Factorio Forums

Seems to me if you want to stage construction materials for a big job, that's logistics -- carpenters don't deliver wood, right?. So plop some requester chests at the job site, have the logi bots deliver the goods, then switch them to provider chests for the construction workers.

quyxkh wrote:Seems to me if you want to stage construction materials for a big job, that's logistics -- carpenters don't deliver wood, right?. So plop some requester chests at the job site, have the logi bots deliver the goods, then switch them to provider chests for the construction workers.

You could use buffer chests in 0.16 as well.

Buffer chests for the win, I also hope they add my suggestion of making buffer chests send excess items to one another (it would make for some really interesting possibilities for recycling and mall redesign) buffer chest bellow it's requests is a request chest that construction robots and requester can draw from, buffer chest above its requests is a passive provider buffers requesters or construction can draw from

SuicideJunkie wrote:What if you place a buffer chest next to your passive provider?
Have it request 1 item. An inserter will pick that item and start to move it to your PP chest. While in hand, the logistics bots will run off and grab an item out of storage for your butter chest.

I can't think of a good way to make it stop once your storage chests are empty without wiring those storage chests up, but you could use a timer to drop the inserter to a 1% duty cycle.
That will make your storage empty out quite slowly but consistently. Once the storage is empty you'll have an occasional waste of a bot fighting with the inserter, but that will ensure you always have at least one available logistics bot near the factory even if the others have flown off.

That still only works i you only have one passive chest for building.

My post might not be entirely on topic but it may be of interest to you. In another forum thread some users and I discussed what is necessary to feed stuff from the storage chests back into the production process.

The result was a compact and nicely working blue print.

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=52166

If it is used after the factory producing a type of item, then the storage chests are being kept free of this type of item, the items can still be requested from a passive provider and be requested to requester chests, WITHOUT causing a provider-requester loop (that was the problem to solve).

Eg if you want to get rid of all the iron plates in the storage chests and feed them back to the production line, but you also want to be able to provide iron plates to the player and requester chests, then plug in that blueprint after your smelting lines for iron plates. And voila, never again iron plates in the storage, but still available for requests.