QoL questions about robots getting stuck in the air

[mekanic]

Hi fellow Engineers


I've been trying to scale up a base into a rail-based megabase for the first time and I'm having some annoying issues with construction using robots (blueprints/copy paste). Can you help?

I have dozens if not hundreds of robots that sometims get stuck in the air with cargo, then they run out of power, and still remain stuck in the air.

They don't return to roboports, if I add more roboports, nothing changes.
If they are construction bots, they also don't return to my personal roboport.

How do I solve it?

Background: The primary issue is around robots and roboports: often when I construct something (e.g. from a blueprint or copy-paste) and then deconstruct it quickly before it's built because I want to move it by a few tiles, robots around me get stuck. They stop mid-air, holding items that were either part of construction (rails, belts, etc.) or chests with stuff to be moved (logistics robots?) e.g. when I had items in Trash to be put into chests that I moved / removed / destroyed accidentally.

This is in presence of both standard roboports and my personal roboport.

Robots just stay in the air until they have 0 power. They are in range of my personal roboport, and in range of standard roboports. All ports have full power (charged up). There are many other robots available (not busy) in those ports. There is space in chests, and space in my inventory.

I don't know what triggers this state, but it's extremely frustrating and I don't know what to do.
What I'd rather NOT do is walk up to every individual bot in the area and right-click-hold it until it's back in my inventory

Any ideas?

[Loewchen]

What do the warnings next to the shortcut bar say?

[astroshak]

I might be way out on a limb here, but .. it almost sounds like the bots are stuck holding stuff with nowhere to put it.

Make sure that a port’s logistic network covers the area, then slap down a Storage Chest or two, see what happens. If it is a matter of not having space to put stuff, they will all charge the SC and deposit whatever they held. (Obviously, said Roboport use be powered)

[mekanic]

Hi, you are lovely people. The chests were deconstructed (against my intention) so indeed there was missing cargo space.

I replaced storage chests and they move stuff back into them.

So here's what I think happened:
- I had space in inventory
- I had unused storage chests placed around the area
- roboports had construction bots in them, waiting
- I deconstructed a large part of the area (a screen or more)
- construction bots from the roboports (or my in ventory?) rushed to deconstruct it with the intention to put it into the storage chests...
- ...but I removed the chests as well (maybe with a separate click) and they, what, maybe couldn't reprogram themselves to put stuff into my inventory
- ...so they got stuck

Or something like that.
Anyhow, solved.

I was wrong about having chests in the area when I wrote the post above.