Based on Rseding's response, it sounds like they thought the "reported bug" was that the "hard item count limit" was changing. This is not the bug that we discovered and were trying to report. The bug is that the "hard item limit" is NOT greater than the "automated insertion limit" prior to researching any stack size upgrades for the inserter. This bug occurs even in vanilla factorio with zero mods, where inserters can get stuck with no player interaction. {and just for clarity, when I say "hard item limit", I mean the limit that is meant to be slightly larger than the automated-insertion-limit.}
If you load the saves in the linked thread you can see that the issue is that the insertion limit is a hard limit at 400 soil (rather than 404) when the inserter stack size is 1 and no upgrades have been done. It seems if you do inserter stack size upgrades, then it updates the hard limit to be [inserter hand size x 4 + 400], so that you could theoretically have 3 or 4 inserters swinging stuff towards an assembler in the same tick, when it was at 399 befeore, and they wouldn't get stuck. This is great. This is the desired behavior
The problem is that this is NOT the case at the beginning of the game with no stack size upgrades. It seems the hard limit is locked at a flat 400, and therefore inserters are getting stuck if they grab items at the same time (say from a warehouse) to insert into buildings that have an automated-limit that is larger than a stack of something (in this case, soil stack size is 200)
So I respectfully argue this is indeed a bug, as the behavior to prevent inserters from being stuck isn't applying at the beginning of the game when they are just stack size 1.
in the attached picture you can see an inserter hand being stuck. In vanilla factorio (not even modded).
- 03-30-2025, 08-35-57.png (964.85 KiB) Viewed 1837 times
- start a game, throw down a yellow assembler for nukes. Manually place 989 or some other odd number of copper in it close to 1000
- Place the chests as shown in pic, with inserters set up.
- Place copper in the bottom left chest, now the two inserters will be "in sync".
- Since they are in sync, when there is 999 copper, they both grab a copper and try to insert it
- Then you can see one gets stuck, since there is a *hard limit* of 1000, rather than 1004 (we would expect the 1004, to prevent inserter stuckage, and I say 1004 because it seems that the formula is [4 x hand size] once you start doing hand size upgrades)
- If the intent is that inserters DO get stuck (which I'm pretty sure is not the case since Rseding described the functionality to change the hard limit to *prevent* them getting stuck). Then there's a bug with all the behavior after the upgrades (which again I doubt as that sounds like the proper behavior)
