Hello there,

Im new to this automation genre, and i wanted to share my design of an universal factory.

It comes with a couple of Pros and Cons (more info further down.

I DO NOT RECOMMEND BUILDING THIS YOURSELF FOR 2 REASONS:
1. It takes away from the fun of the game that comes from designing your own machines
2. This factory has some quirks that require you to know where to look to work around them, you will probably be better off with a less cluttered design.

Here are two other designs:

• Compact Universal Factory by Lysquid
  
• Compact, Lag-Friendly, Easy-Reset, Everything Machine by Boomdingo

Here is a quick overview of the entire factory. The parts are labelled and are described in more detail further down.


Sorry about this garbage screenshot, i had to compress it to get below the filesize limit :/

There are four basic shapes in the game. The factory takes in 4 streams of each shape for a total of 16 streams.

The shape selection is divided into 4 sections (1 section for each layer) and each section is itself divided into 4 selections (1 selection for each corner).

Any single layer shape can be configured this way by adding a conveyor belt at the appropriate place (see the marked spots on the screenshot below).
As an example ive marked the configuration to get the "blueprint shape" in red.



I chose to take 4 streams because i wanted the factory to be able to produce at least one continuous stream of shapes. So if there was a shape, that was the same base shape in every corner of every layer, 4 streams would be just enough to supply this. This choice made it necessary to use splitters which made the whole design a bit over-engineered in my opinion, but it works for now.
Sadly i didn't reach this goal, the factory only produces 1.5k / min instead of the maximum 1.8k that would be possible. I don't know why and i dont know how to fix it.

The colour selection is pretty much the same as the shape selection, but with 7 different choices instead of 4.

The painters are not very interesting. In the screenshot below you can see the module of one layer. This module is copied over 4 times.

To get grey shapes you can switch the conveyor belt in the marked areas from the top tile to the bottom one. This will feed the shapes directly into the output stream, completly skipping the painting.


I coloured the shapes before cutting and layering because otherwise adding grey shapes into the mix would have been very difficult.
Also i didn't use double painters because the input for colours in double painters is on top which is very inconvenient since the colours get fed from the bottom of the machine.

Here the coloured shapes get cut, the quarters get rotated into the same orientation and then they get restacked with the rest of the shapes of the layer.


If the conveyor belt in the marked area is switched the shape will feed directly into the output. This is useful if there is ever need for a single layer shape.

Here all the layers will get stacked.


The conveyor belts in the marked areas can be switched to produce two streams of 2-layer shapes (by using layer 3 and 4 to make a second stream)

This has been a fun project, and im quite happy with the result. Here are some pros and cons:

• Produces at least 1 stream of any shape (up to 4 layers) at almost full speed (1.5k / min)
  
• Can be reconfigured to produce 4 streams of single layer shapes or 2 streams of 2-layer shapes
  
• Very easy to operate

• Cannot produce shapes like level 18, where complex shearing is required
  
• Since i've used 8 modules for each step (which is more than needed i think), there are always lots of shapes stuck from the previous shape. Therefor reseting takes a lot of time because the old shapes have to be flushed out first.
  
• Layers with missing quarters require manual reconfiguration (because i didn't think of it while designing)
  
• Very lag-unfriendly (could probably be fixed by replacing belts with tunnels)
  
• Doesn't produce the maximum amount of shapes possible (1.5k / min instead of 1.8k / min)

Maybe i will update this after the wires update to make it more versatile and fully automatic, but for now it's good enough.