Factorio Forums

So firstly, I should point out that I've only seen this in my heavily modded game, I have yet to test it in vanilla, but all the items in this bug are vanilla.
Secondly, it's a multiplayer game, ran on the factorio servers.

I saw this happen several times in the same game. Each time, I would have a line of boilers set up, and burner inserters feeding them. I would have so many boilers that water stopped reaching most of them very quickly (as soon as the buffer of water in the pipes ran out [I should maybe point out that the pipes were plastic pipes from bob's mods]). Once this happened, the burner inserters would stop in the middle of their movement and after water was supplied, and the boilers should have been running, the burner inserters did nothing. to fix this, I had to break and replace each inserter and they would work fine

(the only thing on the conveyor belt was coal so there's no way the burner inserters were accidentally picking something else up)

edit: Version is 0.16.22

Can you supply a save game that demonstrates the issue?

I've had this happen sometimes on 2 conditions:
- Red or Blue belt being used OR burner inserters are set up on both sides of the belt (so that they pick from the same belt section).
- Fuel is not being backed up, IE it keeps moving along the belt.

What actually happens is that the burner inserters sometimes try to grab stuff but miss their grab. If they do this over an extended time, they burn through their internal fuel supply. Without fuel in their own burner, they permanently shut down that way, until a player manually refuels them.

This happens to me with express belts/normal inserter, but that is because inserters are slow for that belt, still its sometime frustating because arrays does not always work as intented (unless belts are full)

Skeletpiece wrote:This happens to me with express belts/normal inserter, but that is because inserters are slow for that belt, still its sometime frustating because arrays does not always work as intented (unless belts are full)

i dont' think that is related to what the OP is saying. also that is not a bug. you need fast inserters for express belts.

I do not have a save that still shows this, and have trashed all the boiler arrays for nuclear power
They were fast belts
There were inserters on both sides, but not all of them were grabbing from the same spot as another
I checked that they had fuel when they stopped running and tried adding more which didn't work

burner inserters can only reliably pick up from straight yellow belts. (not on a bend)
they can run themselves out of fuel trying to pick up from fast/express belts.