Factorio Forums

Hi, I have been playing Factorio for a few months and first time to post and not sure if anyone else has thought of this set-up for mining using robots for transport of materials. I realised I could do this a few days ago, doing away entirely with belts, inserters and the line gaps between mining drills needed to feed through power lines. A much more efficient use of the available mining areas I thought.

I was thinking about this some time ago, after all optimization i ended up with this repeatable design-pattern: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 9&start=18

C = Chests
P = Medium Power Pole

Very nice burnhard... That reminds me of the magnasanti from Sim City.

That one is a better pattern, as you said no wasted space, it looks like it will do my head in a bit more though planning it out to begin with. Going to use it now thanks, great to share this stuff.

-root wrote:Very nice burnhard... That reminds me of the magnasanti from Sim City.

I tried to replicate that city once, it was an amazing failure in replication but still the most dense city I ever managed to build without cheats.

Now I need to go watch the video for the awesome music that had people flagging it.

What I'm not clear about is the way you then send things to the smelters, one box every 2 smelters? Wouldn't for this part be a lot better to use transports?

In my opinion belts are always better for mining, than logistic bots.

The first reason is, that the mines deliver a constant output - and the belts transport a constant stream.

Second reason is, that the usefulness for the bots depends on the distance. For belts not, they can be very long, more than 1000 tiles, before they become unusable.

And third reason: it's just more fun to see the things flowing.

Has anyone computed the number of bots per tile distance needed to match the speed of a yellow, red or blue belt? (assuming these bots will be used exlusively for transporting ore to smelter).

Which make me think: Why transport ore to a smelter? Transport it to a chest just outside the filed and move it to belts or trains for long range mass transport..

So the question becomes: How many logistic bots does it take to transport ore at normal/max drilling speed? I'm a newbie but I think I saw something about normal speed being roughly an ore every 4 seconds and max under a second. Can logistic bots even land on a chest that fast? What about chests with 2, 3 or 4 miners?

I used robot mining in a (v12) base because of ease of building outposts, since everything is blueprintable. With belts you always have to do some custom wiring, with bots you can just make a mining blueprint with roboports, a station blueprint, plunk em down, and everything builds itself.

vanatteveldt wrote:I used robot mining in a (v12) base because of ease of building outposts, since everything is blueprintable. With belts you always have to do some custom wiring, with bots you can just make a mining blueprint with roboports, a station blueprint, plunk em down, and everything builds itself.

What kind of custom wiring? I just cant understand...

Sorry, I meant in the figurative sense of the word, mainly connecting the belts, merging/balancing the different mining 'alleys', and feeding the result into the (blueprintable) balanced loader at the station.

Edit: funny enough there is a set of blueprints for belt-driven mining outposts on the front page now (viewtopic.php?f=8&t=25326), maybe I just didn't take the time setting up the blueprints or had too much OCD on the belt balancing... (probably from when I used splitters for chest balancing rather than combinators...)

That setup has been on the forums for quite a while, but it got largely ignored when it was posted. I think the posted (belt-based) mining setup is overengineered, but I have to say that if you have blueprints like those it's rather easy to set up a belt-based outpost without a lot of "manual wiring".

The bot based outposts have the problem that they use a lot of energy. If you mine 3-4k/minute then you need a couple of hundred robots and several roboports, and it eats up Megawatts really quickly.

You have less "manual wiring" but you need to carry lots of robots with you if you set up an outpost, I think it's very awkward.

I personally recommend to use substations, and tile the miners around the substations. This gives you 100% coverage, and also maximum speed except where the substations are (these spots are still fully covered, though). Just make a blueprint for the substation grid, and another one for long columns of miners (+ belts) that tile around the substations.

ssilk wrote:In my opinion belts are always better for mining, than logistic bots.

The first reason is, that the mines deliver a constant output - and the belts transport a constant stream.

Second reason is, that the usefulness for the bots depends on the distance. For belts not, they can be very long, more than 1000 tiles, before they become unusable.

And third reason: it's just more fun to see the things flowing.

The downside: making belt based system load chests evenly is a pain. Bots do it automatically (the fill requestors requesting the same item uniformly).

Frightning wrote:The downside: making belt based system load chests evenly is a pain. Bots do it automatically (the fill requestors requesting the same item uniformly).

Why is it a pain? It's one combinator and a bit of wiring (all of which is blueprinted so you don't even have to do it yourself more than once).

siggboy wrote:

Frightning wrote:The downside: making belt based system load chests evenly is a pain. Bots do it automatically (the fill requestors requesting the same item uniformly).

Why is it a pain? It's one combinator and a bit of wiring (all of which is blueprinted so you don't even have to do it yourself more than once).

I suppose, with 0.13 it's almost as easy, but that wasn't the case in 0.12.

Frightning wrote:I suppose, with 0.13 it's almost as easy, but that wasn't the case in 0.12.

It's the same kind of "easy" for 0.12 and 0.13. It has become faster in 0.13 beause of the inserter changes, but not in any way easier or harder.

siggboy wrote:

Frightning wrote:The downside: making belt based system load chests evenly is a pain. Bots do it automatically (the fill requestors requesting the same item uniformly).

Why is it a pain? It's one combinator and a bit of wiring (all of which is blueprinted so you don't even have to do it yourself more than once).

IMO, you don't even need wiring. You just need belts balanced. I enjoy belt balancing, so that's my preferred solution.