Factorio 2.0 will let items on conveyor belts stack, something long thought impossible

Friends in factory-building, a day has come which I thought I would never see. Wube Software has announced that, in the upcoming Factorio 2.0 release, objects on conveyor belts will be allowed to stack upon each other, and a new bulk inserter type will pick up and drop entire piles of objects at once. It's a change that the developers of Factorio have said was impractical to add for years now.

Filter inserters will also be removed from the game. All of the various swinging arms will have the capability to only pick up what you want them to. The changes will come as part of the Space Age expansion and accompanying, free, Factorio 2.0 update.

The new bulk inserters will pick up a whole pile of objects at once, only swinging to release when their big grabby hand is completely full. They'll be able to pick up 16 things at once, and a new technology called "belt stack size" will  let you pile things as high as 4 items per pile on belts.

The new stacking is limited by a few key rules. Inserters will only place objects on empty belt spots, not on existing stacks. Splitters won't modify stack height, either. In short, only the new bulk inserters will make piles alongside a few buildings that'll output piles—like the big mining drills.

Factorio is the longest-running, and perhaps most influential, of the factory-building games. It was crowdfunded in 2013, went through an extended development cycle commensurate with its complexity, and released proper in 2020. PC Gamer pretty consistently lists it as one of the best games you can play—check out our review for more on that.

The change to item stacking and inserters was announced on the Factorio blog in a post entitled "Putting things on top of other things."

Otherwise in the post Wube casually drops the existence of a fourth, faster tier of belt to produce with, and says that in concert with this new stacking you can make your factory go about as fast as you'd ever like it to. Fast enough for those new planets, even.

You can read the entire announcement on the Factorio blog.