Factorio Forums

The case is here, that players place a new roboport on trees, which are marked as deconstructed. That is very cool. But if that is done at the border of a construction area - which is the quite natural use-case, cause the areas are just exact that size - the roboport cannot be built.

- find big area with trees
- build roboport A, which connects to the factory
- mark an area with trees for deconstruction, part of that should be the place, where you want to set the next roboport
- now set the next roboport B as GHOST, at the edge of the construction area (so that it is connected to A)
- the bots begin to cut the trees and one bot tries to place the roboport.
- The deconstruction is finished, but this one bot tries and tries and tries. When it gets empty it flies back to recharge, then tries it again.

I think this is not the players fault. I think, the ghost placing must be very reliable, cause it enables - when working - a type of building stuff, which I never saw in any other game.

Think three options are possible:
A) it should be not possible to place a ghost, if it is so at the borders, that even if the ground is marked for deconstruction it isn't possible to built, cause not able to reach marked for deconstruction parts.
B) (I think this is better) in that case the bot, which will place the item, sees that and silently destroys the marked items. That may take some time.
C) (I think this is best) a robot, that is in this waiting state silently builds a small construction area. It works like a very small roboport (5x5 or the size of the building he wants to place + 1) and is connected to the next roboport. That would also enable to trick to build some parts outside of a construction area.

I think this second option is also very useful for cases, where a neighbor roboport is accidentally unpowered, cause the robot wants to place a big pole at the edge, to power this roboport.

I think I used to actually use the method you're describing to build my roboport network, and it did actually work, but i havn't played properly, nor tried this in a while.

I've tried yesterday for an hour:
The construction-border is directly below the character, you see the line of marked trees. The next roboport is outside, above this pic. You can see also a bit, how the robot tries to place the roboport.

The workaround is to make a 46x46 grid of roboports, so roboports do not hang off the edge of the green area.

46*46 = 2,116
50*50 = 2,500

That's about 16 % area I loose per roboport!

I think there's still a tree in the way on the edge there. when I used to do it, I used to clear that 4x4 area of trees where I wanted to place the roboport before adding the ghost.

That needs me to run to that place, remove the trees and then I can place it. That takes very much time.

I dunno, if someone else uses the ghost placing so much as me, but in my eyes, that is the sense of it: being able to place things fast and far away from the character and the bots do the rest, even if I be very far away and do completely different stuff. That is not the case here, it disrupts the player in this "new" kind of workflow. He needs to take care about this "edge"-case.

I think with the new personal roboport feature for 0.12, this issue can be easily fixed with solution C: the placing robot creates a personal roboport, which includes as minimum the building, it wants to place. As side effect, other buildings, outside the range will be built, too.

I modded my roboports to 51x51 construction area I haven't run into this problem since. Though I would expect the need to increase it to 52x52 because the roboport is 4x4.

I linked also to this suggestion and back:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=37785 Construction robots don't deconstruct trees that block order

This was somewhat solved by making the base roboport area 110x110