Factorio Forums

When using construction robots, they never use charging points, neither if the network only has a roboport nor if it only has a robochest (and a zone expander). This is not the first time I tried to make charging points work, and I'm really frustrated about that.

Please either explain how to correctly set this up or remove them from your mod to spare other players from desperately making this work. Mod versions are pretty much up-to-date (almost up-to-date Sea Block).

Well, you're less likely to see a construction robot use a charging point anyway, because they do a job, then return home, and with the way the system works they will always try and charge only at their docking point. (A flaw in the roboport logic, and why a robochest even has a charging point built in)
if however you're trying to build most of an outpost with only a few robots, then you might see them try and use a charging port.

I typically see the charging ports being used when I have a high traffic of Logistic robots, you watch them for a while and will notice that they break off from the stream to go charge. put a charging point at that location, then instead of breaking off to go charge, they'll just stop at the charging port and use that instead.

On top of this, you also have roboports with 4 charging points in them, so if you use a normal roboport, the charging ports are less useful too.
Also if you're using MK5 robots (MK4 with fusion reactor) then charging ports are useless, because they never need to charge.

You're right! It seems construction robots only ignore charging points and 'shortcut' to the roboport / robochest once they're done and have to go home anyway. If there are still jobs in the queue, they will use charging points as well. To shortcut to home might be good in some cases and bad in other cases. Bad of course if they're literally waiting in dozens on top of an unused charging point; but an algorithm considering this possible optimization might be more complicated.

Thanks for clarifying!