Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Change inserter's belt dropoff point (Far vs. Near)

What ?

Inserters, as of right now, are only able to drop items on the far side of a belt. With this new addition, a player would be able to switch the dropoff point on the belt in terms of far vs. near on the belt. A checkbox in the inserter's menu might be the way to go.

Why ?

It would make compact building much easier. Players would be able to have both belts AND both inserters on the same side, instead of inserters on opposite sides for dual-item efficiency.

+1

It's already a standard with Bob's mods.

would take away from the puzzle aspect.

Actually I wouldn't mind if the dropoff was systematically the near side : I've never understood why pickup side would be the near one, and dropoff the far one. Where's the logic behind it ?

There's a mod for that called Smart Inserters I believe. It allows you to configure the pickup and dropoff point in a 5x5 square, and allows you to set far and near drops. I think it was part of Bobs mods, not 100% sure. I would welcome this as a vanilla feature though!

Koub wrote:Actually I wouldn't mind if the dropoff was systematically the near side : I've never understood why pickup side would be the near one, and dropoff the far one. Where's the logic behind it ?

I think that inserters with 180° rotation are not so effective like linear inserters without rotation. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/LinearInserters
Taking items from far side of nearest belt and drop items to nearest side of another belt looks much better.

impetus maximus wrote:would take away from the puzzle aspect.

This would extend puzzle aspect because you would have to decide which side of belt. But seriously, I think that this would neither decrease nor increase amount of puzzles to solve. This would just change the way you solve problem with belt sides.
The choice is: setting which side of belt will be use by inserter vs building weird belt loops that move items to the other side, which too isn't very hard to do but it takes up a lot more space and prevent you from having nice, compact factory layout. Because my main criteria is amount of pain in my ass while playing Factorio, I like OP's solution much more.

I've never understood why pickup side would be the near one, and dropoff the far one. Where's the logic behind it ?

I think the logic simply comes from using a single belt for in- and output. The output can't be on the same side as the input. Braking the default for this common scenario would be wierd, so they made different sides the default.

Also, taking from the near side seems right, becauuse its the nearest item to get.
With default droptoff far, its easy to put an item on the near side, by just sideloading ist out of a side of the machine. With default near side dropoff, it would require a bigger and awkward footprint to put an item on the non-default side.

would take away from the puzzle aspect.

This. It's part of the fun to figure out how to get items on the correct side of belts.

This would extend puzzle aspect because you would have to decide which side of belt.

Are you serious? Flipping a switch in an options dialog, instead of planning belt layout, adds puzzle aspect for you?

gsezz wrote:

This would extend puzzle aspect because you would have to decide which side of belt.

Are you serious? Flipping a switch in an options dialog, instead of planning belt layout, adds puzzle aspect for you?

You didn't read the rest of my post. In the next sentence, I've written that this is actually more like fifty-fifty - some puzzle become less frequent but new ones emerge instead.
So as it is now, sides of your belts are fixed. You have to use the near side for components and the far side for products, right? You have some limited options to change that but it usually would take too much space and is generally a big pain in the ass, IMO. It is not a big challenge either. You just use the same solutions to switch sides every time. However, if you are able to decide which side to use, considering where the belt goes later, it would encourage designs where you need to plan in advance which side of belt you will need for the next part of the factory.
Moreover, it wouldn't wipe out belt tricks entirely. It would just made them less frequent, especially in dense assembly machine cluster where they are really inconvenient to use.

I don't think you'll ever be able to do this outside of using mods. The devs believe using inserters and belts is a bit of a puzzle game, and being able to configure inserters to do special functions would take away from that puzzle.

if the issue is really pushed, then MAYBE you'd end up with a near inserter similar to the long inserter, but it's unlikely that you'll even get to see this in the base game.


Honestly though, when people are complaining that belts aren't as powerful as bots... this sort of change would make belts stronger. it won't affect any inserter interactions on things like chests, or factories, so it literally is a belt improvement.

Still, makes more sense for me that Inserters should drop items off on the closest lane but all in all it doesn't really make much of a difference. Would make sideloading mid-way along a furnace or assembler line a bit easier, and very slightly improve the speed of dropping items onto belts. Aside from that it would break a lot of existing setups to change. It's still beta so arguably worth it or not, idk.

bobingabout wrote:Honestly though, when people are complaining that belts aren't as powerful as bots... this sort of change would make belts stronger. it won't affect any inserter interactions on things like chests, or factories, so it literally is a belt improvement.

A very minor one though. The biggest problem I have with belts is upgrading them. Currently building an enormous factory, going to beacon the hell out of 15 belts each of Iron and Copper Ore - any idea how many belts that requires? I've already been through a few thousand and I've only got one lane of Iron and Copper so far, just trying to get some science going to use some Petroleum so I can make more Heavy Oil, keep running out. And yet this is still a lot easier than trying to put down red belts and upgrading them later, all that work all over again. Oh and heaven forbid should you miss just one somewhere in the chain, especially (and most likely) in a big balancer where it's not as easy to see the throughput loss.

We need some way of easily and painlessly upgrading them with Construction Robots, that would be the best buff they could get. Though now even that's not as simple as the different Underground Belts have different lengths but it would be something. If we could then have a pair of Stack Inserters able to compress a belt too, that would be great.

Things like priority splitters and near inserters do not address my problems with belts in the late game, which is the limited throughput that belts can provide when trying to use them in large scale 8x8 beaconed setups, which can only fit a finite amount of belts.
For me the problem with belts versus bots is trying to build something like an 8x8 beaconed green circuit layout that scales to a reasonable length (So most of the beacons are affecting 8 assemblers). Blue belts just don't have enough throughput, and there just isn't enough room for enough extra belts in an 8x8 layout. (Plus 1 stack inserter can't quite move enough copper wires to feed a 5.5 craft speed green circuit assembler. And again there is no room for extra inserters. That last problem is common to both bot and the belt based layouts though).

I've done beaconed green circuit layouts that scale to 20 blue belts worth of green circuits, but that design only achieves a craft speed of about 3.6, and is a pain to fit into a typical factory. (For 20 blue belts of throughput you need to feed it iron and copper from both the east and the west, and extract green circuits from both the north and the south, which tends to lead to an inconvenient arrangement of belts. The beacons also don't match a typical 8x8 build so even at a smaller scale, you typically can't share beacons). (You also often need multiple inserters, since one inserter often can't pick up fast enough from a belt to keep up with a beaconed assembler). An equivalent bot based layout is way easier to design.

What I'd rather see is vanilla support for something like viewtopic.php?f=190&t=57264, with a late game tech that enables stack inserters to automatically and transparently create similar "mini-stacks", (without needing a converter box), and the ability to tranparently feed such stacks to assemblers. Not all products need to stack that way, just selected hi volume intermediates. Iron ore, copper ore, iron plate, copper plate, green circuits, maybe stone, plastic, red circuits, gears and copper wire. That would enable belt based 8x8 setups of a decent size for things like green circuits. (And a nice side effect is inserters would also benefit, since they could pickup stacked items in less time, meaning one stack inserter would probably be enough for most beaconed assemblers).

Zavian wrote: For me the problem with belts versus bots is trying to build something like an 8x8 beaconed green circuit layout that scales to a reasonable length (So most of the beacons are affecting 8 assemblers). Blue belts just don't have enough throughput, and there just isn't enough room for enough extra belts in an 8x8 layout. (Plus 1 stack inserter can't quite move enough copper wires to feed a 5.5 craft speed green circuit assembler. And again there is no room for extra inserters. That last problem is common to both bot and the belt based layouts though).

I think there's a case for getting rid of beacons and going to higher levels of modules, personally, but that never seems to get much traction. I don't see beacons as adding much to the game because they always seem to just push you towards one kind of layout.

Zavian wrote:For me the problem with belts versus bots is trying to build something like an 8x8 beaconed green circuit layout that scales to a reasonable length (So most of the beacons are affecting 8 assemblers).

Why is is that nobody ever blames the beacons when they are at fault and instead blames it on bots/belts/inserters? Makes no sense at all. The whole bots vs belts debate was basically founded on this but never addressed the topic.

Beacons are only partially at fault. In truth a prod3+beacon build not only makes your base more compact but it reduces the total number of items that need to move around. Less items in a smaller base makes the situation easier for bots and belts alike.

The big downside is that a beacon build has very limited space for belts. A common beacon setup is to have alternating rows of assemblers and beacons. This setup will fit one long belt on both sides, but clever spaghetti can double or maybe even triple the belt space. In any event a line of fast assemblers will quickly push 2 or 4 belts to their limit. Once the belts are maxed out the line of assemblers will max out and can not be made longer.

Bots don't have lane issues. They can fly as many items over a beacon build as needed. Their sustained throughput instead comes from roboports that can be placed far away. It still takes a considerable amount of roboports to keep a beacon base going, but it's much easier than belt spaghetti for sure.

Beacons are one of those things with a mechanic that clearly makes sense at the low end and becomes weird at the limits. Sure, something which can spread the effects of an expensive Speed 3 module over multiple assembly machines makes sense in terms of resource conservation, but for megabases the results of stacking and overlapping end up looking absurd.

What would be lost, in real gameplay terms, if Beacons were deprecated and modules were rebalanced and expanded instead, so you could get the same kind of extremes of production speed without having to stack arrays of beacons everywhere?

Loaders do that.

Preface

Before I get into anything specific here, I just want to thank all of you for one, making this topic seen, and two, supplying me with helpful information on said topic.

Mods

Thanks to all the users who have shared the mods that allow what I am seeking to happen. While I might try these mods out later when I really get into mods, I made this suggestion to let our wonderful developers know what I'd like to see in vanilla. My reasoning behind this has two points. 1. Players who play on and enjoy vanilla servers, like me, would not be able to utilize this feature without the mod in place to do so. 2. Players with not as powerful computers may not have the "capacity" to download and play with said mods, and this would restrict them from playing on modded servers. While I appreciate your suggestions, I must again express that this was a vanilla suggestion.

Quotes

dood wrote:Loaders do that.

For one, loaders are not in vanilla, and two, loaders load both sides of the belt, while I am interested in choosing which side, or sides, I would like to load the materials on.

Thank you so much again guys. I don't know whether I'll close this topic just yet, because there might be some more incoming responses that might have further information, or would at least express their opinion on this topic.

Bobby_Joe wrote:loaders load both sides of the belt

Not if you use them like an inserter.

Bobby_Joe wrote:

dood wrote:Loaders do that.

For one, loaders are not in vanilla...

Yes they are.