Factorio Forums

Here is the scenario:

I have two inserters per furnace, one to handle the ore, and one to handle the fuel. Unfortunately, one of the mining drills was overlapping a coal ore, and released coal onto the ore line. This is obviously undesirable, but shouldn't stop the operation.

If two inserters are trying to insert coal, the second inserter stops moving even though there is space for the coal. It is waiting for the furnace to drop below 5 coal, however this can't happen because it needs more ore, which it can grab if it just doesn't stop. So I suggest that it would be allowed to insert fuel above 5 fuel, and only check before picking the fuel up.

That might solve this special situation. But in general it don't solves the problem.

I try to explain by a somehow similar situation:
You fill up a wagon directly from a belt with five inserters. When the wagon is full, it can happen, that an inserter already greped an item and now it cannot insert it into wagon, because it is full. So one inserter has an item in its hand, the other 4 not. I take this example, because it is easy to reproduce and clearly visible.
I don't know how to solve that situation, because that means, that all inserters, filling one entity needs to communicate. The inserters needs to wait, depending on the number of inserters and how many they can grep in one hand.
The same problem appears for logistic bots. There are special cases, e. g. One inserter takes out from a chest and another from a belt and a third from an assembly. What happens, when in that moment the last stack is taken by another item-type? And much more things.

As said, I don't know how to solve that, because the inserters needs to communicate in some way (attention! we are now one step before it might be filled up!) and communication is CPU intensive.

This particular problem was easy to solve.
Once the coal is in the hand of the inserter, it will try to put the coal inside even if it goes over the 5 items limit.
Will be fixed in 0.7.2