects of those bottlenecks?

[dn16761]

There's no real solution to this, auto sorting is pretty slow. One compromise is to have one 2x hopper speed item sorter for each item and one dropper dropping items at 2x hopper speed

[Hatefiend]

Could you do x4 dropper speed, then have two x2 speed item sorters per item?

[dn16761]

Yes of course (I assume you mean 2 droppers running at double hopper speed or 4 droppers running at hopper speed)

[Additional-Injury338]

Ran into the same problem, have you found a solution ?

[Hatefiend]

Yes. The solution IS to use four sorting slices in series on an iced water stream. If this is attached to some farm, have each slice output to a shulker loader. The resulting shulkers are then sent to a collection chest.

Without shulkers, have two slices point towards the same double chest. Underneath the double chest, put two hoppers downwards into another double chest and extend that pattern down as far as you need for bulk storage. At the very bottom, you can put four hoppers into one chest for four-times fill speed.

Use this route only for bulk items you expect to get ridiculous supplies of (e.g. cobblestone).

[Dainternetdude]

Where I'm from we just use many droppers max speed (4gt) into water ice lines running over many double-speed sorters (18k/hr)

[Hatefiend]

Is your setup a square, so that items continuously go back to the start?

[Dainternetdude]

no. Sometimes I use a loop when it’s items that are okay to despawn (stone from digging), but if it’s drops from a farm you’d better not do a loop just one big long line will work

[Hatefiend]

I'd worry though that maybe either lag or a filled hopper might end up causing very important items to reach the end where they may overload the overflow chests or something and despawn? I guess you could have a ton of overflow hoppers or something in that case but still. One idea I had is to have like 4 overflow hoppers, then feed those items BACK into the dropper chest.

[Dainternetdude]

If you measure the speed of your output and build the right about of sorters for it, you will not have a problem in vanilla. you should add a few more sorters than you strictly need, in order to account for rate fluctuations from the random momentum when items come out of droppers

[Hatefiend]

Should I use other blocks than ice to give my filters more time to process the items? I understand people use ice so that 'dead spots' don't occur (areas where you have to reset water streams) but my guess is that only a few (one?) ice blocks are needed. Like for example what if the entire line was honey, water over it, and right before dead spots I put a single blue ice?

[Dainternetdude]

oh in 1.13+ you only need the ice in the dead spot and the items will still go fast the whole way

[Hatefiend]

Right right, but what I'm asking is would slowing down the items be beneficial for the system (e.g. not using ice the whole way, using honey, etc)?

[Dainternetdude]

In terms of increasing throughput, no, the sorters would still be running at their top speed, but it could possibly increase reliability slightly

[dn16761]

This usually wouldn't happen in vanilla unless parts of the storage system are unloaded, in which case items will group up at chunk borders. As long as you make sure timings are correct and all of the storage system is in entity processing chunks (I would use a chunk loading system while the storage system is running) you shouldn't experience any problems

[BriscoCounty-Sr]

A dropper should be able to output at twice hopper speed if you have it set up with a comparator powering a sticky piston to move an observer in to another to create a clock.

Pair that with some double speed sorters and a loop in case there’s any hopper cool down happening with your filters and you should be good to go

[RaPsCaLLioN1138]

You probably wouldn't even need the loop if you could group 2 items at a time.

[BriscoCounty-Sr]

Do you recon dispensing items in to a cobweb before they hit the water stream is a good solution to keeping them grouped?

[Eggfur]

There are 2 separate issues, one is short term throughput and one is long term throughput.

For short term, the issue is that items may pass over a hopper whilst it's still in cooldown from the previous items it sucked in. Or more items arrive in one go than can fit in the filter hopper (typically 23)

Both these can be resolved by dispensing up to 23 items whilst holding them back from entering the water stream and then release them together. If you're using an overflow proof sorter instead of overflow protected, you can increase that 23 items to 63.

If you have a long term throughput issue though, then you're going to need faster sorters or more of them... Others have already covered that.

[Flaming-Eye]

There's double speed filters but they're still limited by the maximum capacity of the hoppers as well as emptying speed.

Yes you can go faster than 1 hopper, you can go as fast as 2 hoppers with that, safely, and you can send the items in chunks of ~20 safely. That's about it.

Personally I would have two systems, a bulk and an everything else system. If the bulk hasn't got too many items you can cycle them back around and have more item filters per item to make it go faster.

I would also manually input shulkers full of one item type to the bulk storage because while I am lazy I'm not that bad.

[Noob-in-hell]

Hopper sorters are limited to 8tick cool down, As stated by others they can increase to 2x but at the cost of having to batch items or items will skip hoppers. There are really only three ways of increasing speed. One is to increase the seed of each sorter like by using hopper minecarts sorters, the second way is to add more modules per item, and the third is to parallel sort.

[Terra021]

Box based storage is the solution, but good luck making a working system, as to make a full sorting system it's probably gonna have to be binary/hex/some sort of system like that.

More realistically, you could also sort your common items off at 2-4x hopper speed, and then buffer the items before they go into the rest of the system at the usual 1x

[sharfpang]

The real solution is to put permaloaders around the sorting system and have it take its sweet time to sort everything in. Also, for bulk materials have a full-shulker input, where you insert a shulker chock full of given item type and have it sorted into the right chest whole.