Factorio Forums

So, as of now the inserters take an element from behind and put it on front, right?

But what if we could customize the inserters points of origin and destination? You could even allow many movement combinations. And for smart inserters you could set a filter for each movement, and maybe a ratio of movement as well.

An image is worth a thousand words, this is what I mean:



And for smart inserters imagine that there are filter icons over each white line, and maybe a percentage indicating how much time of the inserter is dedicated to that movement.

What do you think?

Custom pickup and dropoff locations have been enabled for modding a while ago, not sure if it's possible to do diagonally.

However, here's a mod that does the 90 degree angles:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =14&t=2719

Factorio would benefit more from having very specific tools that perform a single task each. Not only it would increase difficulty level of a game making it harder for newcomers, but it would also achieve very limited result.

Reason for limited result is simple - I have too much hassle setting up smart inserters and logistic chests when they are extremely necessary - will I do the same with inserters? No I would build my complex in such way that I wont need to. as such this addition to the game would end up being mostly ignored by me as well as many other players - resulting in complete waste of developer time.

Well, I think this is worth one or two more thoughts.

I think to the idea of robot factory streets. (Edit: for the newbies, this is an older idea) The picture I have in head is like this:
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/ima ... 0dpjpg.jpg
Or
http://thebreakthrough.org/images/main_ ... actory.jpg

The robots follow an programmed path, when building up the cars. The image from Zeques remembers me to that: programming of robots in a somehow very easy way.

But then my imagination leaves me. I think we should keep that in the back of our mind, perhaps it's useful.

It would allow one inserter to pull finished goods from 4 assemblers into 1 provider chest. That would be cool.

However, all it achieves is a space reduction. I don't think there is anything you can do with this that can't be done in some other way using more space.
But I'd still like it because it makes things more (space)efficient

The character wants to build an inserter with a configurable length. When he chooses the inerter in the crafting screen, another window appears in which he can choose the source and destination lengths independently as well as the modifiers like fast, smart, etc. The arm length determines the resource cost.