The day you thought you'd never see, my factory-building friends, has arrived: in the upcoming Factorio 2.0 release, Wube Software has announced that objects on conveyor belts can now be stacked on top of each other, and a new bulk inserter type will allow entire piles of objects to be The company announced that it will be able to pick up and drop objects all at once. This is a change that Factorio developers have been saying for years was impractical to add.

Filter inserters will also be removed from the game. The various swing arms will all have the ability to pick up only what you want. This change is part of the Space Age expansion and the accompanying free Factorio 2.0 update.

The new bulk inserters will pick up entire piles of objects at a time, swinging and releasing only when their large grab hand is completely full. They will be able to pick up as many as 16 things at a time, and a new technique called "belt stack size" will allow as many as four items per pile on the belt.

The new stacking is limited by a few important rules. Inserters place objects on empty belt spots, not on existing stacks. The splitter does not change the height of the stack. In short, only new bulk inserters make stacks along with some buildings that output stacks like a large mining drill.

Factorio is the longest-running and perhaps most influential of the factory-building games, crowdfunded in 2013 and officially released in 2020 after a lengthy development cycle commensurate with its complexity. PC Gamer has pretty consistently consistently cites it as one of the best games available to play.

Changes to item stacking and inserters were announced on the Factorio blog in a post titled "Putting things on top of other things."

Elsewhere in the post, Wube casually dropped in the presence of a fourth, faster belt layer to produce and said that in conjunction with this new stacking, the factory can be as fast as you want. Even the new planet is fast enough.

You can read the full announcement on the Factorio blog.