Active Provider Chests and Storage Chest (stupid robots)

[ChickenMacNugget]

I'm having a weird issue when I'm transfering items between an active provider chest and storage chest. I'm using bots for everything, no belts... So when a train pulls in I have stack inserters load the items into active provider chests. I then have a big chunk of storage chests nearby that the robots dump the raw materials into (ores, coal, etc).

The problem I'm having is that if any space opens up in a storage chests (say 50 items... 1 stack) robots jump on it and try to cram 500+ items into the chest. Obviously they can't do that with the available space, so they just float there... above the chest... doing nothing... Why?

I tried to replicate the problem on a smaller scale.

I had 3 active provider chests, a roboport with 50 logistics robots and 1 storage chest. This also happens with 1 active provider chest

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I fill the storage chest, and put a few stacks in each provider chest

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Now I take out a stack

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And the little idiots just float there once the chest is filled.

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Is this intended? It's really annoying and the only way around it is by wasting lots space having passive provider chests going to requester chests with inserters into storage chests. Surely the bots can figure out how much space there is in storage and only grab that much...

[Boogieman14]

Same thing happens when you deconstruct items while there's no available storage. I suppose the logic is "there's empty space for the items, let's go pick them up". then the empty space fills up, so they have no space to drop them. I suppose it would be possible to make this more intelligent, but this would get very complicated very fast if chests are also getting manipulated by inserters.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Hmmm. Logistics bots work on the principle "if it's not there now, it might be by the time I get there". You can see this behaviour when you insert ONE item into a provider chest and have multiple of it requested, it shows up as a negative value. Also if you take the item out of the provider chest before the bot gets there, the bot will still visit the chest in case a new one is inserted.

This MIGHT be a problem with robot stack size... Say robots see room for 50 items, 50 robots are dispatched to fill it without taking into consideration stack size, but this is easily tested by putting like 55 robots in the network and seeing if 5 remain in the roboport.

But I wouldn't personally be using storage chests to hold ores (or anything high-volume) unless I had a HUGE storage array, and then I would limit the inserters to the provider chests to only work while ore is below a threshold to ensure there is always room. You could work around this by connecting your inserters from the train to logistic network, setting them to ([Iron Ore] < (Chests * 50 * 48)). If you need the storage of the provider chests, just add that many storage chests.

An alternative might be an array of passive provider chests, train unloads to 6 chests, when any chest is half full an inserter starts picking it up and inserting to another passive provider. When that is half full, etc.

Just a note, inserting from a requester chest to a storage chest won't work too well. If the supply from the active or passive providers runs out or is disabled, the bots will pick up from the storage chest to insert into the requester, which then gets put back into the storage chest, etc.