Factorio Forums

We already have inserters picking coal from boilers, it would be nice to extend this behaviour to input products in assembling machines.
You could then build the following assembly line :

AM1[iron gear wheel] #1 > parallel(AM1[transport belt] #2,AM2[electric inserter] #3) > AM1[green science] #4 > AM1[green science] #5

#1 picks iron plates from belt
#2 picks iron plates and gear wheels from #1
#3 picks iron plates and gear wheels from #1 and electronic circuit from an other belt
#4 picks transport belt and electric inserter from #2 and #3
#5 picks transport belt and electric inserter from #4

This would open a lot of possibilities design-wise.

BTW, thank you for 1) making such a great game 2) run natively on Linux

This is slightly problematic. For boilers there is only one inventory slot, so there is no ambiguity in what the inserter should pick. For assemblers, you always have at least two slots - one for output and at least one for input. If inserters are allowed to pick from any slot of an assembling machine's inventory, this would mean you need some way to choose which item it takes, and while there are ways to do it I think most (if not all) of them would make simple designs needlessly cumbersome (e.g. - you'll have to put smart inserters on all AM outputs, or maybe add another click for every inserter you place)

If I set up an AM with a given recipe and an inserter picking from a crate to said AM, and then drop all kind of items into the crate, the inserter picks only what is needed by the recipe, right ? Although I do admit there need to be some mechanism to prevent an output inserter from emptying all of the AM buffers onto the output belt ...