Factorio Forums

I'm having an issue where I'll go for large periods of time where only a fraction of my construction bots are in use, despite there being enough material and available jobs for all of them to be in use at once.

Here is a screenshot of the logistics system stats where you can see the bot use:



For context, my base has tens of thousands of jobs currently available for that concrete to be placed down.

So I have:
1. Over a thousand construction bots available
2. Thousands of concrete available for pick up
3. Thousands of concrete placement jobs available

And I only have like 200 bots in use for large periods of time? There have been times where those 3 things are true and I have 0 bots in use. It's crazy.

Is this a bug? Is this an optimization of bots for when there are a large amount of pending jobs? I don't understand what's happening. All I know is that I should never have zero bots in action when there are thousands of jobs available to be completed.

I can provide the save file if necessary.

You have thousands of missing items so it takes a while for the game to find a job that can actually be performed. Don't place ghosts for items you do not have to avoid that situation.

Basically only 600 jobs are checked at a time, if they can be fulfilled, in some recurring sequence. It's not a very fast process, you can see it happen on the map, if you have enough tasks.
It happens when you have too many "unfullfillable" tasks.

Loewchen wrote: ↑

Sat Jul 22, 2023 7:56 pm

You have thousands of missing items so it takes a while for the game to find a job that can actually be performed.

Based on this, I assume there is a hard cap for how many job checks the game does per update. Is there a way to increase this? I don't want to have to separate my blueprints out to each individual item just because the game can't put 'jobs with missing items' on a separate job queue that doesn't consume the entire check limit every tick.

aka13 wrote: ↑

Sat Jul 22, 2023 8:32 pm

Basically only 600 jobs are checked at a time, if they can be fulfilled, in some recurring sequence. It's not a very fast process, you can see it happen on the map, if you have enough tasks.
It happens when you have too many "unfullfillable" tasks.

Ok, so yeah that's kind of what I expected the cause was. Is there a way to increase this limit?

Is there a plan to update the game so that this isn't a problem? Unfulfillable jobs blocking fulfillable jobs from being started sounds like an issue that can be fixed programmatically.

BotsOnStrike wrote: ↑

Sat Jul 22, 2023 8:33 pm

Based on this, I assume there is a hard cap for how many job checks the game does per update.

Have a read of Increase bot queue processing rate.

I hate to say it, but this is my bottleneck now. I would love it if I could put a lot of my bots to work!

The limit is always “you don’t have the items to build this”; having robots partially build something doesn’t solve that. Go make the missing items and it will finish building everything.

Thanks for chiming in to clear that up, Rseding91! It looks like I just need to make more stuff faster...