Remove ability for inserters to interact with the beacons

[Hares]

TL;DR

Inserters should not be able to insert modules into beacons and, more importantly, remove them.

What?

Literally "What?". "What?" was my first thought when I saw them doing so. So many times rotating an inserter ended up with it grabbing out a module or two and putting them in the belt or getting stuck in its hand.

Why?

WHY do you think it increases the value of Factorio as a game?
Exactly. WHY this interaction is in the game in the first place? No other entity can interact with the modules in such way, and there's literally no reason to do so. Beacons don't consume less energy when they have no modules, and construction robots (especially in 2.0) can add/change/remove modules easily via upgrade planner (or even Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V).

[Tinyboss]

Beacons don't consume less energy when they have no modules, and construction robots (especially in 2.0) can add/change/remove modules easily via upgrade planner (or even Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V).

But the buildings in their area of effect do use less energy without (speed/prod) modules. And inserters can be automated with the circuit network. The point is to allow a factory to choose automatically and dynamically which modules to use.

As an example off the top of my head, you could have a ship that uses prod/speed in assemblers when stopped in orbit, but swaps them out for efficiency during travel to reserve power for laser turrets.

[Hares]

On the ground, power switch exists. The starship case is irrelevant as the only chest available is space platform hub, and making a belt full of modules just to potentially save some of cheap & infinite asteroic resources doesn't look like someone sane would do. Unless they are doing so on purpose but then they can use mods.

[Tinyboss]

The ship example was just to illustrate the idea. Work was done to make automatic selection of recipes possible, and it makes a lot of sense that we'd want to use different modules depending on the recipe being crafted.

[Tinyboss]

On the ground, power switch exists.

True, but that can only turn off a beacon, not put different modules into it. And having one beacon with each kind of modules obviously won't work because it wastes beacon spots.

[Stargateur]

haha I love it, so many possibility, I would left this feature

[myridium]

"Remove this feature from the game because sometimes I accidentally use it."

[DeadMG]

Honestly I don't see any genuine use case for this, it only ever seems to be used by mistake, so removing it seems fine to me.

[MeduSalem]

No.

I remember I was one of the original people who wanted the ability to be able to remove modules from beacons with inserters in the first place. So I just say no. ^^

I would only agree with the removal of the feature of being able to use inserters to remove the modules, if they would give beacons a circuit network connection that allows to disable beacons on demand.

Otherwise leave it as it is.

Because currently the only other way to turn beacons "off" is to use power switches. But I am one of those players who hates using the power switch to turn them off because it is sometimes difficult to do that when power poles effect such big areas. But what is way more annoying is the constant blinking when machines are un-powered. ^^

[Hares]

You don't disable beacons with power switches; you disable the entire production areas to stop energy drain. And I can't really imagine a non-modded scenario where you really need to manage which modules are inserted into the beacon – feel free to give me one. Why am I speaking of unmodded? Because in modded Factorio, recursive blueprints exist, allowing to programmatically apply any update to your facility. And the feature in subject – it hurts more than benefits.