Simple question:
How can I balance all roboports in my logistic network to have the same amount of logistic as well as construction robots, including repair packs?
I know of other threads that asked similar questions with ideas like locking inventory slots manually or make the content of this port only readable via circuit network. However, there was no solution. It's possible to add or remove a robot blindly; regarding repair packs only adding is possible.
Searching Factorio's mod pages was successless. In no description I found a roboport that adds readable content to the circuit network for itself only.
Did someone manage to prevent -at least- "drainage" of a certain robot type from an area, eg. you have only logistic robots available so construction robots need to fly very far although the roboport network is gapless? I have no idea how this should ever be possible.
Roboports: balancing inventory
Re: Roboports: balancing inventory
If you connect a roboport to the circuit network, you can enable robot statistics. As default, signals X, Y, Z, T are created. However, they are global for the whole network, no stats are generated for a single roboport only.
You can insert robots and repair packs into and extract them from a roboport with inserters.
Inserting robots according to Y and T is a good idea to keep up the total amount of robots and replace destroyed robots.
Inserting repair packs until the inserter is stalling is a good idea to replace used up repair packs.
There is no way to balance robots between roboports. After they did their task, robots will fly to the nearest roboport and stay there until they get a new task. There is no mechanism to order robots back to where they were originally deployed. They don't belong to a specific roboport, they only belong to the network as a whole.
It might help to not create one mega logistics network spanning your whole world but instead create a few smaller separated ones. This way the distance to fly back will not get too long.
On the other hand, there are reports where people actually created one mega network over their whole megabase with thousands of bots (I remember amounts of some 3000 were mentioned) with great success.
If you add a huge number of bots, the probability that some bot is available near to where it should pick up something is somewhat high.
That's a downside of the logistics network. Robots have to fly back to the supply. Empty, if there is nothing to transport back. That's the same issue the real world economy had with container shortage during Corona lockdown: https://www.container-xchange.com/blog/ ... imbalance/
(It's always a surprise how great Factorio simulates real world production and logistics challenges!)
You can insert robots and repair packs into and extract them from a roboport with inserters.
Inserting robots according to Y and T is a good idea to keep up the total amount of robots and replace destroyed robots.
Inserting repair packs until the inserter is stalling is a good idea to replace used up repair packs.
There is no way to balance robots between roboports. After they did their task, robots will fly to the nearest roboport and stay there until they get a new task. There is no mechanism to order robots back to where they were originally deployed. They don't belong to a specific roboport, they only belong to the network as a whole.
It might help to not create one mega logistics network spanning your whole world but instead create a few smaller separated ones. This way the distance to fly back will not get too long.
On the other hand, there are reports where people actually created one mega network over their whole megabase with thousands of bots (I remember amounts of some 3000 were mentioned) with great success.
If you add a huge number of bots, the probability that some bot is available near to where it should pick up something is somewhat high.
That's a downside of the logistics network. Robots have to fly back to the supply. Empty, if there is nothing to transport back. That's the same issue the real world economy had with container shortage during Corona lockdown: https://www.container-xchange.com/blog/ ... imbalance/
(It's always a surprise how great Factorio simulates real world production and logistics challenges!)