Factorio Forums

When two items arrive at the same location on a transport belt the sort of get stuck.
They appear next to each other and go half the speed.
In the image I provide you can see that the middle iron mine produces ore just as ore arrives from the top.

I know it's easy to fix by moving the transport belt one down. But I thought it would have been best to notify you.

I had seen that too, but thought it was intentionally. Same thing as with items in a u-turn, I thought. But with the last change I mean it is not.

Well, we will call this just a bad setup.
The movement from the center helps, but it doesn't solve all situations.

This isn't specific to mines. It has to do with that particular kind of junction I think, where one belt comes from one side and another from the other.

The center inserters place it in the center of the belt and it slides then to one of the belt lanes (depends on rotating of the inserter). But if there is already an item, it cannot slide.

I had that situation at my train stations, when the flow was blocked and I found no good solutions to get rid of it. The best solutions was to avoid such side-insert crossings or to create an extra row, where the inserters place the items first on a orthogonal belt so that it side inserts into the main belt. But that costs an extra row, which hurts sometimes at train stations.

I would not swear it, but I'm 80% sure, this doesn't happen before v0.8.4...

I'm not sure, if I like it.

ssilk wrote:I would not swear it, but I'm 80% sure, this doesn't happen before v0.8.4...

Take a look at the thread title [Edit] I was hinting at the mentionend number : [0.7.0]

What I meant was: eventually it makes sense to keep that as a puzzle-like problem in the game. But the longer I think about it, the longer I mean it should be avoided, because it happens too random. In industry every kind of randomness is removed as far as possible.

What was the original problem that made the devs add the sliding?

Well, this thing has a long history:
I think in v0.6 Kovarex added, that items from side-inserts have a bigger chance to come into the belt.
With that the chance, that an item not on lane would stuck rises.

In V0.7.0 he added that items layed by miners and orthogonal inserters was layed in the center.
- Straight belt pushes items from the center to one of the sides, so randomly inserted items on belt shouldn't cause stucks in the U turns.

Well. Since then this happens. For normal usage a player won't see it and I think it is ok, that it may stuck, when a belt was destroyed and repaired.
What I mean is, that this happens only in such a case as a group of inserters unloads from chests and met in the center:
It's difficult to say, if it is a bug. And what to do against it. I could live with it, but I think this is so special, that it shouldn't be in the gameplay.

What I also thought: A splitter could have the possibility to order the items correctly. Like so:
So, if placed like so, the splitter places the items in the center correctly.