Factorio Forums

In 0.15 I built a lot of loading stations that used 4 stack inserters to pick up items from 1 compressed blue belt and insert it into a chest and this all worked fine.
Since the change to belt mechanics in 0.16 they however wait too long for items on the right lane before switching to picking up from the left lane. This causes the left lane to back up while 4 stack inserters should be more than sufficient to pick up a compressed blue belt. Especially since it only takes 4 to create a compressed blue belt (I tested, 56 ticks per swing to put down 12 items on a belt).

In the included picture you can see that one lane is uncompressed while the other lane is backing up. This causes the belt to backup into my builds that then have no space to put down their items and reduces the efficiency of everything.


What I expect: Stack inserters should consider picking up from the other lane sooner so they can actually work at/closer to full capacity

I like your solution to the problem.
Though I don't trust sideloading at the moment, so I don't know if this system would hold up in the long run.

side loading with 100% throughput.
also don't be afraid to check out, and ask questions in gameplay help.

While I appreciate the help in circumventing the issue, I already had a working setup. But as a side effect of a change to the game those stack inserters are working at about 70% of their maximum capacity, which I consider a bug.

This seems to be because inserters always want to pull from the left lane when pulling from the end, causing them to repeatedly move back to it (delaying slightly) every time a single item comes through. Moving half the inserters to the left lane and half to the right lane gives full throughput - in fact they enter equilibrium, pulling from the far lane when there's not enough items (which is slow and causes that lane to back up), then pulling quickly from the near lane once there's enough backed up.

Hello, can you please provide save or at least blueprint string of the setup? Thank you.

also, when picking up mixed items they are working faster if you disable multipickup and reduce the item count to 1. Its also because they wait too long to move.

iSd3d wrote:also, when picking up mixed items they are working faster if you disable multipickup and reduce the item count to 1. Its also because they wait too long to move.

or just use fast inserters if you need speed instead of volume.

Oh, I didn't notice Posilla responded. Thanks for your time! Here's a save with the setup.
Even if I manually balance the items over the four chests, the system becomes unbalanced again because the inserters pick up so slowly.