Factorio Forums

I was building a smart oil setup that I had used before, but I wanted to improve the compression of the iron i was inserting onto a belt that already had sulfur in the other lane. So I moved the inserters adding the iron so that they were inserting on to side belts and connected those in with splitters. To my surprise, when I did this the iron lane on the main belt stopped moving, which is weird as the belt is a big loop and the items should never stop. Even more weird - the sulfur kept moving. The effect can be seen in the first video.

I looked around a little more and noticed that, with the splitters removed so that the items were moving again, there were weird stutters in the movement of the items in each lane. And these stutters occurred at a different place for each lane. The iron stutter occurred in a straight patch of belt, and the sulfur stutter occurred at one of the locations where it sideloads onto the belt. I tried removing the belts where the iron was stuttering and replacing them, and the stutter moved to a different location. I tried to capture a stutter in the iron lane in my second video, but it's tough to see with my low resolution. I am playing at 1080p but can't record at that resolution. It is hard to say for certain, but I am pretty sure that every time the gap in the iron lane, where I removed a bunch of iron, gets smaller each time it passes the stutter. I then tried adding the splitters back. The iron stopped moving again, and the sulfur kept going again. But this time I looked and could not find a sulfur stutter anywhere.

Also, the behaviour was the same with all mods disabled.

I also just tried adding items to the sulfur lane, and it stopped too.

Don't let the belts back up. Belts in a loop like that will stop if they get completely full.

I suspected that that was the case. I wouldn't have wound up making the report, but the weird stuttering seemed worth reporting.