Hi

I have a copper plate foundry setup on Vulcanus with 4 beaconed foundries that gets belted to a big chest. The foundries use turbo loaders to output to the belt and insert into the chest. Currently the setup is slightly positive, with the chest gaining a stack of copper every couple of seconds. But if I replace the loaders connected to the foundries with stack inserters, the setup runs negative.

I did a two minute test on a savegame I have. With loaders, the chest gained 17 stacks of copper in those two minutes. When I reloaded the save and replaced the loaders with stack inserters, the chest LOST 44 stacks of copper in the same two minutes.

When I look at the production screen, my consumption is slightly higher than my production, fluctuating from 12k-14k while my production is a steady 12k constantly, leading me to suspect that the loaders may be outputting more copper than is actually being produced and that the stack inserters are simply getting the "real" output from the foundries.

I'm wondering if it could be a strange interaction with the Infinite Belt Stacking mod, since that's the only other mod I have that affects loaders, stack inserters and belts. I have 55 levels of that researched which increases belt capacity to +56 and stack inserters to 5+64 capacity, and presumably similar for the loaders. I have the belt stacking option enabled.

With loaders: https://i.imgur.com/z5XfJc6.png
With Inserters: https://i.imgur.com/vKNoM8v.png

Actually, I think I see a different explanation for this inconsistency, which is due to the aforementioned Infinite Belt Stacking mod. When loaders are outputting from a chest, they don't fully saturate the belt, they seem to toss out the last stack in the chest which is often not a complete stack unless the chest is entirely full. With foundries using stack inserters at high belt stacking research levels, the last stack will almost always have 50+ plates in it, which isn't the case with loaders where they feed the chest a continuous stream of smaller stacks. So what I might be seeing is the loader on the copper chest outputting more plates to the belt when I use inserters in the foundries compared to loaders, causing the belt (which is very long) to buffer a lot more plates than usual which normally would be left in the chest.

Well, that'll teach me to check closer before I make a bug report. Sorry about that!