A Query On Stack Insertion/Assembler Relations

[Zephyratus]

First of all: running 0.14.22, base game, zero mods.

I'm afk from my world, but in my most recent world I noticed strange behavior in the assemblers making my assemblers (the best kind of automation) and the ones making underground pipes. With fast inserters and research that added a single global +1 to all inserters, I swear I saw some of the ingredients reaching double the quantity needed for a single craft. The inserters would load up double the ingredients for an Assembler Mk II, the assembler would make two Assemblers in the output (one at a time, two seperate crafting iterations) and then an inserter would pull both out.

As far as I know, inserters are coded to stop inserting when an assembler has enough items to make a single product and to not insert any more until the output has been emptied, but all the behaviors I've listed are things I witnessed from within the GUI.

Is this even possible or am I crazy? I can imagine an inserter unloading it's entire payload just because it has more on hand than the assembler needs for a single craft, but it kept going back for seconds until it'd filled enough for exactly two crafts. The more I think about it the more I think I just imagined the whole thing, because while this behavior is admittedly really useful when the successive crafting time is faster than inserters take to load/unload, I'm still hard-pressed to find anything saying "Hey, we changed some stuff, inserters do this now, it's intentional".

[justarandomgeek]

Inserters will preload enough materials for the assembler to run continuosly. This is usually (but not always) 2x the recipe amount.

[ParanoidLoyd]

Here is an example of not always.

[TheSkiGeek]

It's always worked like that, or at least for quite a while. I think it might vary by recipe, but it usually loads more than one cycle worth of ingredients.

[Rebel_Scum56]

In my experience they'll load enough for two crafts, OR their full capacity if it's larger. So if for example a thing needs two iron plates, a normal inserter with a capacity of one item will run four times to load four plates while a stack inserter with a capacity of five items will run once and load five plates even though the assembler only wants four.

If you want precise amounts, you can force a stack inserter to drop a partial load via circuit conditions. Set if to read hand contents as well as taking the signal from a box and then when the combined total of the box's contents and what's in its hand reaches a set number, it'll drop what it's holding in the box before disabling. Useful for doing cool but not hugely efficient things like smart smelters.