Robots won't go to nearby empty robot port to charge

[josh3]

Before I get into it, this exact setup worked very well in 1.x. But something changed in 2.x.

I have a many, many robots trying to use a single roboport to charge, even though there are many empty roboports close by they could go to.

I have attached screenshots.

I am not sure how to solve this issue. Like I said at the start, it worked fine in 1.x. It seems like they are prioritizing their destination too much?

It's causing a lot of problems, as there are not enough active robots to do the work at the proper rate now.

Any advise would be welcome!

[josh3]

I decided to try picking up the roboport. It did make them all go to all the roboports I have that were unused. But as soon as I put the roboport back it started picking up robots in a circle around the port again and they did not instead go to the near by ones that were inactive.

It's interesting though, when I picked up the port it created an intestine circle of them (I have many robots ports all around them, so they went in all directions towards them); see screenshots.

[j3po]

This needs to be reported in Bug Reports. I seem to be having the same issue with some of my roboports, which had no issue prior to the 2.x update. I can also confirm deleting one of the roboports that has the massive halo around it immediately scatters them out to the surrounding ports to charge, however as soon as the port is placed down again, it becomes THE spot that they all want to que and recharge at.

[josh3]

As a workaround for now, what I do is have a timer setup to turn on and off power to the problem roboports. This reduces the amount of power going to roboports. The ones that have problems always have robots continuously charging. I've got it timed so there is a bit less power going to them then it takes to recharge the roboport back up if it is continuously charging robots.

Eventually the power-reserve at the roboport runs out and then all of the robots that were waiting go away and recharge elsewhere. When that happens the power drain on the building is not there anymore due to it not charging robots. The enough power eventually gets fed into the roboport to restore its operation.

It seems to be working, but it does leave parts of my storage container temporarily inaccessible to the network.

The next step would be to place two roboports down per-existing-roboport. I turn off the power on a different schedule to one vs the other, to try and keep at least one of the two roboports up at all times to keep the storage always available to network.

This is a bit of a pain, but it does work. But it feels like a hack to get around this new v2 robot charging behavior.

[bmnk115]

I noticed the same thing. With the last 1. version, the robots distributed more evenly.
Now, with 2.0.12, they start to wait at a few ports to recharge and the number of available bots decreases, decreasing resource throughput.

Adding more ports helps, but should not be the final solution.