[0.11.22] [Rseding91] Active Provider Chest ignored

[dee-]

As a sibling to this bug report (Request Chests do not get items delivered)
Here's a bug report where Active Provider Chests do not get their items picked up:

APC:


bot network and matching storage chest:


As seen in the screenshots the roboports are powered and connected.

Switching the APC to a different chest and putting a new APC again on top immediately made some bots fly to the chest and unload it.

1. How can I identify the broken chests and fix the factory?
2. Has the reason of the two bugs been found yet?

[Rseding91]

How many robots do you have in the network? It may be that there's just not enough robots to move the items in the time you want them to. Putting down a new chest puts it at the top of the list of "chests to be dealt with".

[dee-]

uhm, 0.5k - 1k?
When placing the chest bots came out of the left roboport, so they were idle before

[bobingabout]

I've encountered similar bugs before too.

especially common with the active provider chests.

I've had factory chains stall before because the purple chests weren't being emptied, dispite the fact there were free drones available, and free storage space to store the junk I was producing.

Sodium hydroxide, if you've played my mod, you know what I mean. everyone hates my Sodium Hydroxide.
It's like an oil chain without cracking or fuel blocks. you use the petroleum gas to make plastic and sulfur, and what do you do with the heavy and light oils? make a little flame thrower fuel, and lube? Sodium hydroxide is like light oil if you couldn't crack it, or make fuel blocks out of it, it has a use, but the demand is too low for the ammount that is produced, because of the demand for petroleum gas.

[SHiRKiT]

I have also encountered this issue in the past. I have currently a over 1k bots factory, and my factory is totally bot dependent. Next time I encounter this I'll reported, I have used this trick of replacing the chest with a passive -> active to solve this.

[bobingabout]

I have used this trick of replacing the chest with a passive -> active to solve this.

thats what I do too.

[dee-]

I have used this trick of replacing the chest with a passive -> active to solve this.

thats what I do too.

I also swapped Active Provider Chest (broken) -> Logistics Chest -> Active Provider Chest (works again)

For me it looks like the botnet chests somehow fall off an internal list and don't get considered anymore.

I can provide the savegame of the above situation if devs want to look at the internal structires (sadly we can't do that for ourselves)

[dee-]

Also some kind of plausibility check program can help here. The program can be upgraded for every "weird" thing that has happened in the past to check for data consistency.

At work we usually have some of these plausibility programs to check for data sanity. It's a kind of knowledgebase about what went wrong sometime in the past.
The check here for example might be something like: iterate through all chests. If bot chest check if in internal to-be-considered-for-bots-list.
Even if it (never) turns up any findings it would if something unexpected happens one day.

I wonder if they also use some kind of asserts in their program? They also help tremendously.
If your programming language does not support the assert keyswords a if will do the same - distrusting your own application is a key to hardened code

[ssilk]

This is a good point. At my work this is a "DevOp"-job: Making programs that fixes corrupt data in our appliactions and at the same time the rest of the team tries to find out what goes wrong and trying to fix that bug, so that he doesn't need his quickfix anymore. Cause the experience says: If you have too many of those checks, it makes no sense at some point.

The same is with factorio: There might be a need to have some kind of mod, that does such integrity checks, but in the end that are bugs, that needs to be fixed.

PS: I had that bug too. But it is really not easy to find, cause with the next load it works and there is this simple workaround. It's now here and there in for more than 9 month and my experience says: they will find it suddenly and unawaited.

[slpwnd]

Hello, save would be useful. We do have some internal checks for verification of the logistic system consistency. It is not straightforward to use it in the game though because at the moment they simply crash the game (by asserting) which is useful for developing but not playing. On the other hand I can imagine having a variation of this that prints the results instead of crashing the game available as a dev-console command.

[dee-]

The exact same savegame from this bug report can be used.
You just have to rewire the mining place to power it up and the robots start flying, emptying only a part of the active provider chests:

[Rseding91]

I've got a few additional questions:

Did you use any mods on this save at any point?
Did you mark for deconstruction and or cancel deconstruction any of the trouble chests?
Did the roboports covering the chest(s) ever lose power while you where working on/setting up the chest(s)?
Did you start this save in 0.11 or has it been migrated from 0.10/other version(s)?

[dee-]

I've got a few additional questions:

Did you use any mods on this save at any point?

Yes.

- Barter mod
- The Fat Controller
- Resource-Monitor-Mod

The latter two were removed again, the first one is still active

Did you mark for deconstruction and or cancel deconstruction any of the trouble chests?

I can't remember and did not pay attention but I'd wager a "no, perhaps?"

Did the roboports covering the chest(s) ever lose power while you where working on/setting up the chest(s)?

Maybe but I did not pay attention as I only later found out about those special chests. It could easily have happened when connecting/disconnecting the mining area for making room/rearranging things.

Did you start this save in 0.11 or has it been migrated from 0.10/other version(s)?

It's from 0.10, IIRC 0.10.8

[Rseding91]

I've tested every convoluted setup I can think of in 0.12 but I haven't been able to reproduce this. Other bugs related to the logistic system have been fixed in 0.12 so there's a high likely hood this has been fixed by one of those. Or, the bug may have been related to one of the many logistic related issues in mid 0.10 that have been resolved as well.

For now, I'm going to move this into resolved for next release. If it happens again in 0.12 please post.