Factorio Forums

In my save I have some electric mining drills working a small stone field. In this bug, I'm focusing on a group of three electric mining drills outputting to a green belt going to the left. The mining speed is > 30/s, so only the right most drill is working. The middle drill never works, and when hovering over it, the machine status reflects that ("Target full"). The left most drill also (theoretically) should never be able to work. At a glance this is the case - the drill animation is frozen and the status light is yellow. However if you hover over it, the machine status switches between "Working" and "Target full", with a surprising amount of time in the "Working" status. I have no way of checking if the machine is actually working, but it shouldn't be possible given a single miner saturates a green belt.

This behavior seems to be present for all groups of 3 mining drills outputting to the same belt, as well for a group of 2 miners in the upper left. The other groups of 2 miners don't exhibit this behavior.

Thanks for the report. I don't currently have a solution to this that doesn't make the status for drills even worse. The issue is: the drill is active because the belt is constantly being removed from - but it can't put the items it's holding onto the belt at the location it wants (the free space is further down the belt).

This is a side effect of the entity status and the actual entity logic being 2 different pieces of code and the status being a "best guess" about the state of the entity. Each tick, the drill updates and fails to output its results, and goes to sleep, but then is woken up by the belt moving and having an item removed.