Factorio Forums

It seems a little bizarre to me, to reserve repair packs for a slot that may or may not continue to have construction bots in it in the future, in one specific roboport... and then the bots will grab and use packs in a provider chest hot off the assembler, only to hide them in random roboports where they potentially may NEVER be used without manual intervention... why not do away with the slots entirely and have the bots take the partially used packs to storage?

I would be fine with reducing it to 1 slot. 7 slots is totally ridiculous.

+1 on that 1 slot is enough and a little better use of it too

Either limit it to 1 slot or add the ability to limit automatic insertion.
Having an inserter shoveling 1.4k repair packs from a requester chest into each front line roboport when all I need is to have some available for fast response repairs is a needless resource dump.

Why not just logistic chests? If we need something to repair, just take from nearest chest and repair it.

darkfrei wrote:Why not just logistic chests? If we need something to repair, just take from nearest chest and repair it.

My border wall spawns several km, Trump would be proud, by the time a bot travels to the supply station, grabs a repair pack and heads to the damaged part it often has been destroyed.
If just one stack of packs is available at each roboport along the wall response time is almost instant.

Soon we can use buffer chests for that.

Depending on how deep in the science tree will unlock these buffer chests, keeping one slot for repair packs will still be a necessity.
7 slots, however, is overkill indeed.

Optera wrote:

darkfrei wrote:Why not just logistic chests? If we need something to repair, just take from nearest chest and repair it.

My border wall spawns several km, Trump would be proud, by the time a bot travels to the supply station, grabs a repair pack and heads to the damaged part it often has been destroyed.
If just one stack of packs is available at each roboport along the wall response time is almost instant.

Note that bots take a repair pack and then keep it. So the first time you need to repair something the bot takes a long time. The next time it already has a repair pack and is fast. So over time repair packs, or rather bots with repair packs, will collect where repair is often needed.

Plus you can put provider chests along your border and fill them with repair packs from train stations.

I also think that storing repair packs in roboports is generally a bad idea. But to remove this functionality we need a decent replacement namely the return path. When construction bot has partially used the pack it has to return it somewhere and the spot in the chest might be taken resulting in a stalled bot or long travel
Buffer chest with limited request can serve this purpose pretty well. Actually a storage chest with filtered slots if one was available

Koub wrote:Depending on how deep in the science tree will unlock these buffer chests, keeping one slot for repair packs will still be a necessity.
7 slots, however, is overkill indeed.

We can change stack size and it will be just ok.

I think repair pack stack size is just what it should. But 7 slots, that's too much

I remember that damaged items used to take up their own slot, did partial used repair packs used to do the same thing?
Might explain why the roboports have so many repair pack slots. Don't need seven slot anymore that's for sure.

As far as I remember, they never did. But I might be mistaken.

Optera wrote:My border wall spawns several km, Trump would be proud, by the time a bot travels to the supply station, grabs a repair pack and heads to the damaged part it often has been destroyed.
If just one stack of packs is available at each roboport along the wall response time is almost instant.

If you don't mind manual filling, you'd do just as well dropping a storage chest next to each roboport and dropping a stack in there. The coming buffer chest will remove the "manual filling" caveat.

Koub wrote:Depending on how deep in the science tree will unlock these buffer chests, keeping one slot for repair packs will still be a necessity.
7 slots, however, is overkill indeed.

Storage chests are part of the Construction Robotics research, and therefore made available simultaneously with construction bots. Construction bots will happily fetch repair packs from storage chests, go out and do repairs... then carry the packs to a roboport and hoard them. Why not put them back?

[Koub] Moved to balancing
On a second thought, it's more a balancing issue than help needed for gameplay.

I would be happy if one could just read out the number of repair packs and then add or remove them as needed.

Or produce more if the roboport has less than 50 present.

I dont see any use for those slots. Specially when buffer box come they are totally obsolete. There would be much more use for module slots what allow affect to roboport charging capacity and charging speed.

If inserters could grab the repair packs (they cannot currently) then you could set up a filter inserter to take them out as needed, the number should also be reported to the circuit network.

Koub wrote:As far as I remember, they never did. But I might be mistaken.

Yup, I'm not sure if it was in 0.11 or 0.12 where they changed it so that mining 2 damaged entities would merge the two into a single healthier item.

AFAIK, Tools, Armor and Ammo have always used this behaviour.