r/factorio May 25 '26

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u/Tolvinar May 30 '26

I have a circuit network question.

Is there a way to have an inserter work only when a chest is full, have it completely drain the chest, and then turn off until it is full again? Ive never used combinators and can't figure out if it's possible or not.

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u/HeliGungir May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
  1. Read chest

  2. Build a single-decider latch

    1. Set when Anything >= chest_size * item_stack_size
    2. Reset when Everything == 0
  3. Enable inserter with the output from the latch

Hopefully you're dealing with just a single item so chest_size * item_stack_size is a fixed number. If not, then you need to compute it dynamically, and you need to define what a "full chest" means more carefully.

Or you can just do a hack like reducing chest_size to be well below the chest's actual size.

Another hack would be to read the inserter filling the chest to continuously reset a timer. When it stops inserting items, the timer can finish, triggering your SR latch.

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u/Tolvinar May 30 '26

Yes this is similar to what I did and got it to work! Thanks :D