Factorio Forums

It would be nice if inserters pulling items out of a chest would pull from the smallest stack instead of simply the last stack. Why? Well, for example, take a look at this spoilage chest: The intent here is to take mash/jelly/spoilage off the belt and place it in the chest, wait for it to spoil (if not already), and then pull it out of the chest and put it on a belt. The problem is, the filtered stack inserter always pulls from the last stack of spoilage in the chest, instead of the smallest, and this results in a lot of small stacks of spoilage in the chest. For example, here it is while it's still filling up, and you can see numerous small stacks caused by the inserter pulling from a different stack as items turn into spoilage: And after some time, it looks like this: With all these slots full of small amounts of spoilage, it limits how many more items can come in, and thus the throughput of spoilage through the chest. This isn't as bad with a legendary chest (as seen here), but the smaller the chest, and the faster your inserters are, the bigger the problem is.

And yes, I'm aware there are other ways to create spoilage, like throwing nutrients into a recycler, but this is even cheaper than that and doesn't require a recycler (and all the other things that requires, like modules, power, nutrients, etc.).