Factorio Forums

As stated, burner inserters can't grab coal off of fast transport belts if the coals come one at a time (ie. there is a bit of a space between them). This results in the burner inserters wasting their own fuel without actually grabbing any coal and leads to them being out of power and them completely stopping to function. To fix the player needs to manually add fuel to them.

I didn't use burner inserters until they got the ability in a previous build to start with some fuel and to fuel themselves. Now this makes the burner inserters completely useless again as they are flaky and as soon as the coal (etc) slows down, they break.

Thanks for the report,

However this isn't a bug,
The inserters are too slow to pick up from the faster belts, unless they are more compressed

Klonan wrote:Thanks for the report,

However this isn't a bug,
The inserters are too slow to pick up from the faster belts, unless they are more compressed

Thanks for the quick reply.

I would recommend you guys change this so at least the inserter won't use fuel if it doesn't pick up anything or better, let it pick up from any speed belt, as personally I am not likely going to ever use the burner inserters anymore as they are pretty useless. I used to feel they were useless before you guys made it start with fuel and fuel itself, looks like they are back in the useless pile for me now. They are cool idea though, but just not practical. Perhaps others will still use them.

Burner inserters have very specific uses and aren't meant for anything outside those uses. That's by design.

Rseding91 wrote:Burner inserters have very specific uses and aren't meant for anything outside those uses. That's by design.

Yeah, to fuel furnaces (and perhaps any other entity where you also transport fuel on one belt, eg early smelting). That's it, this limited use is basically it, but they are obsolete if you upgrade the belt even once. Your choice, I won't lose sleep over it, I just think it would be a good improvement to allow them to pick up from any speed belt. You can even limit them to only 1 item regadless of inserter capacity bonuses (perhaps you already do that?).

factoriouzr wrote:

Rseding91 wrote:Burner inserters have very specific uses and aren't meant for anything outside those uses. That's by design.

Yeah, to fuel furnaces (and perhaps any other entity where you also transport fuel on one belt, eg early smelting). That's it, this limited use is basically it, but they are obsolete if you upgrade the belt even once. Your choice, I won't lose sleep over it, I just think it would be a good improvement to allow them to pick up from any speed belt. You can even limit them to only 1 item regadless of inserter capacity bonuses (perhaps you already do that?).

Forgot to mention, my main issue isn't that they can't pick up from any speed belt, the biggest issue is that they try and waste fuel when they can't crab an item. I wouldn't mind if the belt had to back up before the inserter could pick up from a faster belt, but I don't like how they waste fuel trying to pick up items going by on the belt, fail to pick up any of the items and waste all their fuel. This kind of defeats the purpose of them being self fueled. What if a mod alters any of the timings of the belts, such changes could render the inserter completely useless without the player realizing until they run out of power.

Again, it's not a huge issue, but I feel it makes a very limited use niche item, even more limited use. It's especially sad because I like the concept. Also consider the suggestion that seems to have gotten a lot of traction (and I like as well) of getting early personal robots. Some suggested running them off of coal. Just a thought, but if you will implement early personal robots, how is it that an inserter can't pick up items from any speed belts? I mean robots can fly and do way more then an inserter. Something to ponder .

just use yellow belts, and don't have the burner inserters picking up on a 90° bend and this won't be a problem.
you can have as fast a belt as you want before the pickup area.

Actually burner inserters are completely useless. I'm using yellow belts and I have pickup bonus researched and the inserters randomly die until i give them fuel manually. By watching them I notice that if the belt isn't fully saturated (yellow belt) then the inserters end up fighting with each other to pick up the coal from the belt (they are picking up from both sides of a straight belt. There is no bend in the belt).

I highly suggest the inserters don't waste energy unless they actually are able to grab something off of the belt, or you change it so that they don't fight for things to pick up and when one is about to grab an item, it first makes sure it can (ie. it's fast enough to pick it up from where the item is on the belt and where it's rotated, etc), and if it can, then the item is locked and reserved for that inserter, and no other inserters go for it.

The simplest solution would be to just not use energy till the inserter actually grabs at least one item.

If it stays like this, burner inserters are useless because they are unreliable and randomly fail.

Not sure what everyone else thinks, but if they stay like this, I won't be using them. This is a shame because it's a really cool concept and I like them aside from this issue.

And normal inserters fail to grab items from blue belts. This is a systemic issue and not limited to just burner inserters.

henke37 wrote:And normal inserters fail to grab items from blue belts. This is a systemic issue and not limited to just burner inserters.

Its a systemic system in that slow, cheaper inserters cannot take from faster belts

Klonan wrote:

henke37 wrote:And normal inserters fail to grab items from blue belts. This is a systemic issue and not limited to just burner inserters.

Its a systemic system in that slow, cheaper inserters cannot take from faster belts

But they also can't pick up from the slowest belt. Please see my previous post.

factoriouzr wrote:

Klonan wrote:

henke37 wrote:And normal inserters fail to grab items from blue belts. This is a systemic issue and not limited to just burner inserters.

Its a systemic system in that slow, cheaper inserters cannot take from faster belts

But they also can't pick up from the slowest belt. Please see my previous post.

That's by design. It means there's actually reason to use one type of inserter over another. We could easily just teleport items into the inserter and skip the "move to grab off the belt" step but we want it that way.

They're designed game mechanics. Every piece of how the inserter goes to pick up an item is something we control (through the C++ or the prototype) and if we wanted it to be something else we would change it to something else. We want it as it is now: these mechanics aren't bugs.

factoriouzr wrote:But they also can't pick up from the slowest belt. Please see my previous post.

I always use burner inserters in combination with yellow belts to fuel my steam power plants, I rarely have them running out of fuel even when supply runs low for a while.

Rseding91 wrote:

factoriouzr wrote:

Klonan wrote:

henke37 wrote:And normal inserters fail to grab items from blue belts. This is a systemic issue and not limited to just burner inserters.

Its a systemic system in that slow, cheaper inserters cannot take from faster belts

But they also can't pick up from the slowest belt. Please see my previous post.

That's by design. It means there's actually reason to use one type of inserter over another. We could easily just teleport items into the inserter and skip the "move to grab off the belt" step but we want it that way.

They're designed game mechanics. Every piece of how the inserter goes to pick up an item is something we control (through the C++ or the prototype) and if we wanted it to be something else we would change it to something else. We want it as it is now: these mechanics aren't bugs.

But they don't work on yellow belts as I mentioned above. Not sure if the issue is in the base inserter that it can't deal with unsaturated yellow belts, with picking up from two sides or because of inserter capacity bonuses.

In my previous post I said:
" I'm using yellow belts and I have pickup bonus researched and the inserters randomly die until i give them fuel manually. By watching them I notice that if the belt isn't fully saturated (yellow belt) then the inserters end up fighting with each other to pick up the coal from the belt (they are picking up from both sides of a straight belt. There is no bend in the belt)."

Boogieman14 wrote:

factoriouzr wrote:But they also can't pick up from the slowest belt. Please see my previous post.

I always use burner inserters in combination with yellow belts to fuel my steam power plants, I rarely have them running out of fuel even when supply runs low for a while.

Rarely means that it does happen, which to me makes the inserters useless. If you have to micromanage them in a game about automation which is supposed to be "set it up and forget it till you want to upgrade it", then that goes against the core design of the game.

I'm fine with it only working off of yellow belts if it would work reliably, but the fact is, it doesn't work reliably so it's not useful. You get burner inserters at pretty much the same time as electric inserters, so that means there is no reason to use burner inserters as they are unreliable and it's easier to just make sure you don't run low on power then to check on your burner inserters periodically to make sure they are still functioning and didn't run out of fuel.

factoriouzr wrote:By watching them I notice that if the belt isn't fully saturated (yellow belt) then the inserters end up fighting with each other to pick up the coal from the belt (they are picking up from both sides of a straight belt.

Stop putting two inserters across from each other. Stagger them, so they pull from alternating belt tiles.