Factorio Forums

The tooltip for "spoiled priority" of an inserter:
> Selects items based on spoiled percentage. Only takes effect when taking items from an inventory.

When you set an inserter to take "spoiled first" and make it choose between a 40% spoiled agricultural science pack with many minutes remaining and some 90% fresh iron bacteria with less than a minute remaining it will in fact take the iron bacteria. Irrespective of the ordering of the item in the source inventory. That means the priority is based on time (or ticks?) remaining rather than the spoiled percentage. Contrary to what the tooltip says.

Thanks for the report. I don't actually know what the intent was with how this should work. The spoil percent logic was written in mind for one item type existing in the source chest. I'll have to talk with the person who wrote it to see how they want it to work with mixed items.

Personally I think doing it based on time is more useful, as you might want to use more spoiled things up quickly before they spoil.

At least that's the only thing I've been using the spoiled priority for.

But if you're trying to make minimally spoiled agricultural science packs, you'll want it to choose the freshest (percentage) items, because that's how the spoilage of the result is calculated.

In that case you might prefer to let the old bioflux and eggs just spoil on Gleba, rather than having the packs spoil in transit.