Factorio Forums

Currently bots work well in a balanced, centralized environment where everything is close by, but stuff like balancing production, keeping bots safe, fully utilizing chest capacity, keeping stuff neatly sorted or using bots on 2 separate sites are loads of micromanagement to set up.

Requester chests don't allow bots taking stuff out of them, storage chests get filled with stuff you don't want here, provider chests are supposed to be always emptied as soon as possible.

Simple ideas that could solve some (most?) of those issues:

• Limited type storage chest - essentially requester + inserter + storage, but without "backwash".
• Lazy provider - tries to keep number of items below a given value, calling for partial emptying only when too full (storage + inserter + provider - backwash)
• Conditionally logistic chest - when conditions (on green/red wire, like a smart inserter) are met, it's a logistic chest of a preselected type (otherwise just smart)
• Chest groups - bots only take jobs when both endpoints belong to the same group
• Radio channels - same as above, except the bot needs to belong to the group too
• Radio-to-wire converter - adds all items that can be acquired from logistic chests (what player sees when mousing over a storage chest) to the signal on a given wire

Most of those would be easily implementable as modules, except for the "radio channels" one.

If you stopped using storage chests, you'd see a lot of these problems disappear. (Other than silly things like putting items *into* a requester chest )
Setting providers up with a smart inserter will limit the amount made, and paired with lowish limit requesters will ensure there's not a vast oversupply of a specific item.

AFAIK, the team's working on something like a Substation for bots that will limit their operational area, which will also fix several of these issues.

Until/unless Storage chests get a editable interface (like requesters) I'd just avoid them for the time being.

Same solution here.
Not using storage for storing excess material, disabling production when satisfied instead.