Factorio Forums

Hi Everyone! I have a question and I'm hoping you can help me.

I'm currently using a circuit network to monitor the number of total logistic robots in my network and combinators to automatically start production when needed. Essentially, when the ratio of robots to ports drops below a pre-set limit, production kicks in. The problem I have is that the number of roboports is currently manually entered.

Here is my question: Is there a way to automatically detect the number of roboports in a network?

Thank you in advance.

There sure is. Hook a roboport up with a wire and then read it's info card. The tooltips explain everything from there.

Escadin wrote:There sure is. Hook a roboport up with a wire and then read it's info card. The tooltips explain everything from there.

Thank you for replying. I see options to view network contents and robot statistics but nothing about the number of roboports. Am I missing something?

He's not asking for the number of robots, but roboports. To my knowledge there's no way to read that out, but the ratio of roboports to robots shouldn't matter anyway. My advice would be to produce robots when the amount of available logistics bots drops below a treshold. Only potential issue would be a traffic jam caused by an ever increasing amount of bots trying to charge from a limited number of roboports, causing an ever lenghtening queue.

Oh I'm sorry. Turns out I missunderstood what you wanted.

No, I don't think there is a way to detect how many roboports there are. Why is the ratio of bot / port important to you?

Escadin wrote:Why is the ratio of bot / port important to you?

It does make sense.
Each roboport can only hold so many robots. So it's quite logical to manage the total number of robots on the networks, based on how many roboports are available.

The problem is you cannot automatically construct roboports. So, if that is your top concern automatically releasing robots is probably not the way to do it. Why not just fill every new roboport with the "appropriate" number of bots while you're still there?

Escadin wrote:The problem is you cannot automatically construct roboports. So, if that is your top concern automatically releasing robots is probably not the way to do it. Why not just fill every new roboport with the "appropriate" number of bots while you're still there?

Still, you may wish to insert new robots in the system when the number of available robots drop below a certain limit, but only if it doesn't break a certain bots/roboports ratio (and, to be clear, that's exactly how I manage things on my own bases ).

There are other solutions, such as placing a constant combinator at the same time as the roboport, emitting a given signal (say 'R' for instance) with value '1', then get the value of 'R' on the whole network, but it's not very convenient, nor it is "clean".

You could put a constant combinator next to each roboport and set it to output roboport=1. Link them all together on a network and you can get the total count that way. You could blueprint the roboport and combinator so it wouldn't be too tedious to repeat the setup.

Based on the rate of being able to recharge bots it simply isn't advisable to only build ports once they are full.

Thank you Shobukai, tuplex, SeigneurAo, Escadin, and Aeternus for your responses.

My intent was simply to just build a roboport adjacent to an existing network and have the number of bots automatically managed. Though the idea of having a constant combinator for each roboport would work, that would require wiring the entire base for new ports which is probably more work than desired.

I think I'll stick with my current solution which is to simple have a single constant combinator into which I manually enter the number of ports.

Thank you again for your help.