Factorio Forums

Currently we can actively provide into the network (active provider, player trash, deconstruction. We can also passively provide (passive requester), or actively request (requester, player logistics slots), and we have a passive storage (accepts anything that isn't being actively requested)

This leaves one glaring hole: passive requesters. What do I mean by that? A chest that can request *spare* (ie actively provided, or in-storage, but not passively provided) items in the network.

This would be useful for situations where, for example, I have iron providers on the end of my bus: to provide iron if it's needed. This works fine, I can now use bot production, or request a little iron for my hand.

But if I deconstruct a huge steel smelting area or an iron unload train station, suddenly I've dumped 30,000 iron into my network: and I'm never going to use that up 100 at a time in my hand. It would be nice to be able to request this back onto my bus... but if I do that, the requesters will start sucking iron from the passive providers too. That makes an automated system impossible without sucking up all my bots.

Instead, I'd like this "Passive Requester" chest. It pulls any actively provided items that are being pushed into the system, and will use items in the storage chests... but doesn't touch anything in passive providers.

An alternative to an additional chest could be the ability to enable/disable provider chests via circuit network.
This way you could disable your provider chest based on the contents of the logistics network.

As workaround you could set up an inserter to only load the provider chest with a small amount, if the content of the logistic network is below a threshold.
Maybe put a normal chest in front of it as a buffer.

Your solution kind of works - I use a logistics connection on the inserter pulling from the chest, to only enable when the logistics system contains >x of the item.

That works okay, but it relies on you manually updating the >x value every time a new passive provider chest is added or removed, because the sum of the contents of those chest is included in the logistics count.

That's fine (but mildly annoying) for a single player world, but is next to useless in multiplayer when you have 50 people running around changing things without actually knowing what's going on.

This idea is not new

See
Dual Passive Provider / Requester Chest
Add a single combo requester and passive provider chest
Storage chest filter