Talk:Retrievulator/@comment-5622520-20121015101315

Important to note that these devices alleviate but do not *eliminate* a significant problem with RP2 manufacturing systems.

Without the Retrievulator, items pulled from chests by a retriever will enter the first valid retriever they come across, even if it wasn't the one that requested the item. In other words, if you have two retreivers sharing a common input chest and are configured to pull the same item, the item will always go to the *closest* retriever, not the retriever that requested the item.

The retrievulator helps by removing the items from the retriever when not in use, and jamming it with the "STOP" item. This makes the retriever an invalid destination and no items will go into it. However, the problem returns if both retrievulators are requesting the same item, for the exact same reason. This makes large manufacturing machines a pain since, for example, trying to make machine blocks AND mixed metal ingots (both use refined iron) will result in whichever machine is closest to the source being flooded with refined iron while the other gets nothing.

Suppoedly this is a feature (items go to the nearest valid target) but as features go this is pretty broken. The game should internally note which machine pulled the item and route only to that machine, and only use the default closest-valid rule when there is no specific request.