Factorio Forums

Latest 2.1.8 changes has affected Legendary Inserter's rotation times from consistent 8 ticks per cycle into inconsistent 8/9 ticks depending on swing direction.

I will explain this on maxed out Legendary Stack Inserter (4 stacks of size 4).

For chest-to-chest movement:
If it is horizontal, then all is as intended - 8 ticks per cycle (4 ticks for forward movement, and 4 ticks backward). But vertical one alternates between 8 ticks for left-sided rotation (4+4) and 9 for right-sided one (5+4 if looking up, 4+5 if looking down), meaning it takes 1 tick longer to travel every second cycle when swinging from right side upwards (counterclockwise).
You can easily test if for yourself by pasting in editor chest-to-chest inserters for all 4 rotations side by side, and seeing them desync almost instantly. Example below: Exactly same for chest-to-belt and belt-to-chest movement, just with some extra amount of ticks in the middle depending on stack size and pick conditions.

Lower quality inserters do not see such issue, they have consistent swing cycle times.
I do not need to explain how devastating it is - it drops throughput from 120 to ~113 for chest-to-chest and from 80 to ~76 for chest-to-belt, which ruins a lot of builds and ratios. Secondary it breaks all clocked builds which do tick-perfect output, not only by changing the active window duration, but making it alternate uncontrollably.
And finally it is exact opposite of what 2.1.8 fix wanted to do - consistent swing times regardless of rotation or mirroring, which is right call, but current version is anything but for legendary inserter, admittedly the only quality inserter for all megabasers.

I really do hope that will be fixed to what it was before, please, Wube.

134293?

Can you share a testbed save please? I am putting one together myself to measure the tick times across versions, because this sounds interesting.

Yes, but since it was rejected for not being technical enough, i decided to make a post with exact details on the issue.

Here is the test map with display clock, switch and 3 cases with 4 directions to see it: Reply to previous post was indicating that this is insignificant, but for my base it literally breaks all builds, because they are all clocked.

Definitely seems like a problem that needs to be fixed. Veteran players remember when direction of the rails decided how many inserters would fit per train cart, but a great effort has been taken by the devs to remove these kinds of quirks. I think the inserter swinging has been tweaked too over the years.

I can also add to this issue, it's messing up any setup I have that uses 2 legendary stack inserters to fill a belt lane. It seems like the timings are a bit off so the inserter ends up leaving gaps where it doesn't swing over the belt in time. They do seem ever so slightly slower visually as well, but not sure if that's just a placebo.

I made a simple blueprint to test it: Here's how it looked on 2.1.7 and earlier:


And here's what happens on 2.1.8:


This does in fact only occur with vertical inserters. If I paste the blueprint rotated so the inserters are horizontal, it works fine and has no gaps like the 2.1.7 image.