Factorio Forums

What did you do?
I had a burner inserter that was pulling items off of the corner of a belt.

What happened?
Sometimes, the burner inserter gets stuck slightly away from the center, and sometimes it is centered.

What did you expect to happen instead? It might be obvious to you, but do it anyway!
I would expect that the inserter would always fully return to the center, just like it does most of the time.

Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?
I believe that this happens every time some specific setup with items passes by the belt, but I have not been able to find a consistent way to create a setup that causes this bug.

If you can reproduce the issue, provide the exact steps!
I cannot 100% recreate this bug, but if you go into the attached world and try to drop individual items on the belt leading up to the burner inserter (top side) such that as soon as it swings back from moving a previous item, it tries to pick up a different item and fails to grab it before it gets away, it sometimes causes this bug to happen.

Here is an image that shows the inserter being offset: Attached additionally is my log file (after the bug in my test world) and my save after reproducing the bug in the test world.

How is this a bug? It doesn't look bad, just different to the other one.

It may even be intentional, so the inserter doesn't have to move as much to get future items on the corner belt.

The way that I saw it was that the bugged burner inserter was higher up, which could make it take longer to reach items on the lower/inner half of the belt, and made it not line up with the center, which I think all inserters are supposed to do by default. I don't see any reason why the inserters should "save" where there was items, because you have no idea which side of the belt items will arrive on next, and being on a specific side can be unhelpful in many cases. I believe that showing a comparison between a "normal" burner inserter and a bugged one might be necessary because the difference is very slight, and either one can look "normal" when just looking at one.

Image showing the difference: