Inserter 'Max consumption' statistic is misleading

[macdjord]

My expectation as a player is that:

• The 'Max consumption' value listed in a building's tooltip is the amount of power it will use when operating constantly
• An inserter moving items from chest to chest is as constant an operation as it gets (assuming the source chest always has items and the destination always has room)

However, testing shows this is not the case: Create a tiny power network contain just 3 solar panels (on Nauvis, in full sunlight) and a single bulk inserter (with all hand size upgrades) which is moving items from a full chest to an empty one, then open the power network graph and look at the 5s timescale. You'll see that, even though the inserter is running constantly, the graph is not flat; instead it spikes twice per cycle. Specifically, it shows a power usage of 49kW most of the time, spiking to 169kW for what I think is a single tick when it picks up or drops items, for an average power of 59.0kW. This is very different from the listed power requirement of 169kW in the tooltip. Indeed, you can even remove two of the three solar panels, reducing the available power to just 60kW, and the inserter will still run at full speed, because its internal power buffer is enough to cover the power requirements for the spike.

I tested other arrangements, too. The highest power demand I could find was for moving items from a saturated yellow belt into a chest, which had an average power usage of 114kW - still much less than the tooltip value. (Curiously, having the inserter drop items onto a belt majorly reduced the power requirement. Once the hand was in position, power usage dropped to 1kW - i.e. idle - until all items had been dropped on the belt. I have no idea why dropping items in a chest costs 169kW while dropping them on a belt it free.)

While it makes sense that an inserter's power usage would be different for different actions, such as picking up items, rotating, extending, and dropping, and using less power isn't a bad thing, this makes the inserter 'Max consumption' statistic useless for any sort of planning purposes.

[Panzerknacker]

Its indeed the max, I also noticed this a long time ago. Interesting, isnt it? This is why in Factorio you often need to test setups, you can't plan everything based on those few statistics only. I'm glad it is like that.

[Rseding91]

Thanks for the report however that is not a bug. Max means max, not average.