Factorio Forums

Now that we have robot ports which server to limit the operational area of robots, I think it is time to add harvester bots. Harvester bots would collect wood (and possibly minerals?) to fill requester chest orders. Like other bots, they would operate only in the area covered by a robot port, and would only harvest items that currently had a request order from a requester chest.

Why would we need to harvest wood faster when it is completely useless as soon as the player can produce steel,
I can only see this being any useful for removing trees which are blocking expansions.

Yeah. Pretty much until we can replant trees this would be largely pointless aside from clearing purposes.

It's funny, wood actually provides energy faster than coal.

Mining one big tree gives you 16kJ whereas coal will only give you 8kJ, all things being equal.

I'm guessing this would be cool if we could grow trees in stock.

20 kJ actually, at 4 kJ per piece of wood. The problem is that you need to supply twice as many pieces of wood per second in a production line compared to coal, which means you need twice the number of belt lines or logistics bots to supply the boilers and you can only store half as much fuel in a single chest.

The main reason would be to automate clearing of large areas, the bonus is that you can use it for fuel instead of just blowing it up.