| In Dwarf Fortress's production chains (version 53.16, as its wiki describes it), where one industry's end products often feed another, fetching the materials and hauling the product away are dwarves' jobs, and the wiki says no process can be truly automated. In Factorio, the Factorio Wiki says, inserters move items between belts and into and out of machines, and an assembling machine set to a recipe "should craft the item" once all its requested ingredients are in its input slots. | opening paragraph | Wiki |
Inserters turn at a fixed rotation_speed: burner 0.013, inserter 0.014, long-handed 0.02, fast and bulk 0.04. The wiki gives the unit as turns per tick. | Inserter speed | Code |
| The wiki measures a full swing (pick up, drop, return) at 76 ticks for the burner inserter, 70 for the inserter, 48 for the long-handed inserter and 24 for the fast and bulk inserters: about 0.79, 0.86, 1.25 and 2.5 swings a second. | Inserter speedInserter throughput, Chest to chestRotation speed | Wiki |
| By default an inserter drops onto the far lane of a belt that crosses in front of it, and it picks up from the near lane first. Wube's FFF #442 describes the drop arrow shifting to the side the inserter will drop to, and flipping the inserter to change that side. Since 2.1.7, an inserter dropping onto a splitter always feeds the splitter's input side. | Inserters and transport beltsInserters and transport belts | Wiki |
| An inserter stops feeding fuel to a boiler that holds 5 or more items of it. | Insertion limits | Wiki |