Prototype property to restrict inserters to pick up from a single lane

[Therax]

Broken off from 61354.

Here's a strawman proposal for a "single lane only" inserter, set on a per-prototype basis.

1) Add new optional prototype property to inserters: pickup_position_only. Default value is false, and preserves current inserter behavior. To summarize, the current behavior is: when selecting an item to chase & pick up, select the lane that's closest to the inserter's position. If both are equidistant, select the "left" lane as seen from the belt's perspective. If there are no items in the selected lane that meet the inserter's filters, look again in the opposite lane.

2) When this new property is true, when selecting an item to chase & pick up, select the lane that's closest to the inserter's current pickup_position. If there are no items in the selected lane that meet the inserter's filters, do not chase any item and treat the belt as completely empty, dropping the currently held stack or returning the inserter hand to the pickup_position.

[raiguard]

Well, today's FFF put to rest any chance of turning off inserter chasing, so that discussion is over. This, however, is probably a better solution for my modding needs and could still work. Is there a chance, devs?

[Oktokolo]

Sounds like a prerequisite for having lane-filtering miniloaders - so +1 for beeing able to restrict pickup location to a specific lane of a belt.

[Therax]

Additional use case here: I’d like Beltlayer to be able to preserve which item is in which lane, but currently there isn’t a way to guarantee to pick up items from just one side of a belt without using expensive scripting, so I can’t know which lane an item came from to be able to restore it to the same lane on the other surface.

[eradicator]

+1

Trying to implement a custom entity that is partially similar to a splitter and this would greatly help.

[eradicator]

For shenanigans with hidden inserters it would be nice if it was possible to restrict a modded inserter prototype to pick up from a single lane only (same as it only drops off on one). Determined by which lane is closer to the pickup vector position.

[Edit: Meh. Apparently my search-foo is worse than that of the kind moderator who moved this post here... ]