Factorio Forums

Is there a mod or Lua command I can use to count how many construction (not logistic) robots I have?

I'm your everyday's OCD guy and I aim to have exactly a thousand construction (and logistic) robots working. I've been building them in increments of 100 but it seems that I might have 482 construction robots at the moment somehow. At least that's the number of robots that come to build the blueprints when I place them. How can I find out what happened to the missing 18? They're not in the logistic network. They haven't been destroyed either (I think) because I play on peaceful.

EDIT: SOLVED. I ordered them to construct/deconstruct a 32x32 sector of walls. That added the construction robots to the network's count of logistic robots (thanks to ssilk's information) and brought the number up to 792. Since I knew I had 300 logistic robots, I came to the conclusion I had exactly 492 construction robots active/idle in the network. I still have no idea what happened to the missing 8 (maybe they got destroyed while trying to repair walls *shrug* or were accidentally left in another lone roboport not part of the main network). Thanks everybody. All of the suggestions and clarifications were very helpful and appreciated. Factorio has such a nice community. I've been having quite some fun with it. This game of mine (which is my fourth game since I started playing) has been going for 80+ hours. Factorio (and here I'm including the game, the developers and the community) has got such a huge potential.

you could stop powering your roboports to count them

I'm at work at the moment but I'll do as you suggest as soon as I get home, however I'm curious to know how powering my roboports off is going to help me? How am I going to count the construction robots afterwards? Would you care to ellaborate?

If they're unpowered the contruction and logistic bots will sit inside the roboport and do nothing. Then it's just a case of going to each roboport and adding up how many is each one.

I see. Well, I can count the logistic robots by hovering the mouse cursor over any logistic chest. It shows the total on the right panel. The same isn't true for the construction robots, though. There's nowhere (at least that I know of) that shows the total of construction robots active/idle in the network.

Instead of visiting every roboport you have, do the following:

1. find a roboport with some space around it;
2. place a blueprint of something, preferably something that uses a considerable number of robots to build;
3. wait for them to finish. All the robots will most likely park in the roboport near you;
4. collect the robots from the roboport;
5. deconstruct what you've just built;
6. wait for them to finish. All the robots will most likely park in the roboport near you (this might not be so efficient, because the robots will try to store stuff in different locations);
7. collect the robots from the roboport;
8. repeat from point 2 until there are no more robots in the network;
9. find a nice round number of robots to put back in the network;
10. don't rest until this number is kept perfectly rounded and tuned with whatever amount of robots you think it's ideal at the time.

EDIT: missed some steps.

If they work, they are added to the logistics bots (which is of course ugly). So give all logistic bots something todo (cut trees or so) and count the difference.

To clarify what ssilk said, the number you get on hovering over a logistics chest is the total number of bots, both logistic and construction.
Setting up several trunk line gathering chests (to maximize request input) and setting them a decent distance away, and maximizing the request amounts, should give you a good way to tie up all your logistic bots.

From there, you could then see how many are left available, but you risk underestimating your construction bots, since a few of them could be returning from wherever they had to last repair. I wouldn't expect to be off more than a couple, but something to keep in mind.
Alternatively, to using the supplied number, you could simply gather/mine all the logistic bots as they go to deliver to the requester, ensuring that you would get an accurate count of only the construction bots from the bot total.

SOLVED. I ordered them to construct/deconstruct a 32x32 sector of walls. That added the construction robots to the network's count of logistic robots (thanks to ssilk's information) and brought the number up to 792. Since I knew I had 300 logistic robots, I came to the conclusion I had exactly 492 construction robots active/idle in the network. I still have no idea what happened to the missing 8 (maybe they got destroyed while trying to repair walls *shrug* or were accidentally left in another lone roboport not part of the main network). Thanks everybody. All of the suggestions and clarifications were very helpful and appreciated. Factorio has such a nice community. I've been having quite some fun with it. This game of mine (which is my fourth game since I started playing) has been going for 80+ hours. Factorio (and here I'm including the game, the developers and the community) has got such a huge potential.