Factorio Forums

Currently, inserters will take items from top to bottom and from left to right.

This is problematic, because you set the limit from bottem to top and right to left and thus any extra item you place in them will not be taken unless items are taken out at a higher rate than they're put in.
This is bad, because when you add some stuff manually that you got by tearing some parts down or so won't get taken from the chest unless the input inserter doesn't have anything to put in any more while the output inserter still takes stuff out.

Example current behaviour:
Chest is limited to 1 slot. A standard inserters puts copper cables inside a chest, another inserter takes those out of the chest.
Now you manually add 5 Stacks of cable.
The out inserter will still take from the first stack, not the last. So new items will be inserted even so you have more than 1 slot filled.

Example Suggested behavious:
Chest is limited to 1 slot. A standard inserters puts copper cables inside a chest, another inserter takes those out of the chest.
Now you manually add 5 Stacks of cable.
The out inserter will still take from the last stack, not the first. No new items will be inserted unless all other slots except the first slot are completely empy again.

Not sure what you're talking about, just tested on vanilla 0.12.22 and it behaves like you describe in your post as suggested:


It first removes the copper cable from the limited red zone, and only then from the allowed white zone. Also notice that the left inserter stops inserting into the chest as the white zone is full.

Erm.... This looks like a bug to me. Inserters shouldn't interact with locked (red) slots in chests.

sillyfly wrote:Erm.... This looks like a bug to me. Inserters shouldn't interact with locked (red) slots in chests.

I thought so too but I wasn't sure, so I tested it.
For the screencap above I used the sandbox/god mode, but I just tested it again on an old 20h+ vanilla savegame and it is the same there.

I myself wouldn't call it a bug, rather an undocumented feature, as I would prefer it this way aswell.

Well looks like the behaviour was change after 0.12.20, because that's the version I'm currently playing ^^
0.12.22 is an "experimental" build, isn't it? Because I just looked at the options and I have automatic updating enabled for normal builds, but not for experiemental.

But well, when this behaviour comes with the next version, then everything is ok.

And I personally think that inserters should interact with the locked slots by being able to remove stuff from there, but not add stuff.

Yinan wrote:Well looks like the behaviour was change after 0.12.20, because that's the version I'm currently playing ^^
0.12.22 is an "experimental" build, isn't it? Because I just looked at the options and I have automatic updating enabled for normal builds, but not for experiemental.

But well, when this behaviour comes with the next version, then everything is ok.

And I personally think that inserters should interact with the locked slots by being able to remove stuff from there, but not add stuff.

Very strange, I just tried with 0.12.20 and 0.12.6 (!) and I still got the same result as in the screencap I posted above.

Only on 0.11.22 it didn't remove items from the red zone and behaved like you mentioned in the first post as current behavior.

Moved to Implemented Suggestions.

After some research I found that this was changed in 0.12.4:

[url=https://forums.factorio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=14884][Version 0.12.4][/url] FactorioBot wrote:Changes

• ...
• Reverted the order of inserter slot selection. (https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=14656)
• ...

It is actually a bug if it doesn't behave like that, I tried on 0.12.6, 0.12.20 and 0.12.22 and got the expected result.
If it doesn't work for you on 0.12.22 (experimental), please make a Bug Report.

The linked topic says this:

Shrikey wrote:I'd really like inserters to grab items from the end of a chest. I limit most chests and sometimes put stuff back in the red/limited area. But as it grabs the first item from the chest, it keeps filling the chest up:

kovarex wrote:These are not actually bugs, but small feature requests.

But I will do them anyway, because the changes are very simple, and these things were annoying me as well.

So the the main inventory has now bigger priority when picking stuff from character and the order of slots inserter takes into consideration has been reversed for 0.12.4

I thought that meant it would take from the end of the inventory, but still not from locked slots, but I never tested it

Tested it again, removing all mods.

Worked as you said it would.

Tested it again, all mods active.

It worked as well.

But I just recently started new and removed some mods... so one of those mods must have screwed around with this previously.

So, false alarm ^^