[MOD 0.12.20+] Logistics Mining 1.0.1 - Mining With Robots

[Afforess]

Really neat mod, I don't dread setting up new mining outposts any more. The convenience doesn't feel overpowered either, because if you intend to charge batteries on-site, you're going to spew lots of biter-attracting pollution. I tried a few other mods for late game mining, but this is by far my favorite. I did notice one bug, though: one of the rotations of the charged miner is 3x3 instead of 1x1. Probably not a big deal since they're intended to be placed by the bots anyway.

I've uploaded a 1.0.0 version, no major new content, just code cleanup. I've also requested the thread be moved, to reflect this is no longer an alpha mod.

[NoriSilverrage]

Grats on release.

[AlexTheNotsogreat]

This is actually really freaking cool! I wanted a mod that allowed robots to mine ores, but never requested it. Thanks for making this!

[Peppe]

Cool mod. Ran it in a test world and seems to be in a good state. Initially was concerned with the charging mechanic, but it actually plays pretty well. Thought it was only giving back batteries, but it was just my personal roboport getting the miner first

It is better than placing miners yourself and you can either incorporate it into the outpost or do it by train. Like the balance/flexibility of it -- I think it fits well with the game by not solving the entire problem in a single step.

As a few others mentioned would be cool if it didn't provide ore until it was equal to the stack size bots can pickup, but doubt it affect performance just probably a higher power draw for more active bots.

[Afforess]

Cool mod. Ran it in a test world and seems to be in a good state. Initially was concerned with the charging mechanic, but it actually plays pretty well. Thought it was only giving back batteries, but it was just my personal roboport getting the miner first

It is better than placing miners yourself and you can either incorporate it into the outpost or do it by train. Like the balance/flexibility of it -- I think it fits well with the game by not solving the entire problem in a single step.

Thanks, glad you enjoy it and find the mod balanced.

As a few others mentioned would be cool if it didn't provide ore until it was equal to the stack size bots can pickup, but doubt it affect performance just probably a higher power draw for more active bots.

That would be convenient, but I am not sure there is a way to do that without impacting game performance. I will mess around and see if I can come up with a solution.

[SaulSimon]

Some of the mines are not being automatically picked up and when I try to manually pick them up I get the following error:

Error while running the event handler: __LogisticsMining__/control.lua:104: attempt to index local 'inventory' (a nil value)

If I use a deconstruction plan a robot picks up the mine but the space still is occupied. I cannot walk through it or place anything down although it appears empty.


Thanks,

[Afforess]

Some of the mines are not being automatically picked up and when I try to manually pick them up I get the following error:

Error while running the event handler: __LogisticsMining__/control.lua:104: attempt to index local 'inventory' (a nil value)

If I use a deconstruction plan a robot picks up the mine but the space still is occupied. I cannot walk through it or place anything down although it appears empty.


Thanks,

I'll look into it, thanks for the report.

[Afforess]

Some of the mines are not being automatically picked up and when I try to manually pick them up I get the following error:

Error while running the event handler: __LogisticsMining__/control.lua:104: attempt to index local 'inventory' (a nil value)

If I use a deconstruction plan a robot picks up the mine but the space still is occupied. I cannot walk through it or place anything down although it appears empty.


Thanks,

I did some investigating, and found some answers!

1. I'd hazard a guess your mining drills hadn't been slated for deconstruction because they still have excess ore in their inventories that needs to be picked up, and your logistics network is full.
2. I fixed the error in the event handler, part of release 1.0.1
3. I fixed the containers being left behind occasionally when removing the logistic mining drills by hand or robot

I'd wager you have a few tiles where you have the invisible containers left over-top of ores. Here's what I suggest to clear those:

1. Remove any mining logistics hub from the ore patch
2. Remove any logistics mining drills and any other drills from the ore patch
3. Run this command in the console, while standing nearish (50 blocks or so) of the contaminated area:

Code: Select all

/c for _, ent in pairs(game.local_player.surface.find_entities_filtered({area = {{game.local_player.character.position.x - 25, game.local_player.character.position.y - 25}, {game.local_player.character.position.x + 25, game.local_player.character.position.y + 25}}, name = "robo-miner-logistic-chest-active-provider"})) do ent.destroy() end

4. You're done!

[SaulSimon]

Wow! Thanks for the quick response. I am at work but will try this when I get home. This mod is great saving me from spending half my time just moving mines/belts around.

SaulSimon

[NoriSilverrage]

What do the config changes do?
LOGISTICS_HUB_TICK_FREQUENCY = 20 -- 20 ticks = 0.33s
LOGISTICS_DRILL_TICK_FREQUENCY = 300 -- 300 ticks = 5s
LOGISTICS_DRILL_BATTERY_CHARGED = 75 -- power in MJ

+MAX_CONSTRUCTION_REQUESTS = 25 -- per mining hub

Specifically the first 2. As I understand the drilling speed, the drill mines about 0.4 units a second, so if the tick is what I think, does it let it mine 2 items before it requests pickup?

[Afforess]

What do the config changes do?
LOGISTICS_HUB_TICK_FREQUENCY = 20 -- 20 ticks = 0.33s
LOGISTICS_DRILL_TICK_FREQUENCY = 300 -- 300 ticks = 5s
LOGISTICS_DRILL_BATTERY_CHARGED = 75 -- power in MJ

+MAX_CONSTRUCTION_REQUESTS = 25 -- per mining hub

Specifically the first 2. As I understand the drilling speed, the drill mines about 0.4 units a second, so if the tick is what I think, does it let it mine 2 items before it requests pickup?

The first one (hub tick frequency) is how often a mining hub will search for a free spot to place a logistics mining drill.

The second one is how often logistics drills are updated, to check if the ore underneath has been depleted and a deconstruction request should be made.

[Afforess]

The latest version of Logistics Mining was updated for Factorio 0.13 and uploaded to the factorio mod portal: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Afforess/LogisticsMining

[Peppe]

Logistics Roboport energy stats are that of the old roboport.

I think most of the energy numbers are about 5x of what they were.

.13 roboport stats:

Code: Select all

energy_source =
    {
      type = "electric",
      usage_priority = "secondary-input",
      input_flow_limit = "5MW",
      buffer_capacity = "100MJ"
    },
    recharge_minimum = "40MJ",
    energy_usage = "50kW",
    -- per one charge slot
    charging_energy = "1000kW",

Logistics roboport:

Code: Select all

energy_source =
        {
          type = "electric",
          usage_priority = "secondary-input",
          input_flow_limit = "2MW",
          buffer_capacity = "48MJ"
        },
        recharge_minimum = "20MJ",
        energy_usage = "200kW",
        -- per one charge slot
        charging_energy = "200kW",

[Afforess]

Logistics Roboport energy stats are that of the old roboport.

I think most of the energy numbers are about 5x of what they were.

.13 roboport stats:

Code: Select all

energy_source =
    {
      type = "electric",
      usage_priority = "secondary-input",
      input_flow_limit = "5MW",
      buffer_capacity = "100MJ"
    },
    recharge_minimum = "40MJ",
    energy_usage = "50kW",
    -- per one charge slot
    charging_energy = "1000kW",

Logistics roboport:

Code: Select all

energy_source =
        {
          type = "electric",
          usage_priority = "secondary-input",
          input_flow_limit = "2MW",
          buffer_capacity = "48MJ"
        },
        recharge_minimum = "20MJ",
        energy_usage = "200kW",
        -- per one charge slot
        charging_energy = "200kW",

Thanks for pointing that out!

[Anson]

I think most of the energy numbers are about 5x of what they were.

Thanks for pointing that out!

AFAIK, they wanted to allow less energy usage for just covering a large area with roboports,
while increasing energy usage for really using many bots


TLTR: a really nice mod, running pretty well in 0.13.13, giving a nice alternative to faster modded miners and their required belts in a robot factory. thank you.

here comes some fun, a few observations, and a real bug ...

THE FUN
I just tested this mod with cheats enabled to get a preview what can be achieved in the late game, and i love it.

couldn't stop ROFL when i saw 500 robots working with 500 logistic mining drills on an ore field 16 kilometers distant from my base which had 20 million ore. the robots got 16k ore per minute (almost 1 million ore per hour) and filled an entire warehouse (2000 slots) in a matter of minutes. energy usage was something like 4 MW for the mining roboport, 7 MW for 3 groups of rechargers (each had 1 assembly for making drills and 7 rechargers around it for the batteries), and 70 MW for recharging the bots (which was my biggest problem, to have no big queues in front of the normal roboports; maybe I'll use FusionRobots later :-). to finally smelt that much ore at the same speed, i needed 6 or 7 rows of furnaces, each with a blue belt and 12 electric furnaces 3 (from another mod) with maxed speed modules for speed 12 :-) of course, the smelters required another 80 MW, and to power the whole system with coal, i would probably have needed another robot mining site to get 2k coal per minute :-)
to make it look nice, I hid all the furnaces in factorissimo buildings (4 rows with a total of 48 furnaces in each) and handled the compressed blue belts by simply putting requester and interface chests at the input lines and interface chests to store the plates. it will be quite a challenge to build the same again in a real game with only the robomining and a large smelting complex, with lots of spaghetti belts :-) and no big warehouses.

pictures of this test setup

a third of the mining site with one of three recharging setups (total 15.5k ore per minute)

mining.PNG (410.01 KiB) Viewed 7046 times

one of two smelting buildings

smelting-outside.PNG (388.12 KiB) Viewed 7046 times

the inside of a smelting building for 9.6k plates per minute

smelting-inside.PNG (415.8 KiB) Viewed 7046 times

THE OBSERVATIONS

a few things that i noticed about this mod while playing around:

• even when the recharging assemblers had no work to do when i stopped mining, they still used 7MW. it would be nice when they used lots of energy, but only while really recharging batteries.
• you can use fast assemblers to make the drills, but each one needs 10 recharged batteries. since you can use fast assemblers with 4 speed modules, or even faster assemblers from other mods, i had problems to get enough batteries to the assembler fast enough. there is only enough space for 7-8 rechargers in a circle around one such assembler, and the rechargers accept no kind of modules. i don't want to start using belts to recharge batteries for robot mining and i didn't try setups with groups of rechargers that output to provider chests so that the assembler can request more charged batteries. anyway, it would be nice if the rechargers could get slots for speed modules too (which of course would multiply the power usage).
• the mining roboport has the button to connect to circuit networks, but i didn't succeed in attaching colored wires to it. connecting it to a circuit network (or even better to the logistic network) would allow for nice options, eg to pause the mining roboport (to stop getting more resources when the current drills are done) instead of having to delete it manually when the storage gets full (I hate when active providers fill every storage they can find)
• why do the drills use active providers at all, and not passive providers? with passive providers smelters (and boilers, plastic assemblers, etc, and also chests at a train loader station) could request only exactly as much or as little ore/coal as they need. especially at a remote outpost, it's difficult to watch whether storage is flooded, and to adjust mining quantities to the main factory's needs. and even a small traffic jam on a train line could easily cause the whole outpost to be filled with ore, blocking other important functions like storing a bit of ammunition. having more than one kind of resource (eg iron and copper at a smelting outpost, or iron and coal when using fossil energy) is near impossible when active providers start flooding the wrong type of storage, causing ore to jam boiler feeds, copper to jam steel smelters, etc.

THE BUG

and there is probably also a real BUG:
when i placed a mining roboport, i noticed that the red area skipped a few locations. on several attempts (placing the mining port at different places), it seems as if it was always the same locations that were skipped, when marking the area with red, as well as later when placing the drills.

picture of the red area with skipped spots

to be able to see whether it was really the exact same locations that were skipped, i have marked two of them with lamps, and thus could confirm that it is always the same spots. also when the drills were placed later, these spots were skipped. thus it was not only a graphical glitch on displaying the red area.

red area with some missed ore spots

buggy-floodfill.PNG (1.04 MiB) Viewed 7046 times

[jghake]

Not sure if this has been reported yet or not but if you deconstruct the logistic mining drill with your robots they pick up as regular electric mining drills.

[Afforess]

Not sure if this has been reported yet or not but if you deconstruct the logistic mining drill with your robots they pick up as regular electric mining drills.

That's no bug. Logistics Mining Drills are made with regular electric drills + batteries. If you deconstruct (or mine by hand), you lose the batteries.

THE BUG

and there is probably also a real BUG:
when i placed a mining roboport, i noticed that the red area skipped a few locations. on several attempts (placing the mining port at different places), it seems as if it was always the same locations that were skipped, when marking the area with red, as well as later when placing the drills.

picture of the red area with skipped spots

to be able to see whether it was really the exact same locations that were skipped, i have marked two of them with lamps, and thus could confirm that it is always the same spots. also when the drills were placed later, these spots were skipped. thus it was not only a graphical glitch on displaying the red area.

buggy-floodfill.PNG

I mentioned it in the mod portal, but not here, but I guess I should repeat it. This issue is fixed in the latest version of the mod portal. It has been fixed for a couple weeks now.

[omniper]

Great mod.

Like someone else mentioned above, in the current version, if you deconstruct the logistics mining drill, even before it was depleted from the battery use, it will show up in the inventory as a regular electric mining drill.


Also if the character is nearby when the logistics mining drill is done and deconstructed automatically, the electric mining drill is put into the character's inventory, instead of a nearby requestor chest or even logistics storage chest. The requestor chest would be the one linked to the assembly machine that would have created a new logistic mining drill from the electric drill and a charged battery. In other words, it's possible that the automation of the logistics mining is broken at some point, if the electric mining drill is not returned to a station where it can be re-used automatically.

[Anson]

Subject: [MOD 0.12.20+] Logistics Mining 1.0.1 - Mining With Robots

Like someone else mentioned above, in the current version, if you deconstruct the logistics mining drill, even before it was depleted from the battery use, it will show up in the inventory as a regular electric mining drill.

think of it like this: When they are built, you turn over control to automatic systems, and you'll get back a normal mining drill later. if you do something yourself, the automatic process is already started and thus you don't get the fully charged drills back.
to not miss something, just stop placing drills and wait for the automatic process to terminate by itself.

Also if the character is nearby when the logistics mining drill is done and deconstructed automatically, the electric mining drill is put into the character's inventory, instead of a nearby requestor chest or even logistics storage chest.

this should only happen when you have a personal roboport and thus items that are marked for deconstruction are not deconstructed by the factory but by your own bots. the opposite effect can also happen: when YOU mark items for deconstruction, some of those items might get deconstructed by the factory and not by your own bots.
you always have to be very careful when building and deconstructing while in the range of roboports AND having personal roboports too.

to make life with personal roboports easier, there are mods that either disable personal roboports while in range of other roboports, or that allow for easily enabling and disabling of personal roboports with hotkeys.

the above effects also may occur when using no personal roboports, but other mods like "bluebuild" which automatically build and remove items.