Prioritize personal roboport construction bots?

[Locane]

Does anyone know if there's a mod, or a way to set deconstruction / construction planning to prioritize personal roboport (and my inventory) over the logistics and roboport base network? I know that I can turn my personal roboport off, but that's not what I want. I want the opposite.

I like the roboport logistics network for bringing me items and for fixing my base after biter attacks, but I don't like how long it takes to do those things.

It takes MINUTES sometimes for them to fulfill a construction / deconstruction request in a large base, and I'm too impatient to wait that long.

My workaround thus far has been to deconstruct only as many things as I have personal construction bots for, so I end up sweep-selecting things in small areas, repeatedly, so that the roboport construction bots don't try to "claim" something right in front of me and make me wait until it's gone.



While we're on the topic, it would be really nice if I could set some kind of loop priority for what the roboport bots prioritize and do. Power poles getting taken down should be top priority to replace, but they seem to just go in a list of "first come, first serve" and that makes the bots in Factorio cumbersome to work with. They're kinda dumb.

[Koub]

The way it works is that it's not the logistic network or the bots that poll for new jobs to do, it's the build order itself that calls "send me a construction bot with this item" to the construction network. And for performance reasons, the intelligence of the network is limited.

There are no mods I'm aware of that do what you want, but I guess a mod limiting temporarily roboport construction area to 0 should do the trick (if it excludes your personal roboports).
This might be of some help.

OR you can remove the roboports that cover the area you want instabuilt. Or just issue your build order, and go do something else.

[MEOWMI]

It kind of sucks but I just try to deal with it.

I try to get around it by using a lot of personal roboports. It works fairly well, I've gotten up to 6 robo2s equipped quite comfortably (4 batts, 1 fusion, 6 exos I believe), and it'll be even better if you're willing to sacrifice some exo slots, but it's not perfect.

If you do accidentally issue more orders than you have bots, you can alt+d shift-drag over the orders to cancel them and reissue them if speed is of necessity.

Maybe even have a secondary armor specifically for fulfilling large robot construction? That way you can have like 4-6 batts, 1 fusion and the rest just roboports in your armor. You could even add 4 more robos if you're willing to micromanage battery recharging more (just requires a few clicks to switch them in and out when needed).

On rare occasions, you might also be able to get around some of the issues by using a buffer chest.

On a side note, it is very useful to rely on your base to do the building too even if it's at a much slower pace, and to equip it to be able to do so. Your engineer time is usually worth so much more than standing around babysitting robots.

[Locane]

Could we have a feature to turn off base construction bots within the scope of my personal roboport build area?

That would solve the problem - then I could use my construction bots to re-vamp a section of my base in peace without my personal bots ignoring the ghosts / removal marks *right in front of me*.

Actually, just setting personal construction bots to always activate when there's a nearby workload, whether it's claimed by the base network or not, would also solve the problem. I would much rather have that behavior than to be trying to make painful base re-jiggering be hampered by minutes-long wait times.

[astroshak]

I honestly sounds to me like there might be a faulty approach to building your base, TC.

Bots really shine over small, discrete networks. It sounds as though you have one big network covering your entire base? That’s what the complaint about it taking, as you put it, “MINUTES” tells me anyway.

After some point, it starts to make more sense to have either some kind of “building train” - a train loaded down with all the building supplies you would need for an outpost - or to start taking stuff with you in a car or tank, if not both. Go to where you are building whatever you want to build, build it, and then have the primary connection to the rest of your base via the rail network. Bots just do not function all that well over medium to long distances.

[Deadlock989]

I honestly sounds to me like there might be a faulty approach to building your base, TC.

Bots really shine over small, discrete networks. It sounds as though you have one big network covering your entire base? That’s what the complaint about it taking, as you put it, “MINUTES” tells me anyway.

After some point, it starts to make more sense to have either some kind of “building train” - a train loaded down with all the building supplies you would need for an outpost - or to start taking stuff with you in a car or tank, if not both. Go to where you are building whatever you want to build, build it, and then have the primary connection to the rest of your base via the rail network. Bots just do not function all that well over medium to long distances.

+1000. This does indeed come up time and again. I don't know why people think they have to carpet an entire continent with one monolithic logistics network when all the available evidence points to this being a bad idea almost all of the time.

c.f. the threads where people complain about bots flying out over a giant lake when the player built a giant monolithic U-shaped logistic network around a lake

[Locane]

Blaming my base building style and efforts for why logistics / construction bots systems take too long or act dumbly is pretty classic for forum threads like this.

It's not always the player that's wrong; sometimes the design or implementation is wrong, too.

Factorio is a game about automation and logical systems, working together, to form larger systems.

It's not at all unreasonable for a player to assume that a roboport network would need to cover the entire base - that's why the logistics skirt size is smaller than the construction size, it adds a layer of complexity to base planning and building challenge.

Telling me that I'm "playing wrong" for expecting that roboports and bots should be in the larger network is not a good answer. I'm pretty sure Kovarex would agree with me.

[Deadlock989]

It's not always the player that's wrong

No, not always.

[astroshak]

What you *can* do and what you *should* do are not always the same choices among your options.

You *can* make a giant roboport network that covers your entire base. That does not mean that you *should*. If you choose to do so anyway, then you are choosing to accept the “MINUTES” wait you complained about.

Or, you can choose that you don’t like the long wait that comes from having long distances for your bots to travel, and change up the design, or not design it that way when building your next map. Its up to you.

In other words, its your design choice that gives you the wait you were complaining about. Its not a bug with the game - bots only travel so fast, even with bot speed upgrades. Its not you playing wrong, or making some kind of error. The base is merely doing what you designed it to do.

Thus, if there’s a problem, it is a faulty design. We’ve ALL made faulty designs. Sometimes its a simple matter of forgetting a power pole, or an inserter, or a critical pipe-to-ground. Other times, the overall design concept is flawed and needs to be redone from scratch. Who cares? Just fix it and move on . Or accept the faulty design and the limitations inherent to it. That is up to you.

[Locane]

What you *can* do and what you *should* do are not always the same choices among your options.

You *can* make a giant roboport network that covers your entire base. That does not mean that you *should*. If you choose to do so anyway, then you are choosing to accept the “MINUTES” wait you complained about.

Or, you can choose that you don’t like the long wait that comes from having long distances for your bots to travel, and change up the design, or not design it that way when building your next map. Its up to you.

In other words, its your design choice that gives you the wait you were complaining about. Its not a bug with the game - bots only travel so fast, even with bot speed upgrades. Its not you playing wrong, or making some kind of error. The base is merely doing what you designed it to do.

Thus, if there’s a problem, it is a faulty design. We’ve ALL made faulty designs. Sometimes its a simple matter of forgetting a power pole, or an inserter, or a critical pipe-to-ground. Other times, the overall design concept is flawed and needs to be redone from scratch. Who cares? Just fix it and move on . Or accept the faulty design and the limitations inherent to it. That is up to you.

Why isn't the problem "Construction and logistics bots in the game aren't very smart", or "an option to prioritize personal roboport is missing"?

Again; blaming me for a natural expectation of a player is not the right call. But then, I don't work at Wube, so maybe they have data to the contrary.

[Deadlock989]

Why isn't the problem "Construction and logistics bots in the game aren't very smart", or "an option to prioritize personal roboport is missing"?

Because if the bots were programmed to predict and work against dumb sub-optimal set-ups by players who are stubbornly set in their ways, bots would run more slowly for everyone and the game would be objectively worse as a result. It might have occurred to you that your preferences are not everyone else's. Some of us like having 60 updates per second, for example. It was explained to you above by Koub how the build order works and why, and you just ignored it. Personal roboports can't be prioritised over static ones because neither of them are relevant in assigning bots in the first place.

I mean, it's not like this conversation hasn't happened 100 times already since the tail end of 2013 when construction bots were first introduced, but I guess the mere fact that the way that build orders are handled has hardly ever changed in all that time is never going to cut any mustard with you.

[astroshak]

What you *can* do and what you *should* do are not always the same choices among your options.

You *can* make a giant roboport network that covers your entire base. That does not mean that you *should*. If you choose to do so anyway, then you are choosing to accept the “MINUTES” wait you complained about.

Or, you can choose that you don’t like the long wait that comes from having long distances for your bots to travel, and change up the design, or not design it that way when building your next map. Its up to you.

In other words, its your design choice that gives you the wait you were complaining about. Its not a bug with the game - bots only travel so fast, even with bot speed upgrades. Its not you playing wrong, or making some kind of error. The base is merely doing what you designed it to do.

Thus, if there’s a problem, it is a faulty design. We’ve ALL made faulty designs. Sometimes its a simple matter of forgetting a power pole, or an inserter, or a critical pipe-to-ground. Other times, the overall design concept is flawed and needs to be redone from scratch. Who cares? Just fix it and move on . Or accept the faulty design and the limitations inherent to it. That is up to you.

Why isn't the problem "Construction and logistics bots in the game aren't very smart", or "an option to prioritize personal roboport is missing"?

Again; blaming me for a natural expectation of a player is not the right call. But then, I don't work at Wube, so maybe they have data to the contrary.

I’m saying that the delay you experienced, and complained about, is the result of your design choices. You have two options to resolve your problem : either accept the delays that accompany one large bot network, or break it up into smaller, more effective networks, and accept the logistical consequences of no longer having one overarching bot network.

There’s no one blaming you, but maybe yourself? I’m not sure why you are being so defensive when faced with the game’s mechanics and how they don’t work the way you want them to.

[ssilk]

You can use the nice green supply chests to make construction a lot faster. Not perfect, but you can think about this: what’s the difference between a supply chest and player inventory?

[jamiechi1]

I normally don't have construction robots in the network in the main base where I am constructing things. If I use construction bots on the base at all, they are kept on a separate network near the walls away from the center of the main base. Use belts to move things from one network to another as needed.

[aaron311]

Apologies for the thread necromancy, but I actually had the same problem. Yeah, I know, I shouldn't be building massive logistics networks across my base, but I can't resist! I'm addicted to massive networks. It's an illness, what can I say?

Anyway (somewhat shameful) plug, I wrote a mod that allows temporary prioritization of your construction bots. It's incredibly evil and hacky but IMO makes my life considerably better when playing the game. That way I can make massive and ill-advised logistic networks to my heart's content. Now there's really no negative consequences for my poor life choices!

Mod link: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/TacticalConstruction

Still very much beta. If you try it I'd very much appreciate feedback (both positive and critical) since I'm trying to think of ways to make it better...