Back from out-of-town today, and back to working on the FICSMAS factory.

I need a total of 61 FICSMAS Gift Trees, and I wanted them to be part of the cosmetics of the place, so I got all of those laid out.

I also built out the general facade of the factory. I do have a few more ideas for detailing on the outside that I'll get to eventually.

Next session will be starting on wiring these together, and figuring out how to split them up across all the machines.

Also went back to check on Frameworks to discover that there's ANOTHER issue with the Iron Ore balancing. I believe I now understand why people are asking for Smart Mergers (I.E. with the ability to give some inputs priority, similar to what you can do with Smart Splitters), because I'm pretty sure that is the source of the issue this time. Previously, I would have said that Priority Mergers aren't necessary, when you can just go upstream and place a Priority Splitter, but I don't think that's feasible here.

Instead, I opted for a cheesy solution: using crates as mergers. These crates SHOULD fully allow backpressure to propagate across the two input belts, instead of pushing little bits of it back onto the input belts, and making them back up, since there are now 0 mergers ANYWHERE on the Iron Ore lines.