Inserters

Inserters are single-tile-sized robotic arms that move items automatically. They swing back and forth, grabbing from the tile in front and placing on the tile behind (except for the long handed inserter that reaches further). They can face any of four directions and they can interact with machines, chests, vehicles, and transport belts, making them essential for nearly all automated production.

Basics

All inserters except for burner inserters run on electricity. Most hold one item at a time, though technology upgrades can raise the base hand capacity.

When interacting with chests and buildings, the direction of the inserter is simple: If it faces away from the building, it will work to add in inputs or fuel, and if it faces towards a building, it will work to take out outputs. Pointing to specific parts of buildings is not required.

Inserter interactions with transport belts are a little more direction-dependent: When taking from a transport belt, an inserter prefers the closer one of the two belt lanes but it can grab from both. When placing onto a belt, the inserter can only place onto the further one of the two lanes, even if the near lane is empty. This might sound annoying at first but it is beneficial for keeping lanes separated.

Burner inserters are slow while electric inserters have regular and fast variants. The speed matters for transporting items faster, but also, slower inserters fail to catch items that are traveling along fast-moving belts. For example burner, inserters can only keep up with basic belts, regular inserters can keep up with fast belts, and fast inserters can keep up with any belts.

Automatic filtering and sharing

Inserters automatically filter to items relevant to their destination machine. For example, an inserter feeding a lab will only pick up science packs, or am inserter feeding an assembling machine with a specific crafting recipe will only pick up items that are used in the recipe. Similarly, if the building uses a fuel, an input inserter will supply fuel to it as well, while an output inserter will never take out fuel.

As an automatic way to prevent item hoarding, inserters stop after "sufficiently" filling the input slots of the buildings they feed, leaving the remainder of the source items available for other machines to use. Similarly, when multiple inserters share a source tile, they take turns in picking up from it so that the source is distributed evenly between the available inserters.

Custom Filtering

Any inserter can be configured to use custom item filters. You can set up to 5 filters for specific items or in some cases item groups. The filtering can use either a whitelist logic, where filter items are the only ones picked up, or they can use a blacklist logic, where filter items are the only ones ignored.

Burner inserter

Burner inserters are the simplest inserters to craft and they are available from the start. However, they are much slower than any of the electric inserters and they require burner fuels to function, such as wood or coal. They have enough energy for a few swings when first placed down, and they can refuel themselves when they need to if they happen to pick up a fuel, but otherwise they have be refueled constantly by either the engineer or by other inserters. These refueling requirements make burner inserters hard to work with unless they are used to move fuel items.

Unlike most other burner devices, these inserters do not generate pollution. Their fuel consumption efficiency is also pretty low: It is more fuel efficient to burn a piece of coal in a boiler to create steam power and then run some electric inserters rather than to use the same piece of coal to run a burner inserter.

Regular inserter

The regular inserter is the standard electric inserter and it is the most widely used variant. It transfers items fast enough for most assembling machine operations in the early game and it also works fast enough to be usable with regular transport belts and fast transport belts.

Notably, crafting any other electric inserter requires a regular inserter as an ingredient, which means it is safe to mass produce this variant without concern.

Long-handed inserter

The long-handed inserter operates at the same throughput speed as regular inserter but it has a longer reach and it swings faster to compensate. Instead of taking from the tile directly in front and placing on the tile directly behind, it takes from the second tile ahead and places on the second tile behind. It ignores all tiles directly next to it, even if there are electric poles or other obstacles in the way.

Long handed inserters are useful in complex assembly lines. For example, if you want to feed a row of furnaces with a belt of coal and a belt of ore, you can run the two belts right next to the row, and then use regular inserters to take from the closer belt and long handed inserters to take from the farther belt.

Fast inserter

Fast inserters are unlocked with automation science technology. They are identical to regular inserters except for working much faster. This makes them preferred for operations that require transferring a lot of items fast, such as when loading trains or crafting lots of copper wire very quickly. Fast inserters can keep up with even the fastest belts.

Not every task requires a fast inserter, and if there is instead space to place multiple regular inserters, this might be a more efficient alternative.

Bulk inserter

Bulk inserters are upgraded fast inserters that are unlocked with logistics science technology. Their upgrade is that they can hold more items in hand, making them have even greater throughput for the tasks that can benefit from it, like loading trains. When loading a large handful of items onto a transport belt, a bulk inserter lays them down one at a time.

Stack inserter

Stack inserters are special fast inserters in Factorio Space Age. They are unlocked using advanced technology. They allow placing stacks of items onto transport belts instead of individual items. Unlike other inserters that can lay only one item at a time per belt slot, stack inserters can lay up to 4 items stacked on top of each other per belt slot, making the belt have several times more capacity.

Note that collecting from stacks of items on belts can be done by any inserter.

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See also:

• Transport Belt Basics
• Chests
• Furnaces

External links:

• Official Factorio Wiki: Inserter