Logistics Chests - Configurable cap on concurrent worker actions

[Planks]

Yo

So at the moment, logistic chests don't have a cap on the number of requests or deliveries that can be made at once. This leads to some undesirable surging behaviour if you start loading high volumes - say for example, an ore train. If you try to load an ore train from a robo-mine an entire factory's bot count can be sent to one place. At the moment the only way to avoid this is separated logistic areas for volume loading, or avoiding bots.

It strikes me that it'd be a graceful addition to the chest settings to be able to set a cap on concurrent request or pick-up movements - for example a chest may only be allowed to have 10 or 100 bots flying to or from it at once. This would solve the problem of 4,800 logistic bots flying across the entire base to satisfy a refill request of 4800 while not limiting throughput so long as the player sets an appropriate cap.

If the flights are short - as they should be for volume loading - it would mean the closest [n] bots would be allocated to the active chest by the logic, but once the chest is worker capped these same [n] bots will sit in their little work/charge loop and be re-used for further requests rather than waiting for new bots from progressively further and further to arrive.

[Nova]

Workaround: replace your high content chest with a steel chest, place a stack inserter and a logistic chest beneath it. Now you set this logistic chest to some smaller amount. You may have to guess a bit - just try some values until the amount of robots looks correct.
Now you connect the steel chest with a red cable to the inserter and set the inserter to insert into the steel chest until you got your original amount of items in the chest.

That workaround has some disadvantages, but maybe it works for you.

[invisus]

If you try to load an ore train from a robo-mine an entire factory's bot count can be sent to one place.

This is why players often opt for a discrete robotics network from their main base network. Given a discrete network, you can actually attempt to optimize the number of bots for the number of expected jobs.

[Planks]

Thanks for the suggestions! I extensively use discrete networks just now and have now dabbled in feeder chests to emulate the behaviour I described. Both work well enough for what they are. I thought I'd post this as the latter I believe the devs see discrete networks as broadly undesirable behaviour (recalling some FFF here, long time ago) and the former is, I guess, counter intuitive? I hadn't thought of it for sure.

I see this as something of a "stack inserter" hand size type setting where most people won't need to touch it but sometimes there's corner cases where it comes in super useful. Quality of life.