Factorio Forums

How to reproduce:

• Setup two roboports, one reading network contents, and one reading network requests
• Link them to a pole, one red, one green, so you can read both outputs
• Setup a requester chest with a request for 50 of an item (something not a multiple of the robot cargo size, I was using a size of 4)
• Place a storage chest and place 50 of that item inside
• Manually step through the frames one by one
• The network requests are instantly satisfied by the storage chest (this is incredibly useful for my use case)
• As the bots get assigned to pick up items, eventually the network contents goes negative (not a bug) since 50 is not a multiple of 4
• As the last bot gets assigned, for a single tick, the network requests increase before correcting itself the next tick

While I understand the network contents are designed to go negative, I believe the increase in network requests for a single tick is a bug.

Revisiting this post because I noticed that with enough bots in your network, this issue does not occur.
While I might be missing some underlying logic, I still believe this to be a bug.

New steps to reliably reproduce the issue:

• Setup two roboports, one reading network contents, and one reading network requests
• Link them to a pole, one red, one green, so you can read both outputs
• Add 5 logistics bots to the network
• Setup a requester chest with a request for 50 of an item (and robot cargo size of 4)
• Place a storage chest and place 50 of that item inside
• Manually step through the frames one by one
• When the network contents goes negative, for a single tick, the network requests increase before correcting itself the next tick

Screenshot for completeness When using more bots (for example 50), this single tick increase does not occur.
Additionally, when using only 1 bot, this increase happens mid-transit - likely when the remainder of the bot's queued tasks are assigned.