Factorio Forums

TL;DR

add a logic that when inserter steal item from another inserter "P",it will update the "P" to check its fuel slot and trying take fuel from where it take item from.

What ?

when playing space exploration,because it wasn`t give you belt at begining,so I just do this to fuel the burner machines: it can work,for the first few coal,however because inserter wasn`t update the inserter it took its fuel,
so the pervious inserter will not trying take fuel from perv inserter,and so on and so forth,it will not work.

This sounds like a bug, not a suggestion. The inserter that fuel is taken from should wake up when fuel is taken.

moved from suggestions to bugs
Sounds wired enough to move it.

I am looking into this bug reports and i have to scratch my head to understand what is wrong and what is the expected behavior here.

Inserters do not support concept of the output inventory (at least for now), so they cannot become pickup target of another inserter. For the inserter to pick fuel from source, it has to have it as a valid pickup target, even if the burner leech flag is enabled. In this case burner leech will not work at all due to missing output inventory (even when there is the fuel inventory). First 2 inserters in this chain will become fueled, first by self fueling, and second will be fueled by the first inserter. Third inserter in this chain will not be fueled because second inserter has no valid pickup target to get items from and third inserter cannot take fuel out of second inserter.

I can safely throw this bug report to "not a bug". Its just an obscure and not supported use case. If you want you can drop items directly on ground (leave every second inserter) or use small chests in between of them (preferred as in this case inserter will be able to sleep on the chest content).

boskid wrote: Tue Sep 07, 2021 10:22 am I am looking into this bug reports and i have to scratch my head to understand what is wrong and what is the expected behavior here.

Inserters do not support concept of the output inventory (at least for now), so they cannot become pickup target of another inserter. For the inserter to pick fuel from source, it has to have it as a valid pickup target, even if the burner leech flag is enabled. In this case burner leech will not work at all due to missing output inventory (even when there is the fuel inventory). First 2 inserters in this chain will become fueled, first by self fueling, and second will be fueled by the first inserter. Third inserter in this chain will not be fueled because second inserter has no valid pickup target to get items from and third inserter cannot take fuel out of second inserter.

I can safely throw this bug report to "not a bug". Its just an obscure and not supported use case. If you want you can drop items directly on ground (leave every second inserter) or use small chests in between of them (preferred as in this case inserter will be able to sleep on the chest content).

Chests are rather large and you would get a lot of coal wasted even if each chest is limited to 1 stack. belts let the inserter sleep too, right? But I guess the need for a burner inserter chain is the lack of belts in early (modded) game.

Even if an inserter would report the output inventory so it is a candidate for a burner leech (if that is enabled by a mod), most likely it would only report the output inventory when a burner energy source would have a burnt result inventory. Another issue is that inserters do not contain wakeup list so any entity trying to insert items into or take items out would not go to sleep (93859). Trying to expose the inserter's heldStack is also not going to happen, it would have to be turned into full inventory and it would allow cheaty rapid item transfers at speed of hand size items by one tile every tick. There is more cases where inserters will not sleep, like when trying to pickup items from ground (ground has no wakeup list so inserters cannot sleep here).

Burner inserter chain that drops onto a ground should have roughly the same performance impact as suggested chain of burners taking directly from each other. In both cases all inserters will be always active but first one has less entities and works with current logic while the other has more active inserters and some non intuitive assumptions about interactions between inserters.