Inserters
A day of design: how goods get from a stockpile onto a belt and into a machine.
Belts move goods along, but something has to put goods onto them and take them off. Today was mostly design, for a piece called the inserter.
The rules I settled on:
- The inserter is the only bridge. A belt never feeds straight into a machine or a stockpile. Between stockpile and belt, and between belt and machine, there’s always an inserter. It makes every hand-over visible.
- It reaches exactly one tile behind it to pick up and one tile ahead to drop off, in a straight line.
- Machines take up to three inputs, from behind, left and right, and give out one product at the front.
- Every raw good gets its own input stockpile. A new stockpile starts empty and belongs to whatever arrives first, so wood and iron never mix.
Factory floors also grew to 20 by 20 tiles, because the old floor already felt cramped.