Inserters

Standing on that factory floor yesterday, one thing was missing. Belts move goods along, but something has to put the goods onto them and take them off again. I didn’t build much today. I spent it thinking about that piece, the inserter.

The first decision was that 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 is always an inserter. I wanted every hand-over to be something you can see happen.

I kept it simple on purpose. An inserter reaches exactly one tile behind it to pick something up and one tile ahead to put it down, in a straight line. The machines it feeds can take up to three different inputs, from behind, left and right, and give out one product at the front.

The stockpiles changed with it. Every raw good now gets its own input stockpile. A new one starts empty and belongs to whatever arrives first, so wood and iron never end up in the same pile.

And while I was laying all this out, the floor that had felt like a real place only yesterday already felt cramped. So floors grew to 20 by 20 tiles.