Factorio Forums

Since Factorio 2.0, you can feed any item directly into an inserter hand by z-dropping over it with an item in hand.

Please remove this behavior.

I have tried to give this feature a fair chance for almost two years now, but it still feels terrible in practice. When manually z-dropping items into assemblers, z-dropping coal into furnaces, or other machines to kickstart production, it is very easy to accidentally put items into nearby inserters instead. Those inserters can then place random wrong items onto belts and pollute production lines, or deadlock machines by inserting items that do not belong there.

I honestly have not encountered a single situation in almost two years where I intentionally wanted to add items to an inserter hand. In every situation, it is just an accidental misclick with annoying consequences.

The issue is common enough that servers like Biter Battles have added an option to automatically move items accidentally fed into inserter hands back into the player’s inventory.

This feels like a feature that only creates mistakes and frustration. Please remove it.

I think I'm missing something. Trying to reproduce what you're describing and nothing happens - in no case does ctrl + clicking the inserter move things into the inserter hand.

If I *open* the inserter and ctrl + click the item in my inventory it will put it into the hand - but that takes a lot more focused effort to do.

Rseding91 wrote: Tue Jul 07, 2026 3:27 pm I think I'm missing something. Trying to reproduce what you're describing and nothing happens - in no case does ctrl + clicking the inserter move things into the inserter hand.

If I *open* the inserter and ctrl + click the item in my inventory it will put it into the hand - but that takes a lot more focused effort to do.

You are totally right, my bad. What I meant is z-dropping items into inserter hands (I use wierd costom hotkeys, so for me its CNTR midclick, sorry)
I corrected the original post accordingly.

Fully agree. z-dropping is really nice for fast feeding smelters for better startup. But (since 2.0) spamming it all over the place just puts coal on the output side so now I have some random coal mixed into my iron plates belt.

+1

Hasn't happened to me specifically, but I have to think the case of hand feeding coal into burner inserters doesn't come up so often (with acknowledgement to Antipatience for being something he might be likely to do ).

+1 to this. I use z-drop a lot and if I'm off a little bit from the machine, it accidentally got into the inserter. I've never once wanted to intentionally z-drop into inserter.

Ok. I was the one who added the code in the past that made it happen and based off the comments on the commit and the code it looks like it was never intended to put stuff into the inserter hand anyway. It looks like it was meant to put fuel items into the fuel slots and that's it.

Based off that, and that ctrl + click that normally fast-transfers into entities doesn't put anything into them - I've changed it for the next release so Z to drop only puts fuel into the fuel slot (if it has one).

awesome! If I knew this was not an intended change, I would have pointed it out much earlier haha. That change really gave me a hard time!

Thank you!!!

Rseding91 wrote: Tue Jul 07, 2026 8:47 pm Ok. I was the one who added the code in the past that made it happen and based off the comments on the commit and the code it looks like it was never intended to put stuff into the inserter hand anyway. It looks like it was meant to put fuel items into the fuel slots and that's it.

Based off that, and that ctrl + click that normally fast-transfers into entities doesn't put anything into them - I've changed it for the next release so Z to drop only puts fuel into the fuel slot (if it has one).

If ctrl + click does not fast transfer to an inserter, but it does fast transfer to an assembler/chest/furnace. For consistency reason, should we be able to z-drop ingredients in an assembler/chest/furnace? It could be used to drop ore into furnaces or to spread anything in chest.