Factorio Forums

It turns out that burner inserters, in their well founded desire to ensure they have enough fuel, will apparently grab any fuel present, even if the machine they're feeding doesn't request fuel. This is good and admirable.

What's not so good, is that burner inserters seem to always try to pick up fuel as their first item, even if you dumped a whole stack of coal into them at the start (or if another burner inserter fueled them). This results in them trying to make gears (and other items) out of coal, as shown in the attached screenshots.

Also, thank you so much for making burner inserters keep themselves fueled even if the attached machine doesn't request fuel. This will make them vastly more practical to use.

Although this may "look & feel" like incorrect behaviour, you'll find that *all* the inserters follow this pattern. I don't believe it's a bug at all. The inserter you're using is a "dumb" inserter ; Inserters, with the exception of the Smart Inserter, do not grab items that satisfy the building's construction requirements, it grabs ANY item that passes by.

What you want to do is research and use a "Smart Inserter" which can be told specifically to grab Iron Plates only (so that it will not grab coal).

Zebulan wrote:Although this may "look & feel" like incorrect behaviour, you'll find that *all* the inserters follow this pattern. I don't believe it's a bug at all. The inserter you're using is a "dumb" inserter ; Inserters, with the exception of the Smart Inserter, do not grab items that satisfy the building's construction requirements, it grabs ANY item that passes by.

Actually, you're wrong about that. Inserters (fast ones at least, but pretty sure I've used this with regular yellow ones as well) will definitely sense what their building requires and only pick up items that satisfy that requirement. It would appear that burner inserters get confused between what they need themselves and what their building needs.

Boogieman14 wrote:

Zebulan wrote:Although this may "look & feel" like incorrect behaviour, you'll find that *all* the inserters follow this pattern. I don't believe it's a bug at all. The inserter you're using is a "dumb" inserter ; Inserters, with the exception of the Smart Inserter, do not grab items that satisfy the building's construction requirements, it grabs ANY item that passes by.

Actually, you're wrong about that. Inserters (fast ones at least, but pretty sure I've used this with regular yellow ones as well) will definitely sense what their building requires and only pick up items that satisfy that requirement. It would appear that burner inserters get confused between what they need themselves and what their building needs.

You are absolutely correct! Alice & Boogie, accept my apologies. I was certain that inserters just grabbed things willy nilly but I am clearly mistaken, I've just attempted this in-game to prove this is the case. I'm not sure how I came to the conclusion that they'll grab anything; likely I didn't have a factory in place and I generalized that behaviour as an "all the time" behaviour.

Good to know I don't need to rely only on smart inserters though...

Try this: Put burner inserter that puts iron into assembler first, then insert one piece of coal into him and let him refuel themself...

DevilXD wrote:Try this: Put burner inserter that puts iron into assembler first, then insert one piece of coś into hmm and let him refuel themself...

Yeah, I already knew how to work around the issue. I just figured I'd post it so that the devs would know about it.

Thanks for the report. This will be fixed in the 0.11.2.