Bots - mining

[ssilk]

I tried to mine some bots due to some reasons (one was for the bug with the bots standing around, the other one I needed just some bots to put them into another, distant roboport).
This is very difficult. I managed to mine my roboport and some other entities, because it is difficult to catch a bot, when he is flying.
And also the other way around: I mined some old stuff and in the end I found 3 bots, that where mined with them, because the bots where that dense, that I could not manage other.

Indeed, when in higher level, more speed and with more bots, it is really difficult to distinct between clicking bots and the entities on the ground.

This brings me to my suggestion. We need "levels" to distinct, want to mine. The idea is, if I mine a bot the chance is high to mine another and very low to mine something on the ground. And vice versa.

So this makes it easier:
1. Bots slow down short before they take up/deploy stuff or land/start. Like the train, but much shorter (only 1-2 tiles). They take also - lets say - 200 milliseconds to deploy/take (a animation, where the item is "sucked up"/"fallen down"?). And I think it looks much more pretty. The throughput goes a bit down, but the default speed can rise a little bit for that, so that in average is no disadvantage.
1.1 When right clicking on a bot, the bot can stop for a second or so.
2. This all together enables to mine them much easier.
3. When I now mine a bot, the the mining-tool is "locked" to the upper level. I can't mine an entity on the ground until I wait 1-3 seconds or/and release the LMB.
4. The same is with entities: When I just mined an entity I cannot mine a bot. The mining-tool is "locked" for - lets say - 1-3 seconds...
5. This is displayed: the mouse changes, to show the player, what the mining-tool currently is locked on.

Well. Not the best suggestion. Perhaps someone knows a better way to tell what to mine now. But I think it shows the problem and it is a solution, which can be used to create a better.

[SilverWarior]

Yes mining should be changed. There isn't only problems with mining robots.
Right now if you want to mine up a conveyor belt line the easiest way is to start mining first piece and then press and hold direction keys so that once first pice is mined your character will move to another. This works OK until you are trying to mine coveyor belt which was placed over some resource field.
So locking mining to "mining structures" or "m ining resources" would be nice.

As for mining robots. I have another better sugestion.
Make roboports in a way so they can limit the number of bots that are available for work.
So for instance you have roboport which you first fill up with 20 bots and say only 10 of them should work.
So roboport sends out 10 bots and keep other 10 bots as reserve. When one of those bots that are out there gets destroyed roboport sends out one of those which were in reserve to replace the destroyed one. Maybe even make this so that when a damaged bot comes back to roboport it is put on a builtin repair platform and a spare bot is sent out to replace it.
This would simply alow player to simply go to roboport and reduce the number of active bots and wait for some of them to return back to pick them up.

With this you could even make limitation of how many active bots can each roboport controll. This way finishing reserach of Bots wont give the player such a big jump in logistic managment as the player would have to research and upgrade its roboports to be able to controll largen numbers of bots or build more of them.

[ssilk]

Why so cumbersome? We need just the logistic network in the smart inserter, and there the number of current free robots (so this number is not an item but a generated number). And when the number is below 10 or below x, then an assembly begins to work and at the end we put a logistic bot into an roboport. Works just now, I tested it: you can use requester chests to acquire bots and repair packs and put them into the port, if needed. Currently just missing the logistic network being useable as circuit network.

[TGS]

I don't think it is 'mining' per say that needs fixing. I think it is layers completely. I was actually just about to suggest something similar to this myself. I had logistics bots going back and forth between a chest filling it up and I spent a good minute trying, and failing to click on the chest because the logistic bots were in the way.

So I propose a button/shortcut that you can use to change your selection 'layer'. So for example if you have your mouse over a chest and logistic bots are covering it. You can hit this button to automatically change your cursor from mouseover selecting the bot to whatever is underneath the bot. That way you can interact with it. Perhaps even have the temporary ability to 'lock' the layer after selection. That way if you want to say... capture some bots and you don't wanna accidentially mine something else you can lock it to the layer the bots are on and start spamming the left mouse button all over where they are flying without any worry of collecting/mining anything else.

There really shouldn't be situations where you cannot click on what you want because there is something else (aka logistic bots) flying overhead. Atm they are the only real thing, but incase there are other 'air' units added that might do this it should probably be put in.

[goku90504]

how about for bots you can go to a port and have it pull in a number of bots from the network and hold them for removal rather than trying to catch bots In the air

as for picking up conveyers vs mining if you could have a special purpose button like holding ctrl or something like that to only pick up one type of item as long as you hold the button (the first item you pick up that way sets the lock till you let go of the button)

[bobucles]

IMO the best way to address this is by expanding the pickaxe system. Early game having only a mining axe is perfectly fine. However the player may want different options on what they choose to grab. In this case something like a "falcon glove" to catch flying things or a "jackhammer" to handle floor tiles would perfectly adapt to the different mining layers.

[ssilk]

That introduces more number of tools. That might be not the best idea.