Factorio Forums

I have an assembler making both medium/tall power poles:

1) the recipe is set to big power poles. It was previously making medium poles
2) there are 3 medium/3 big poles in the output of the assembler
3) the medium output chest is full
4) the medium filtered inserter shows "target full"
5) the large filtered inserter shows "waiting for source items"
6) only the chests/assembler are connected to the circuit network
7) emptying the medium storage chest results in both inserters working as expected again

It seems that the medium inserter being unable to unload prevents the large power pole inserter from unloading.
If I manually remove the big poles from the assembler, it creates more. It's only the unload process which appears problematic.

I don't see any indication in game which indicates/explains why the big pole unloader would not be unloading, either.

This feels like either 1) the big pole unloader should work or 2) it should indicate somewhere it's not working because of the medium pole unloader is blocked. My assumption is (1) but I'm not sure.

Post save and mods please, see 3638

Oops, sorry! Here's the save file illustrating this issue.

No mods other than Space Age.

Thanks for the report. That is working as intended. You must empty the trash output slots of the machine before it will continue to extract from the normal output. This is to prevent players from just ignoring the trash output forever and letting it build up with items.

Rseding91 wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 22, 2024 1:15 am

Thanks for the report. That is working as intended. You must empty the trash output slots of the machine before it will continue to extract from the normal output. This is to prevent players from just ignoring the trash output forever and letting it build up with items.

Hmm.

My recommendation would be to make this dependency clear in the UI somehow - the fact that you can continue to make the primary item when full of trash items there by picking them up the desired item, but are unable to unload it via an inserter, feels unexpected to me.

Maybe make the desired inserter (tall power poles in this case) have a state making this clear, similar to the "output full" state? Something like "waiting for trash items to clear" or something?

Or perhaps simply blocking the assembler from making the new item until the trash items are cleared first upon a recipe switch?