Sorters keep breaking.

[Ethario]

First time playing the game 100% vanilla no mods, when making new machines sorters constantly break they pick up and item but get stuck a frame before delivering what is going on ?

[!?!]

Do you have mixed belts or do they pick stuff up from a chest with lots of different ingredients in it?

[margalus]

Sounds like you have polluted belts

[Cheet4h]

To elaborate on both points:
Unless you set the sorter's filter, it will grab anything from its source and try to deliver it to the object it is attached to. If the object is a factory, and the grabbed item cannot be put in there, the sorter gets stuck.

You can check which item the sorter is currently holding by holding the mouse cursor over it and checking the tooltip.

To fix this, either set a filter on the sorter, or make sure your belts only carry a single kind of item.

[sora]

I found If you put the sorters from A building to B building.it works at first. When the raw materials from A are exhausted and you put some more to A building .The sorters will not works.You should take back the sorter and re-put it.

Maybe it is a bug

You should avoid connect sorters from building to building when the raw materials may be exhausted. if you connect the sorters from building A to belt ,its ok

[josmith7]

Originally posted by Cheet4h:

To elaborate on both points:
Unless you set the sorter's filter, it will grab anything from its source and try to deliver it to the object it is attached to. If the object is a factory, and the grabbed item cannot be put in there, the sorter gets stuck.

You can check which item the sorter is currently holding by holding the mouse cursor over it and checking the tooltip.

To fix this, either set a filter on the sorter, or make sure your belts only carry a single kind of item.

Unless they changed the behavior in the latest patch a sorter won't grab anything the factory's recipe doesn't use -- so it won't grab just anything from its source.
However it'll grab any input to the factory's current recipe whether or not the factory is currently short on that item. So if you were making, say, magnetic coils and the assembler's internal buffer was full of magnets but it was waiting on copper ingots the (unfiltered) sorter would still grab another magnet if that came by before the copper.

And now the sorter is deadlocked -- it can't pick up any copper ingots that might come by because it's still holding a magnet - but the factory can't make room to accept a magnet until it gets some copper so it can make a magnetic coil. Now you've got to manually intervein to get things going again (either remove the magnet from the sorter or manually inject some copper into the assembler.

Basically the game works better if you use dedicated single material belts so a sorter can't ever pick up the wrong thing. (Because even if you filtered your sorters a mixed content belt might get stuck where all of items going by were the wrong one, but because nothing's getting removed the belt can't bring the right items)

[Ethario]

Nothing like you guys are describing is happening to me. The sorter has a copper plate in its hand and the machine needs copper plate but it will just get stuck. Clearing the copper plate from the sorter makes it pick up another one and get stuck in the exact same position only fix is to remove the sorter completely and reattach. Happens every 20 mins to me on some random machine very frustrating.

[Cheet4h]

Is the copper input on that machine empty or filled? Note that sorters will only fill inputs to three times what a recipe would take (e.g. a circuit board requires 2 iron and 1 copper, so sorters will fill the factory with 6 iron and 3 copper at most).

If the input slot of that machine is empty and sorter is still not filling the machine, I'd say it's a bug and your best shot at getting it fixed is submitting a bug report via the link in the stickied thread.

[margalus]

Do you have output sorters removing the finished product? When the factory/smelter/whatever fills up it's output container it will stop until it's emptied. Picking it up empties it.