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The inserters sometimes stops even if there is room on the belt to drop the item. If I change the setting on the inserter it starts again. It happens repeatedly in several similar places in the factory.
I am playing A Seablock with all the recommended mods and settings and nothing else. I think it can be something with bobs adjustable inserters combined with the knew belt optimizations.
It's a still image but the inserter is equally still when the game is running.
I don't know if this is the proper place or if I should post it in bobingabouts/Trainwreck's/Archangel's sub-forum?

Just to add, I've had this quite a bit, but only had one inserter persistently do it:


This was (mostly) 16.25; I changed the configuration before updating. Seablock config.

It happens when the belt is full so the inserters can't put down more stuff and then when the belt starts to move again the inserters don't automatically start again.
I think it could be that the inserter get to sleep to save CPU and the wake up call from the belt don't work if the bob's adjustable inserter has an odd angle?

How do the belts know what entities to wake up? Is it discovered by examining the map when it wakes, or are they stored in a list?

Enable “show-wakeup-lists” in the debug settings (F4) to see what entities inserters are waiting on.

I guess that would make sense, now the question is if the bugged inserters are indeed waiting on the belts, or if they failed to tell the belt they're waiting on it.

I ran into a similar situation recently, except it was a stack inserter that was seemingly unable to deposit items it had in hand into an empty and waiting chest.



Everything indicated that it should have been working. Inserter was oriented the right way, powered up, not connected to any circuits, default settings. Chest was completely empty, no slot restrictions. The other five inserters in the group all worked fine. As it turns out, it was because of the wakeup list:



Earlier, I had shifted three chests full of RCUs over to the left to make room for new chests for LDS (the rocket silo is just offscreen to the right). This was done using a PickerExtended feature, where you can use the arrow keys to move certain entities around without picking them up and putting them back down. As you can see from the second screenshot, the frozen inserter is still waiting for the wakeup call from its original chest, not the one now in front of it (the diagonal yellow line).

I can't remember if this was a problem with earlier versions, but it sounds like it could very well be an optimization where wakeup lists are not refreshed as often as before, to save on UPS. In my case, rotating or replacing the inserter forces an update, and it starts working again.

Thanks for the engagement, it's not surprising that Factorio players thinks this sort of stuff is fun to figure out.

I tested the debug overlay. You can see that the inserter is coupled to the wrong belt, but the belt it's connected to is also empty?
It's an low angle inserter that tries to put down the aluminium plat direct where it is, not the belt segment with the wake up call.

I was messing around last night with a fixed Creative Mode mod, and got a stack inserter stuck. I forgot to take screenshots and check the wakeup list debug overlay, but it represents a vanilla inserter that got stuck in practically-vanilla circumstances (the inserter was moving iron ore from a steel chest onto a belt, that was loading into a void chest).

It would be great if someone could come up with reliable steps for reproduction.

mara wrote:I got the similar bug. Three leftmost stack inserters on gears factory getting stuck and cant take items from belt. They "vibrating" and trying to take iron but they can't. If u take some iron plates from belt or take inserter and place it, it will work fine. But after some time (from several minutes to couple hours) it getting stuck again. Inserters holding no items when they stuck. There are only iron plates on these belts. Also other 9 input stack inserters are always working fine. I'm using no mods. Here is savegame file where 2 of these inserters are stuck.

That's a different "bug" that's not a bug and not related to this thread. See this thread for more info on your "bug": 49473

Thanks for the report and investigation. It's now fixed for the next version of 0.16 or 0.17 which ever comes first.

Great. Best devs ever.

Rseding91 wrote:Thanks for the report and investigation. It's now fixed for the next version of 0.16 or 0.17 which ever comes first.

Thank you thank you thank you for fixing this!

Rseding91 wrote:Thanks for the report and investigation. It's now fixed for the next version of 0.16 or 0.17 which ever comes first.

Hi, Sorry to start this post again, but i am having the same issue mentioned above, with the latest release.

Has the update containing the fix been done? Or will it only be in 0.17?

The update should be live on both stable and experimental. It apparently did not fix all causes of inserters getting stuck. See for example viewtopic.php?t=61705 viewtopic.php?t=59807 viewtopic.php?t=58984