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In certain circumstances, inserters can be forced into placing an item into an extra output slot of a building. This was reported in viewtopic.php?f=23&t=125599, where it was marked as not a bug. I will provide more details here and argue that this should be considered a bug.

Expected behavior:

Place a powered assembler and an inserter facing into the assembler. Place an item (in this case a wooden chest) into the inserter's hand. The inserter's hand swings, and at the end of the swing, hovers over the assembler with its item, as shown below:



Unexpected behavior:

Place a powered assembler and an inserter facing into the assembler. Connect the assembler to a power pole with a wire, then place an item into the inserter's hand. This time the inserter's hand swings, and at the end of the swing, the item is placed into an output slot of the assembler:



Now disconnect that assembler from all circuit networks, and again place an item into the inserter's hand. The item again is placed into an output slot despite the assembler being returned to the state in the first image. The behavior of the assembler can only be restored by breaking and replacing it. In my opinion, this should qualify this behavior as a bug.

In the linked bug report, Muche argues the inserters

will not start putting random things into empty machines after they have empty hands, know the machine is there, and does not want those random things.

I believe the point is this should be enough to prevent this manual storage method from being automated. However, this is not true, as shown in my previous post (viewtopic.php?f=8&t=125185) and demonstration video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEFFIDZIVO0). Clearly automated infinite storage density is not intended to be possible. The demonstrated design is slow, but it could be made much quicker with slightly more effort and complexity.

Since you are reporting this in 2.0.28, can you reproduce this issue on latest experimental (2.0.30)? This sounds suspiciously similar to 125212 which was fixed in 2.0.30 making this a suspected duplicate.

The behaviour is the same, and the same infinite storage design still works in 2.0.30, so I don't think this is a duplicate. I checked by loading my previous world with the linked design into version 2.0.30, and there is no change in functionality.

Thanks for the report however this is still working correctly and I do not consider the “video proof” to be anything except an meme.

Not a bug and working as intended.