[0.17.50] Belt/Inserter Asymmetry

[SpoonUnit]

As I began to upgrade yellow belts to blue, but not the inserters, I noticed some asymmetry I thought was addressed recently. Maybe this is an edge case. It shows that yellow inserters have more trouble collecting blue belt content that is closer to them. To show this, I used cheat mode to create two simple scenarios.

The first uses yellow inserts to place content onto the blue belt, and then yellow inserts to remove the content, where the yellow inserts are restricted to collecting only 1 item:



If you load the save, then place down the electric supply, you'll end up with this result after 100 items are placed on each belt



For the bottom belt, all 100 items are collected, but for the top belt only 33 items are collected, with 67 making their way through to the end container.

This is then flipped by moving the items to the other side of the belt:



The result is a mirror of the first



While the mirroring is a good thing in a way, the question remains? Is it intentional or accidental that the inserts have more trouble collecting from one side of the belt than the other?

[boskid]

Not a Bug

1/ Yellow inserter is too slow for blue belt

Unlike the fast inserter, the inserter is not fast enough to pick up items moving on express transport belts, unless it is highly compressed or items have stopped due to a blockage.

2/ Because of gripper item-tracking, if item is on far lane there is less tracking and yellow inserter may pick item even from blue belt, while on near lane it may need more ticks and may miss item

When picking items from a belt, many more factors come into play besides belt fullness:
- Whether items are on the near or far lane of a perpendicular belt.

[SpoonUnit]

Thanks for explaining. I wouldn't call this intuitive behaviour, but perhaps that's what keeps the game so interesting. Clearly this makes it imperative to upgrade inserters in tandem with the belts.