Factorio Forums

I was setting up a mining outpost and had a bunch of wood in my inventory. I had wood set as auto trash. I connected my roboports from my main base to my outpost (it wasn't very far). The bots started emptying my wood. They decided to take it all the way back to the main base (there may have been a requester chest requesting wood). After a while (at this point I didn't have any more wood in my inventory), I noticed that the bots kept coming back to the roboports near my outpost for recharging. After investigating, I realized the bots were taking a straight line path towards my main base. They would go half-way, realize they were out of power, return to the mining outpost, then restart their doomed journey. My attempts to fix it include:
1. Disconnecting the 2 logistic networks
2. Adding roboports right in the path of the bots (near where they would run out of power).
3. Adding storage chests with wood in them near the outpost. They didn't touch the wood I manually placed in the chest. They just ignored it.

Going through the debug views wasn't helpful at all.

This seems to be a bug, or at least an extremely annoying problem. At least as a feature request, can bots recalculate their pathing if they run out of power? Ideally, the entire pathing system would be more intelligent (the bots would calculate every roboport they would stop at beforehand and not leave if they ended up in an a looping path).

Save file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3xbgenhd5crvt ... 8.zip?dl=0

This was on steam, in case that matters.

Thanks for the report however this is working correctly. You need to not build L shaped or U shaped networks.

Robots will fly in direct lines to the target and if you build L shaped or U shaped networks they can get into points where they won't have enough power to fly where they need to go.

If you build roboports over the area they want to fly they will charge at he nearest roboport when they run out of power and eventually reach the target.