Factorio Friday Facts – Assembler flipping and circuit control

Some constant combinators can hold a list of recipes, and then a circuit that goes through the list one at a time takes like 5 combinators. With a human adjusting things once in a while, that's about all you need. Even upgrading the circuits to make specific quantities wouldn't require much.

The unholy amalgamations would show up when you're trying to make specific items on demand from scratch, or other super-optimized tasks. But beating the game doesn't need that, it needs bulk amounts of everything. And there's no optimizing away how long you'll have to wait. The best you can do is get speed modules early.

And while there's room for lots of careful inventory management and edge-case handling and failure recovery, building an alarm that goes off when nothing has been crafted in 30 seconds takes one combinator and a speaker.

And so many of the things you can just “ignore” until you ask “could this work” and it just does.