Coal and coal powered drills - inserter behaviour

[Albrat]

TL;DR

Make inserters only remove above 5 of item in "consumable" slots.

WHAT ?

:: Suggestion ::

Make inserters remove coal from a "burner" miner only if the stack is above the "minimum" stocking value for the miner. 5 coal is the normal minimum. -- I placed two inserters, one removing and one inserting. This basically put the coal in a loop on the belt, untill there were 5 coal inside the inserter and it stopped trying to re-insert the extra piece. But it would cause a UPS problem over time. ( better to just not allow the inserter to remove from a stack < 5 )

NB : this is very early game and I have no research yet so no access to circuit networks etc. (hence using burner miners.)

WHY ?

With 0.17 just releasing I decided to make a new game. Complete blank slate.

I have just started out and made a burner miner "loop" for the coal mining. I wanted to remove coal from this loop so I placed a burner inserter that would remove coal from the burner miner. This creates a problem that the inserter will remove all the coal before the miner can consume it. (violating the 5 stack minimum that burner inserters usually maintain inside an inventory.)


Edited to match Suggestion Template, because the second I got here I forgot about the template layout completely.

[Darinth]

I don't think anything in factorio utilizes this rule. While emptying, all of the inserters will always pull until what they're pulling from is empty. They won't overfill an inventory, but they always completely empty it. Where in factorio do inserters actually refuse to empty an inventory?

[SyncViews]

I didn't even realize inserters could pull from burner drills, that is definitely not the normal use case. If the drill is outputting automatically, either onto a belt or into some inventory, this won't happen, as it never outputs its fuel stack.

burner-drill.png (220.77 KiB) Viewed 1716 times

Where in factorio do inserters actually refuse to empty an inventory?

They don't remove the fuel stack from furnaces.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, while not exactly the same, see also how Inserter Fuel Leech does it :

 Inserters leech from other fuel inventories if their fuel inventory is empty or the fuel inventory of the drop target
 contains less than 5 items (5 also is the vanilla count of fuel items, that are put in burners by default when
 fuelling from a belt).

----

[I have just started out and made a burner miner "loop" for the coal mining. I wanted to remove coal from this loop so I placed a burner inserter that would remove coal from the burner miner. This creates a problem that the inserter will remove all the coal before the miner can consume it. (violating the 5 stack minimum that burner inserters usually maintain inside an inventory.)

Why not do something like this though ?

[Albrat]

that is a nice idea. It is just that I realised that you could extract the contents of a burner miner using an inserter. it is sort of a bug i guess...

I have the miners setup to feed each other in loop back using a burner inserter to remove the excess... But now i am already into the electric miners. I generally only use 3 burner miners to get to the steam engines and electric stage.

[Darinth]

They don't remove the fuel stack from furnaces.

Inserters don't pull fuel from furnaces at all, they pull the smelted product. I'm more asking 'is there anything that an inserter will pull fuel out of that it won't pull all of it?'

[BlueTemplar]

I'd say more a feature than a bug... (It also works for boilers.)