[16.16] Vehicle clipping

[ASDFGerte]

TL;DR; vehicles can be clipped into other entities' tiles and get checked first for inserters' output (apparently not always for input, just sometimes). Some bounding boxes make for quite hilarious "features".

This has been around for quite some time, don't know if anyone posted it before and it has been made a "won't fix" or something. At least I never saw anyone post it. I didn't post this for a while as it can be useful here and there and I wasn't sure if I want it fixed. With all the belts vs bots discussion I figured properly balancing things is a better direction.

Following are some examples of said "features":

Inserting into other entities

long stack inserter

long long inserter

This one is for reddit. Can also be done over other size two entities, like substations.

known side effect

This one has likely been posted before. However, it uses the same effect - there are four stack inserters between the wagons, making it faster than two express belts at maximum inserter capacity. Plus you can get four different item-types to run through and set filter slots on the wagons!

PS: While this cannot be blueprinted fully (wagons and their filter settings), this is one of the reasons why I usually rename my blueprint storage before joining internet games. Where are our private blueprint libraries?

One could post more and more of these (e.g. i once made a circuit that looks at in- and outgoing inserters to cars and therefore knows the cars' contents. That means you cycle through materials on filter inserters properly and therefore can make insane sushi-"belts"). I guess the few examples show the core idea.

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Off topic: shameless promotion of this, this and my own posts about bots vs belts

[Loewchen]

I don't understand, do you think inserters putting items in a cars trunk is a bug?

[ASDFGerte]

I don't understand, do you think inserters putting items in a cars trunk is a bug?

If the tile they are directed towards is e.g. occupied by a beacon, yes. It essentially stacks the car as a chest into the beacon tile. If not, happy car factory building!

[Rseding91]

Thanks for the report.

If you turn on the collision box debug option you can see the the beacon doesn't fill the entire set of tile(s) it sits on. When you place the car it fills in the rest of the tile space with its collision box.

https://i.imgur.com/pRQRKpp.png

And finally the inserter iterates the entities on the tile it wants to use in the reverse order they're placed on that tile. That means the car comes last so it's found first and the inserter puts things into it.

This is such an edge case and changing it would have performance implications that I don't consider it worth changing.