Factorio Forums

This is my one and only Factorio creation. Instead of creating a new game, I just kept on building on the same map. It's not the most efficient design but the shear volume of activities is pretty impressive, much credit to the game developers.

It's currently run by over 1.5 million worker and construction robots. Each white dot represents a flying robot, doing its logistics delivery. The largest quantity produced item is the copper cables at 940 million units produced, at the production rate of 4.2k per 5 seconds. I had about thousand of rockets launched into space, but somehow I lost count. The latest addition is the 13 spidertrons regularly delivering goods to an island city, surrounded by the waters, where no spitters & biters can attack back.

There is an issue of some robots being stuck in an infinite loop. The robots travel to the middle of unexplored/occupied land, after they run out of battery, they return to recharge at the same Roboport as it previously recharged, and takes the same path to nowhere. They are unable to deliver the ordered goods from the logistics network. Currently the solution is that I have to build more Roboports to guide their paths. Any method to route the worker robots (eg, waypoints) would be my suggestion.

aoh101 wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 14, 2021 8:31 am

There is an issue of some robots being stuck in an infinite loop. The robots travel to the middle of unexplored/occupied land, after they run out of battery, they return to recharge at the same Roboport as it previously recharged, and takes the same path to nowhere. They are unable to deliver the ordered goods from the logistics network. Currently the solution is that I have to build more Roboports to guide their paths. Any method to route the worker robots (eg, waypoints) would be my suggestion.

without adding mods, that is how it works. no other changes to be made other than just not having such a large robot network. each roboport has a fixed CPU cost and the more you add, the slower the game will run.

if you want to try mods, you can add Robot Battery Research (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Robot_Battery_Research) which is a pretty straightforward addition - just some research to allow your robots to store more energy.

Thanks for the reply.

Another interesting behaviour is that while the robots are stuck, unable to reach its destination, you disconnect the logistics network by deconstructing one of the Roboport. This separates into 2 different Logistics network. Only then the robot will be unstuck and drift across to its destination slowly without battery power. It drops the items into Storage chests (yellow chests) of the destination logistics network, instead of making the delivery to the Requester chests (blue chests).
Top left white line shows robots on Logistics network being stuck, they can't reach their destination because they attempts to recharge.

Near the middle white dots/lines shows robots disconnected from the logistics network and now drifting across to destinations (for an hour) without battery power, not needing to recharge.

Zooming out: Anyone else built their Factorio using millions of Logistics network robots having similar issue/work-around?

I like it. It looks organic.

You can add a refueling stop in the middle of your "no-go areas". These robo ports have to be connected to the grid. Figure out what the max travel distance of your bots is (depends on bot speed -- I think...). Then add a refueling station at critical positions and connect it to the grid (perpendicular to the travel direction).

Thanks. Organic is good way to describe it. It's like a living thing that consumes resources and shoots rockets into space.

I have managed to route the robots by segmenting robot network and using requester & provider chests. It's a bit like a trading between 2 separated robot networks. The trick here is to selecting which items to transfer, so that robot path is straight. I need more Roboports since it creates a "traffic jam" when too many robots wants to recharge.

Large delivery