Backed up inserters

[Shokubai]

SO I thought I was being smart by putting down a requester chest next to a couple roboports. The chests requested 50 repair packs, 10 logi bots, and 10 construction bots. Everything works great until the port is full on repair packs and then everything stops. The inserter sits there holding 1 repair pack it can never deliver and 20 bots it can never insert. I haven't found a way to fix this without using multiple requester chests.

[Koub]

You could make another chest to request the bots, but you'll face a problem : over the time, this will fill your roboport of bots too : Request 20 bots, insert them in the roboport, the chest is empty, request 20 more bot, and so on.

[daniel34]

Repair packs don't have to be in a roboport for the bots to be able to take them. Placing them in a passive provider or storage chest (within the logistics range) will also allow the bots to use them.

[Shokubai]

Repair packs don't have to be in a roboport for the bots to be able to take them. Placing them in a passive provider or storage chest (within the logistics range) will also allow the bots to use them.

Learned something new.

[roy7]

Construction bots also, so far as I know, won't take repair packs out of a roboport they aren't currently sitting inside. Another reason it's better to put them in a passive provider chest. Just limit it to one stack or with a smart inserter, and then you'll always make more as needed for the rest of the game.

[brunzenstein]

Repair packs don't have to be in a roboport for the bots to be able to take them. Placing them in a passive provider or storage chest (within the logistics range) will also allow the bots to use them.

Learned something new.

me too - if this is tue...

[orzelek]

Repair packs don't have to be in a roboport for the bots to be able to take them. Placing them in a passive provider or storage chest (within the logistics range) will also allow the bots to use them.

Learned something new.

me too - if this is tue...

Why it wouldn't be true?
It always worked like that.

[Xterminator]

As something else mentioned, only the bots in the specific roboport that the repair packs are in will use the packs. This can cause some issues as you might want imagine. So you can probably fix your current problem and prevent another just by leaving the packs in a passive provider or storage in the network somewhere.

[brunzenstein]

As something else mentioned, only the bots in the specific roboport that the repair packs are in will use the packs. This can cause some issues as you might want imagine. So you can probably fix your current problem and prevent another just by leaving the packs in a passive provider or storage in the network somewhere.

Thanks for the hint.

[Shokubai]

As something else mentioned, only the bots in the specific roboport that the repair packs are in will use the packs. This can cause some issues as you might want imagine. So you can probably fix your current problem and prevent another just by leaving the packs in a passive provider or storage in the network somewhere.

Thanks for the hint.

I almost with there was a localprovider chest. It could request items from the global logi network but only supply them to the area of the single roboport they are connected. Neat solution to bringing items to an area for local use.

[ribsngibs]

Well, it looks like you have your answer for this particular application (the solution of just not adding repair packs to the roboports), but the problem still exists in the general case. A problem I've run into often is a filtered cargo wagon that takes a bunch of stuff, like a supply train that has a wagon that wants a stack of walls, turrets, drills, power poles, belts, or whatever, and ideally you'd want just a single requester chest asking for a stack or two of each and an inserter to fill the wagon, but the inserter gets stuck with an item it can't deliver and won't transfer the rest of the stuff.

The inserter sits there holding 1 repair pack it can never deliver and 20 bots it can never insert. I haven't found a way to fix this without using multiple requester chests.

I think this doesn't actually happen with the inserter holding 1 repair pack. It happens because of the inserter stack size bonus, so there are 98 or 99 repair packs in the roboport/wagon/whatever (or 1-2 less than whatever its maximum is), which is not full, and then the inserter picks up a stack of 5 from the chest, but can't drop the stack off because there's not enough room, and it gets stuck. So that leads to kind of messy solutions where you surround a wagon with 14 requester chests and 14 inserters, limiting your wagon to only 14 different kinds of items.

The only solution to that problem that I found was this mod: SmartLoader, which will, if the container is full, rotate back to drop the items it couldn't fit in there back into the chest, and continue with the other items.