Factorio Forums

In situations where I have a large and wonky shaped base I always have the problem of suicide bots.

It seems to happen quite often where a single turret on the other side of my base gets damaged, and suddenly there are tons of bots are flying off over biter nests and getting destroyed by groups of spitter, or even worms in an attempt to repair it. This wastes bots and can spam the UI with multiple 'junk' alerts as the bots fly to their doom and are destroyed.

As a solution I wouldn't mind having the bots limited to pathing directly between RoboPorts, or to confine bots within the RoboPort construction range.

What do other people think on this?

For wall repair you should have isolated bot networks supplied by train. And not have bots from your main network do the job

I suppose that's on option, but it makes it much more difficult to make autoconstructed printed wall/rail sections

This has been requested many times and declined by the devs, and I agree with them.

It's part of the bot puzzle and something that makes them not be a mindless "plop and forget" solution. How your bot networks are set up is important. Bots are dumb and the only way to make them act smartly is to set them up in a smart way.

Always build convex logistic networks, never concave.

Not only will bots try to cut the corner and get killed again and again by biters, they will cut the corner and run out of power. Also generally because of the poor routing/tasking of bots, small networks work more efficiently/smoothly (e.g. sometimes it will happily wait for a bot to fly a mile to repair/build/etc. something when there is an idle bot in a roboport next to it).

Logistics networks near each other can be "joined" by chests/inserters without a train. There are many ways to do this, you might look at using the roboports circuit output + some constant combinators (so you get "desired items - stored items") to set requester chests.