Inserters can remove items from beacons.

[kd7uiy]

I was just watching Quill18's Factorio video, and saw something I suspect is a bug.

https://youtu.be/qsAwAbIGqck?t=23m2s

At that point, he was trying to figure out why he didn't have any beacons. The reason was that he had replaced an assembler with a beacon. The inserters, which he hadn't removed, took out the modules from the beacon. That seems like really unusual behavior, and honestly seems like a bug. It's not likely to happen that often, but...

[daniel34]

The reason it works this way is because beacons used to consume no power unless you actually put modules into it. You could set circuit conditions to only enable beacons if there was work to be done, and if you removed the modules the beacons themselves would require no power.

Beacons now always consume 480kW of power, no matter if there are modules in it or not.

But this doesn't make that behavior a bug. To be honest why would you actually place an inserter to remove from a beacon nowadays, if you don't want that kind of behavior then simply don't place an inserter there, use power switches instead. On the other hand, there might be reasons to replace the speed modules with productivity modules and vice-versa, I don't see any harm by doing that.

Putting down an inserter next to a beacon is (in most cases) wrong, but in some cases it will work as expected and remove the modules from the beacon. If you don't want your beacon to suddenly lose modules then just don't place an inserter there, problem solved.

[SupplyDepoo]

This is not a bug. Modules can be removed from beacons just like fuel from boilers or science packs from labs. Although I've never seen anyone do it, you could have a system to switch from speed modules to efficiency modules when power is low. Could be better than shutting down production lines entirely. If you don't want inserters to remove modules, then don't place inserters like that. There's no other reason to be placing inserters like that, so "fixing" this bug would just strictly reduce the amount of possibilities in the game. Mistakes like this can happen with assembling machines, belts, or anything else that inserters can interact with. It's unavoidable. Think before you build a big production line. Build a working prototype and blueprint it or insert modules as the last step after checking that everything is right if building by hand.

[Loewchen]

21731

[kd7uiy]

The question becomes is it more likely that someone would do something intentionally, or that they would accidentally include inserters and go crazy trying to figure out what was going on. I could see a case for either case, but if anything, this seems to be something that is rarely if ever used intentionally.

[Rseding91]

The question becomes is it more likely that someone would do something intentionally, or that they would accidentally include inserters and go crazy trying to figure out what was going on. I could see a case for either case, but if anything, this seems to be something that is rarely if ever used intentionally.

It's intended. I specifically added support for it in 0.12.0: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=13512 section "Features" the 6th item:

Inserters can now extract from Roboports and Beacons.