Factorio Forums

It seems impossible that this hasn't been asked before, but I couldn't find it through searching. Apologies if this is re-opening a can of biters.

Anyway, ever since the beginning of the game, I've always been *slightly* annoyed that inserters prefer an item around 3-4 places from the end of a full belt. I've never complained before because it was just my silly OCD and didn't actually effect gameplay at all; if the belt runs out of items the grabber will eventually grab from the end. No big deal.

However, this all changed with Space Age and the spoil mechanic.

Now it *is* a gameplay issue. The inserter will happily ignore the Jellycube at the end of the belt in favor of the one 3-4 places from the end. And it will keep doing this until the Jelly at the end spoils. Using the "Prefer Spoiled" option in the inserter doesn't help as the Jelly isn't in a container, and placing them into a container just moves the problem elsewhere; you still need to use an inserter to get the Jelly into the box and now you're back to the original problem.

The simple fix for this issue is to have inserters prefer to grab from the end of the belt first.
Notice the spoil time indicators. Also notice the inserter with the spoilage filter to grab items that eventually spoil while waiting patiently for their turn that never comes. I have probably 200 of these around my base and that's just silly.

This sounds like a good change to me.
I avoided the problem of things spoiling on the belt by using buffer chests and circuit conditions to turn of the machines before the chest is full.
But that's just my current solution which might change if I decide to scale things up.

Are there situations where the current behaviour is useful or even necessary for something to work?

I am having the exact same problem with the agricultural science pack going into my science belt. The two at the front are never chosen and will go bad just sitting there. I can circuit this to stop feeding the belt if there's something there so it has an on/off belt system but I think it should be far easier to have the inserter just grab from the front of the belt. Thoughts?