Asteroid grabber's extra (invisible) inventory slot

[lane_ftw]

I have this setup

11-10-2024, 22-03-20.png (332.56 KiB) Viewed 231 times

An asteroid grabber wired to an inserter which is then wired to a crusher. The asteroid grabber is set to read contents, the inserter is set to read hand contents (hold), and the crusher is set to set recipe. This is (probably a bad way) to set the crusher to dynamically change it's recipe based on what the grabber/inserter has.
A problem arises when the asteroid grabber's inventory is full. In this case, the asteroid grabber's inventory will be full of carbonic/oxide asteroid chunks, but will have grabbed a metallic asteroid after it's inventory is full. This leads to the recipe on the crusher being set to metallic because the circuit network can still see that the grabber has a metallic chunk, but the inserter being unable to grab the metallic chunk out of the grabber as the grabber's inventory is full, leading to a deadlock.
Is this "extra inventory slot" intended to be able to be read by the circuit network? This doesn't exactly feel like a bug, but having items in an inventory you can neither see nor interact with feels weird.

11-10-2024, 22-18-46.png (406.34 KiB) Viewed 231 times

[Stargateur]

that indeed annoying, you could put a intermediary belt and read belt content instead.

[berggen]

A selector combinator will fix this, but also agreed that that doesn't feel like it should be required.