Factorio Forums

TL;DR

I like to have long handed versions of fast / stack inserter and versions with diferent angles but don't like to have to much inserters at all.

What ?

Reduce existing inserters to following types:

• Burner inserter
  (Normal) inserter
  Long handed inserter
  Stack inserter

Add flowing types:

• Long handed stack inserter
  Full controlled robot arm (direction and long/short controlled by circuit )

Add for all inserters (except burner inserter) two upgrade slots.
This two slots can used for:
- better gearbox (speedup 1 times)
- filter (each adds 5 filter-slots)
- angle sensor (adds ability to load/unload in 90degree steps)
- maybe since 0.16 a compression upgrade may needed

Better gearbox: puting in one of them should equal current fast inserter, (The second one should increase it a bit but not as much as the firrst one). - Should also works on long arm inserter. Stack inserters should be mutch slower then in game at moment, so one gearbox should result in a stack inserter as fast as it is in 0.16. - Should not work on robot arm.

Filter: puting in on of them equals actual filter inserter. put in a second one to double up filter slots.

Angle sensor: If installed there should be 4 points (North, East, South, West ) in GUI where I can switch between input, output or nothing. Example: An inserter loading from two belts in one factory may have West and East set to input and North sets to output. On this way you can input up to 6 item types with one inserter (3 belts on W, E, S and Assembler on N) or spread one belt content over 3 destinations.

Robot arm: An inserter which have the abaility to swich between input and output mode by conditions in circiut network. And also swiches beween long-arm-handling and short-arm-handling by circuit condition. And is an fast inserter by default (therefor an extra gearbox has no benefit).
A possible use case is to have a robot-arm transfering items from chest A to chest B as long as chest A contents more than 1000 iron. If the iron contained in chest A goes below 400 the robot-arm swiches and fill iron back from chest B to chest A.
Robot arm with "angle sensor": This woud be the masterpiece of an inserter. In case of put an angle sensor in a robot-arm it should be possible to set the 3 states (input, output, none) of each direction (N, E, S, W) by circuit conditions. If you add a filter it may be the most complex (and full controllable) inserter (because filters can be seted by network too).

why?

Because it gets the ability to build complex an compact factories (also in late game) without use of logistics network. And I think especialy the robot arm (with full addons) may have possibilities no one can image.

There is little to no chance inserters would receive such an overhaul at this point.
I'm not saying the idea is bad, just it's unlikely it will be implemented this way.

My personal stance on this is I like the limited options current vanilla inserters give us : there are things you cannot do with them, so you have to figure out how to achieve your goal without these features. Having an inserter that can always be tailored to do exactly the very complex routine I want it to do would make things too easy.

Koub wrote:Having an inserter that can always be tailored to do exactly the very complex routine I want it to do would make things too easy.

I don't think so. Because to have that robot arm doing what it should do, you have first to do some tricky things on circuit network (where much player like to avoid that) that's not easy. And of course it should be some what expensive.
I think in most cases "normal" player wouldn't use it because logistics network is much more easy than circuit network. But for player like me who LOVE belts (and try to avoid logistic robots ) some more and more complex inserters would be a great gift.

You may right that normal inserter with angle sensor makes it to easy ... but that there currently are no upgrade for long handed inserters is uncomfortable.

TheRaph wrote:Full controlled robot arm (direction and long/short controlled by circuit )

I really like that idea.

TheRaph wrote:In case of put an angle sensor in a robot-arm it should be possible to set the 3 states (input, output, none) of each direction (N, E, S, W) by circuit conditions.

Are you saying that it should also be possible to reverse the direction of the inserter? This has already been suggested in the following thread:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=45550 Stack inserters with negative stack size

Tekky wrote:Are you saying that it should also be possible to reverse the direction of the inserter?

Yes but no ... The quoted text is in meaning of to set in inserter menu for every direction what to do (grab or drop). Therefor you can set direction this way - but not like negative stack size.

I've found that most of this idea (not roboarm but rest) is already done in "Bob's Adjustable Inserters" here.

But I don't prefer the way Bob has solve it (input section output section and 45° angles ...)

That would be very difficult if not impossible to mod... unless I missed something in the 0.16 modding API. Would be interesting to have a circuit controlled robot arm though.

I like the fact that all of them have a specialty unique from each other. There's no need to cross combine any features. It would create unnecessary complexity.

Burner Inserter - If you don't want your boilers to depend on... themselves.
Normal Inserter - Cheapest, simplest, slowest. However, if you want to limit throughput, it is a convenient solution in late game.
Long Handed Inserter - Very useful when building assembly machine arrays.
Fast Inserter - The best choice for Labs. Is there anything the stack Inserter would do better?
Filter Inserter - Has the most filter slots. Really useful if you just built mom's spaghetti.
Stack Inserter - For train stations where time is... err matters.
Filter Stack Inserter - For sorting setups with a heavy load. Not the best type. I think having only one filter is a fair trade-off with high throughput.

Koub wrote:My personal stance on this is I like the limited options current vanilla inserters give us : there are things you cannot do with them, so you have to figure out how to achieve your goal without these features. Having an inserter that can always be tailored to do exactly the very complex routine I want it to do would make things too easy.

Gergely wrote:I like the fact that all of them have a specialty unique from each other. There's no need to cross combine any features. It would create unnecessary complexity.

I agree with these viewpoints. I think that the fact that each inserter is unique creates an interesting challenge: I have to select the right inserter for the job. The types available seem fine to me.
Even the fact that there are no 90-degree inserters creates a challenge, too.
And in some setups, choosing between filter vs. stack filter inserters is interesting: I can have 5 filter slots and a stack size of 3 or 1 filter slot but a stack size of 12. There's trade-offs. No one inserter is inherently better than the other.

Gergely wrote:I like the fact that all of them have a specialty unique from each other. There's no need to cross combine any features. It would create unnecessary complexity.

Burner Inserter - If you don't want your boilers to depend on... themselves.
Normal Inserter - Cheapest, simplest, slowest. Sometimes you want to have one move slowly and you don't want to mess with circuitry.
Long Handed Inserter - Very useful when building assembly machine arrays.
Fast Inserter - The best choice for Labs.
Filter Inserter - Has the most filter slots. Really useful if you just built mom's spaghetti.
Stack Inserter - For train stations where time is... err matters.
Filter Stack Inserter - For sorting setups with a heavy load.

I personally miss bidirectional inserter here, both as a useful tool and as a challenge to use.
More useful if one side has demands/results.
Stacked/Filtered? - better yes, but even if no.

Gergely wrote:Would be interesting to have a circuit controlled robot arm though.

That is too. If developers would agree, controls can be made simple but powerful.