I fixed this for him.
The issue was the script was an over achiever and naive.
It was trying to identify the plain color iron ingots. It would do this once at the beginning and even if you had more than 1 pile of regular iron ingots in your resource container, it would save that ID it picked (the last one in the finditem circuit).
It pulled 500 ingots... made some bola balls and bolas, then drop the resources back into the resource container. Now it would seek out the original stack of ingots and only pull from that pile. When we drop stuff into a container, it likely goes to the first one it finds that can hold the stack. If you have a single pile of ingots, it would never be noticed.
The setup here was several piles of ingots in the resource container. So it was prematurely running through the ingots and never going back to check that more were actually in the container. It was a lot of assumptions about how to interact with pulling resources from a container and probably not understanding the impact on a larger scale operation.
It did not do this with the other resources it needed (leather, for instance).
It still has some anomalies where it pulls up to 40 bola balls from the container, then makes some more before combining. Eventually your backpack has lots of bola balls in it built up that it never combines. Also it pulls a tinker tool from the resource box, then crafts a new tinker tool whenever it gets down to 1 tinker tool left. After a few thousand, the half dozen tinker tools I started with were gone and it depleted the ones it had and stopped.
Needless to say this is not for making 60k bolas. It works really well for a reasonable quantity (It made 321 for me as downloaded), but has limitations when it comes to mass production.
Later tonight I can post my changes in a code snippet for future reference.
Gaderian
