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Voice. Turn off the sound if it's too awful.

The new items that came out on the 1st of February. The item that I'm most interested in is the Piler Sorter, since it can output items in stacks (once the tech is upgraded enough). The jammer and plasma turret, others can cover - I'm most interested in the new sorter because it will require changes to all of my builds.

So, the older games still have the upgrades to Mk III sorters. We need to start a new sandbox game (hit escape to skip the intro and appear on the planet), check out the tech's, grab all the techs, pave everything (I'm really out of practice). The findings:

The very good: Speed. This thing is fast, fast, fast.

The good: Stacking. After upgrades, it can stack 2/3/4 high. If there's already something on the belt it will add to the top of the stack - if it can. It can be fed back upon itself to make a feedback loop of stacking 1-high items to the max stack height - then it will let the full stack go through. Merge parallel belts and everything is beautifully compact.

This all includes adding to stacks on adjacent belts. This means massive changes to things like fractionator builds - infinite closed loops can be constantly filled from a belt passing by. No explicit stacking required, it's automatically done by the piling sorter. Very efficient.

The bad: Expensive. Two Mk III sorters + 1 SMR + 1 processor = 1 piling sorter. Thankfully it's a simple chaining of items (and assemblers) together, yet still that's gonna hurt midgame.

The ugly: Automatic Pilers. Big. Items to stack must be adjacent on the belt. These have become essentially pointless - just research the stacking upgrades ASAP. Unlocking the 3-high stacking is yellow science, green for the final upgrade to 4-high stacking.

At the really basic rate of 2/2/2 of blue/red/yellow science per second, it will take less than 1 hour for the cubes to unlock the first 3-high stacks. Less than 20 minutes to unlock the final 4-high stacking once we unlock 2 green science a second. Don't even bother adding the Automatic Pilers to the mall.

(Unless and until the devs implement a buffer system of some kind, so that it takes in everything and finally outputs 2/3/4-high stacks. I don't see the point of upping the number of items in a stack to 5+, though it would allow for longer assembly/smelter chains.)

Going forward: Many changes are required to everyone's blueprints. I have already been thinking about the ones we use, to deal with the Dark Fog buildings, since a 3x building output was looking to either:

1/ Have *much* shorter building-chains
2/ Include automatic pilers to fit more on the belts

Given the piler sorters, belts can automatically be stacked up to maximum height directly from the smelter/assembler. That makes things much easier.

I will need to revisit the old Stupid Amounts of Essentials (?) build that we did way back when, to reflect the new items. Then re-build the new interstellar mall, removing the items which require 2+ assemblers to get the higher-end buildings. It'll look neater. The new Essentials mall will take quite some thought to keep it from being spaghetti mayhem.

This is going to be a lot of work for everyone. Stay tuned, there'll be plenty of content from the professional content-creators (Nilaus, TDA, JD Plays, KoS, etc - far more than small-time players like myself).