Factorio Forums

The UI of the chests very clearly states " Limit the inventory part manipulation by machines." Inserters are machines. However they only stop manipulating for inserting items into the section, they still remove items from this section.

The game is clearly telling me I can have a section of the chest where I can put things to be off-limits to being taken, or accidentally having something added.

however I can only stop having things added.

I would almost call this a "feature" if the behavior were reversed, in which case I could have some amount of my production protected from being taken, but then the restriction would have to start from the first square so that inserters only grabbed up to that square, but inserted starting in the keeper areas making a little savings safe from being taken.

Area is set not to be manipulated

Inserter (of any type) still removing Items from this area

Reduced Item count from inserter pulling Items + text from UI saying no machines will manipulate the area.

This is actually by design and intended behaviour. The caption used to be accurate, but is outdated, due to a change (inserters help themselves in "red" zone in priority).
The bug is into the caption now.

why would I want the inverters to take from the whole thing, but only stack in until you hit red, how is that useful?

Nothing can put into red, but anything can take from red or non-red.

the inserters always pull from last, it doesn't matter whether the area is red it will always "take from priority" from the end.

I can't see how this adds any benefit it means i have to manually manage my chests more.

I absolutely LOVE the "fixed" method that they work now where inserters take from the red area. I can now reduce the space in the chest and then know that the system will clear out the now blocked area but not refill it.

The way it works now is great and IMO isn't a bug. Maybe update the tooltip or something, but for the love of all that is holy, leave it the way it works now.

The red area is meant to prevent an inserter, robot, ... adding more of whatever's being added to the chest. Whatever you do manually, however, is not limited by this : if you choose to add/let something in the blocked part of a chest, and do it manually, it's OK. The items will be used if needed first, so that with time, the chest will tend to have empty red zone, and full "non red" zone.

qsquared wrote:why would I want the inverters to take from the whole thing, but only stack in until you hit red, how is that useful?

Nothing can put into red, but anything can take from red or non-red.

the inserters always pull from last, it doesn't matter whether the area is red it will always "take from priority" from the end.

I can't see how this adds any benefit it means i have to manually manage my chests more.

You want to limit them from filling the chest... to prevent filling up the chest. For example it would not make sense to fill an entire chest with processing units

Inserters taking from the red part first means that if you lower the limit even further, any excess will be removed before producing more.


Makes perfect sense to me. If you need a seperate area that's not used by machines just make another chest.

Zeblote wrote:

qsquared wrote:why would I want the inverters to take from the whole thing, but only stack in until you hit red, how is that useful?

Nothing can put into red, but anything can take from red or non-red.

the inserters always pull from last, it doesn't matter whether the area is red it will always "take from priority" from the end.

I can't see how this adds any benefit it means i have to manually manage my chests more.

You want to limit them from filling the chest... to prevent filling up the chest. For example it would not make sense to fill an entire chest with processing units

Inserters taking from the red part first means that if you lower the limit even further, any excess will be removed before producing more.


Makes perfect sense to me. If you need a separate area that's not used by machines just make another chest.

What I really would like is for inserters to insert into white and red areas and take from white areas (because that logic works better for me as a useful thing) or for nothing to manipulate red area.

But, whoa is me, I only use chests for collecting detritus and releasing it later when I have need without using it all up on objects I don't necessarily need.

In other words Its reserve pools of item X to make sure I don't run into a situation where I desperately need item X so when I also want to release Item X I would like to limit Item X from being completely released, without having to manually shuffle things into other chests,which seems quite a pain in the butt.

However, I am still playing through the scenarios, and perhaps in free-play there are just so much resources this is a game-play style which makes no sense.

Then again, in any good logistics game there are more than two ways of folding a box.

Either way, useful or not, I wouldn't have been caught off guard and disappointed if the text and behavior were congruent. I can't be concerned about a strategy-affecting bug if the game isn't telling me it's designed to allow that strategy, or low, the game does allow me to implement that strategy..

Yes, it is not a bug, just the caption needs to be updated.

+1 on liking the way it currently operates. You can drop extra into the red and it will get used, which is great!

Fixed the caption for 0.12.30