Robots fill far away storage chests?

[Nova]

I have no idea how construction robots decide where to store items from deconstructed chests - in storage chest, but where? I have some all over the base, and after deconstucting a filled chest, the robots start to store the items in chest at the other side of the base, but why? There's no reason for that and it crestes many problems, because the robots have not enough energy to fly all the way and then need to reload up to three times. The are many empty storage chests much closer. Why don't they fill the items in that chest?
Is that a bug or am I not able to understand the mechanism how they decide which chest to use?

[roy7]

They will chose the nearest storage chest that already has at least 1 of that item in it.

[Xterminator]

They will chose the nearest storage chest that already has at least 1 of that item in it.

Yup exactly. Personally I think it's a bit silly for them to do this. I think it would just be better for them to store things in the nearest chest, regardless of if there is any other of the item type there.

[Nova]

I would like a system like that for which roboport is used if a robot wants to recharge - distance and already waiting robots will be taken into account. How about the same for storage chest? Item will be stored in chests which already contain some of the item type, but only if they are not too far away.

For some items it would be better if they were distributed over the whole base, but I don't know how to to that without creating new problems. ^^

[Nemoricus]

I would like a system like that for which roboport is used if a robot wants to recharge - distance and already waiting robots will be taken into account. How about the same for storage chest? Item will be stored in chests which already contain some of the item type, but only if they are not too far away.

For some items it would be better if they were distributed over the whole base, but I don't know how to to that without creating new problems. ^^

Using requester chests isn't an option?

[twepy]

Stuff inside a requester chest isnt available for grabs by the bots, u need a (smart) inserter to move a certain amount in a provider chest to make them available again and have in theory crude division of the particular item. To make it a little bit better you would have connect all the storage chests and provider chests in one circuit network, then use a arithmetic combinator to calculate how much each storage location should have and feed that signal to the smart inserters. However the real problem is that its not possible to reserve items in a chest and it could lead to the situation that bots take items from a balanced chest to provide the demand of another chest and now the first chest is unbalanced.

I think it would be possible with belts and smart inserters to accomplish it but its not easy thing to build.

[Nova]

I have no idea how to solve this problem. With large bases, the problem with extremly long flight routes becomes much more prominent - I have 151k iron plates in the network, but my robots need minutes to deliver them to the requester chests, because of this behaviour the construction robots have delivered the iron into chests many tiles far away.

[twepy]

A fairly simple solution is to separate the base in several standalone roboport zones instead of having one big connected roboport zone and use belts to distribute items to the different zones and have the bots in that zone distribute to the buildings within that zone. A very common example is the ore receive area which is separate roboport zone of the rest of the base, this forces the bots serving that zone to stay local and have short flying routes, which improves the processing rate of the receive stations.

[Chromehound]

What if you manually put in an item, thus making it the closest storage chest of that particular item?

[R-800]

What if you manually put in an item, thus making it the closest storage chest of that particular item?

I actually tried this, and made an interesting discovery. Because as it turns out, construction robots don't always put items in chests that have at least one instance of that item already in it. Sometimes, they still go to a further one, even when a nearer one has the same item in it.

It turns out that their behavior updates with the player placing an item in a chest. The bots put items in the nearest chest containing the same kind of item PROVIDED that it was the most recent chest to have that item placed in it by the player. So when bots are putting items in chests that are too far away, it is because the player previously placed this same kind of item in that far-away chest (and likely doesn't remember doing this). The "travelling too far" bot behavior will return once again upon the player putting the same kind of item in a farther away chest, and then ordering a new deconstruction. This is because that too-far-away chest will now be the nearest chest to contain the same item, where it was also MOST RECENTLY put there by the player.