Inserters

< Transport network

Inserters are the fundamental structures of a factory. They look and work like a robot-arm and take items from behind and place them in front of it.

Inserters will

• pick up Items off the Ground, off a Transport belt, or from any object that has stacks (eg. Storages/Chests, Furnaces, Assembling machines)
• place the moved item onto the ground, on a transport belt, or into any object that has stacks.

Inserter mechanics

Inserters will act differently depending on what they are moving items to/into so as not to monopolize all of the items being picked up and allow other machines and inserters on the same transport belt to have items.

Insertion Limits

Inserters will not insert into certain buildings if they already have, or are above of, a certain amount of items.

For example, if a boiler has 5 pieces of fuel in it, then an inserter will not insert additional fuel until it has 4 or less.

• Boilers, Burner inserters and Furnaces will not accept more than 5 x Fuel.
• Gun turrets will not accept more than 10 x Magazine (since v0.8.4).
• Assembling machines: will not accept more than twice the items needed in the recipe.
• Labs: will not accept more than twice the items needed for one research point.
• For smelting, Furnaces have the same limits as assemblers. Example: no more than 10 x Iron plate is accepted for smelting into Steel plate.

Placing

• Transport belts: Inserters will always place the item on the further lane.
• for orthogonal belts, inserter place items in the direction of their rotation. This is by default up for horizontal or left for vertical placed inserters. When taking from a belt, they can change sometimes this direction!

How to change lanes

http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3916

http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3920

Types

Item	Total raw	Max power	Speed (secs.)	Range (tiles)	Special
File:Burner-inserter.png Burner inserter	File:Iron-plate.png 3	180 W (burner)	1	1	Only inserter using Fuel.
Inserter	File:Iron-plate.png 4 File:Copper-plate.png 1.5	12.6 W (electric)	1	1	Standard inserter.
File:Long-handed-inserter.png Long handed inserter	File:Iron-plate.png 7 File:Copper-plate.png 1.5	18 W (electric)	1	2	Only inserter with higher range.
File:Fast-inserter.png Fast inserter	File:Iron-plate.png 8 File:Copper-plate.png 4.5	31.5 W (electric)	2.4	1	Basic faster inserter.
Smart inserter	File:Iron-plate.png 12 File:Copper-plate.png 10.5	44.1 W (electric)	2.4	1	Only inserter connectable to Circuit networks and with configurable working condition.

Special behavior

• Inserters/Interaction with other Entities
• Inserters/Instead of belt: use it instead of a belt
• Inserters/Reduce power consumption
• Inserter item stack size: inserter moves more than an item per turn, works only for transport from stack to stack
• Inserters:Focus/Grep-Points
• Inserters/Priority
• Storages/Sorting (extended filtering)

See also

• Electric network
• Transport network