Factorio Forums

Not sure if this is working as intended:

I've made a little test setup, Provider Chests filled with red and green circuits on the left, Requester Chests on the right, the top one requesting 9000 green circuits, all the other one requesting 9000 red circuits each.
There's a little over 400 bots, and they seem to be split up evenly over the materials requested, not the number of chests requesting: 200 for the chest requesting red circuits, and 200 for all other chests combined (resulting in 800 green circuits and 6x128 = 768 red circuits being delivered).



If there are enough bots, this isn't a problem, but when I'm unloading and loading several trains at once the red circuit chest stays nicely topped up, while the other ones are slowly being drained. I expected there would simply be 400/7 = 58 bots per chest delivering.

This is the type of thing where bots are not so OP. You're in black-art territory here. I realize this is a bug report, but were it a post to a "help me play factorio" thread, my only real advice would have been to futz around with things to try and fine tune things like this. Since, in a shortage, each requester is treated equally regardless of quantity requested, all other factors being equal, all requesters will recieve equal fulfillment, at least in theory, regardless of quantity requested. That means that you can prioritize a "bank" of requesters simply by building more of them, and shrinking the amount requested proportionately.

What happens when there is a shortage of bots, however... is not my area of expertise as I habitually overprovision bots. I guess given the foregoing it does kind of make sense for bots to split their labor power evenly amongst requested types of items (it would be easier for the player, if they split in proportion to number of bot-carrying-maximums requested per item (I think that's a constant for items that stack beyond a certain quantity? not even sure. Anyhow maybe it's more computationally intensive since items would have to be totalled and math'ed over all the time to find those proportions).

Thanks for the report however this isn't a bug. You simply need to build more robots.

Could you imagine my requestor chests that are requesting rocket fuel for my trains NOT being serviced because it's only requesting one item?