Factorio Forums

For some reason the inserter's are not pulling the items off of the belts to the factories. If I load the factories manually they work fine and the ones pictured above are working just fine. I had this same problem in my first game and thought it might just have been a corrupted file but now it has happened again. I can't see any logical reason why the insserter's are not working. Your help is appreciated!

David

It looks like the factories are finished and there's nowhere for the output to go. If you open the assembler, are ~4 items already in the output slot?

assemblers effectively have 2 modes of operation.
1. when they are completely hand fed (no inserter feeding them materials). in which case they will keep making their recepie untill they run out of a material or the output slot has a full stack in it and cant fit more.

2. when there is atleast one inserter putting materials into an assembler, the assembler will try to "conserve" your materials and only fill the output slot to a few pieces (i think its 2 or 4 recepies worth). to make it keep going, add an inserter that takes the results out of the assember and puts into a chest (or keep taking them out manualy, but that's annoying to do).

That was it, amazing how something so simple can mess one up. I didn't realize the factories had no storage beyond four. Thanks for your help!

David

It is not the assembler that cant do more than 4, it is the inserter that dont want to put in if assembler has more

Yeap, inserters stop adding items when the double amount of what's needed for the production is reached.
(If your production item would need 8 copper plates, the inserter will stop at 16).