Factorio Forums

This bug has been hard to precisely track down but ill give the context:

In my multiplayer world, we went to gleba first, to try out spoilage. The solution that we've been using utilizes a main loop of the core ingredients. it looks like the following (example of bioplastic. excuse my poor paint skills):
As annotated, One would expect (and happens if using something like iron plates) the left hand side to be fully saturated, and each addition extension to the loop to be halved. leaving the rightmost belt at a quarter saturation.

However, This didnt happen. up at the merger splitters on the top of the loop the yumako mash was consistently backing up. soi brought it into a test world to set game speed higher and let it run for longer. the result was both yumako mash and the bioflux was backed up. (this is when i sapped it over to iron plates to test if i was missing something. indeed with plates, it functioned as intended.)

So i spent a long time with the game at very low speeds to try and find anything wrong, and i spotted some items strangely teleporting forward in the loop. Heres a video at normal and slowed down speeds to see it in action: Conclusion I drew is the following: Because these items are being pushed forward, they are in some way causing the merger splitters to get out of sync by a very small amount, which, over time, causes there to be gaps in the leftmost belt, which manifest in the merge splitters at the top backing up.

Just another gif confirming my previous conclusion. this is with the gaps shown at normal speed. as you can see a gap in the bioflux seemingly creates itself:

Thanks for the report. This happens with a looped belt regardless of the belts contents. We have no plans to change it because it would negatively impact belt performance even in the non looped belt case.

I understand what you're saying (I think), as ive experienced other loop related oddities. (especially with koravex setups)

however, as stated, this is not an issue with looped belts in the general case. this specific issue does not occur with non-spoilable items.