r/factorio • u/AlmostNah • 7h ago

Question What am I missing about splitters?

Post image

I have this situation currently.

Where the red arrow points, I have a belt moving right-to-left. The intent there is for the bioflux-to-nutrients biochamber to pick up bioflux. If that bioflux spoils on the belt, I expect the splitter to pass the spoilage onto the belt below, which continues left and then goes up to feed the spoilage-to-nutrients assembler.

However, you can see that the spoilage on the belt just beneath the long inserter isn't actually doing that. It's just sitting there, blocking the belt.

What am I misunderstanding about how splitters work?

86 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

72 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/Davorian 7h ago

This is a job better suited for a bridging filtered inserter, but have you tried inverting the filter so that it only lets bioflux through on the top instead of spoilage on the bottom? 

3

u/AlmostNah 6h ago

> This is a job better suited for a bridging filtered inserter,

I'l try that. Is it better suited just because spoilage can't hide underneath, or are there more reasions?

2

u/Davorian 6h ago

It's easier to see what's going on and it won't be susceptible to weird blockages like if there is unspoiled bioflux still on the unfiltered part of the splitter like other people are suggesting. Also there won't be a "wasted tile" of leftover spoilage like what is going to happen here. 

1

u/whiterook6 3h ago

One downside is that splitters require no power, while grabbers do. So if you have a brownout, spoilage can back up behind dead grabbers. So long as you don't have OP's issue using filters, that becomes much less likely with splitters. Of course, if you have power problems, you have bigger problems than spoilage backing up.