That I did not know. Which I find most strange. But it doesn't change much. It just make things easier than I thought. You set requesters to whatever amount you think is appropriate to keep that assembler supplied in time and then forget about it. You set your production limit to about what would be traveling around + an extra amount that you want to keep ready for your personal use.Tallinu wrote:Requester chests are destination-only, and bots will never remove items from them (unless you mark them for deconstruction). This means items in a requester chest are not available for request by the logistics system, and therefore do not count toward available items in logistics storage, whether for the purposes of smart inserter conditions or anything else.
But I was always aware that requesters should have as little as possible in them. Knowing little about his factory, robotport layout and robot count... 100 electronic circuits per requesters felt like a save number to use for the sake of my example.
Now, I totally know the difference between an active and a passive provider and I totally meant to use an active provider. If anything you are the one that seem confused about things with the exception of requester chests. Of course if you are not using smart inserters to keep your active providers empty, the robots will be frantically filling your storage chests whenever they have a chance. But I'm talking about a setup that is using smart inserters.
1) You say that active provider will cause robots to move stuff twice. A little yes, but mostly no. If requesters need something and providers have items available, they WILL come from the active provider. Because unlike passive providers, active providers have priority over storage and requester have priority over storage. There can be 10 000 items sitting in storage the robots wont give 2 crap about it. Items will come from active providers no matter what. Unless providers are empty. Which can only happen if there is an overflow and a overflown can only happen because the player did something to mess with the system.
Deconstructing walls and turrets is unlikely to cause problem to your factory. Requesting 800 electronic circuits only to drop them back into the network definitively will confuse the system a bit. Item count will be way above production limit and active providers will empty. From that point your factory will have to clean the player's mess and drain his/her stockpile from storage. Once item count fall back below production limits, the provider will spring back to life and take priority. Leaving the storage (and personal stockpile in case of request) alone.
Note that this is not different from what would happen with your setup. If you drop a large amount of electronic circuits into your system, items will have to come from storage (even if passive providers still have items).
Also note that active provider will not send anything to storage until requesters are satisfied. The second a requester need something, the robot will stop filling up storage and take items from the active providers and bring them to the requesters. Notice how nothing is travelling twice yet.
By staggering your inserters as you get closer to your production goal you can control production speed. Your factory will naturally match the supply to the demand and your item count in logistic network will stabilize somewhere below production limit. The smaller the demand and the closer your will be to production limit. If you factory stops for a while, production limit will be reached as providers empties into storage then production completely stops. When your factory wake up, the first batch of items will indeed come from storage because providers are empty. But as soon as item count dip below production limit (which should be pretty quick), the providers revive and storage chests are ignored (leaving your personal stockpile alone).
Passive chest will never send anything to storage. So your setup would not have this slightly slower start. However, your system will not be satisfied until storage is completely drained. So if you do something stupid, like requesting 2000 electronic circuits and then dump them back into the network. Your factory will be using the stockpile from the storage for a good while before requesters begin to be refilled by providers again. So in case of stupid mistakes, your passive provider setup will behave in much the same way as my active provider setup. It is not any better.
Passive providers do not sound so great to me so far, but there is more. With my system, if I want to request a sizable amount of an item it will drain what is currently available in that specific moment in providers (which should be next to nothing, because my setup is design to keep them empty as much as possible) and everything else will come from my personal stockpile in storage. I get my full order very quickly (because items are already made) and factory resume production very quickly (with my stockpile taking the heavy blow). Note that the active providers will give priority to current factory production before regenerating my personal stockpile. It will increase production speed to refill it if able. But if it is already running at or near maximum speed it will wait for a downtime before regenerating the stockpile. My player requests have very little impact on the factory production.
Now what about your passive chest setup ? Well any storage is systematically drained with no shred of mercy. So if you make a request, your entire order will have to come from provider chests because that is the only place where you can possible have a stockpile. Now while you like to point out that provider chests are more likely to be closer to requester chests than storage chests, I would like to point out that a storage chests is more likely to be closer to you then provider chests. Hell you could even move them int your new "work zone" on purpose specifically for this. So my setup feed requesters and storage chests feed my character.
But with a passive provider setup, everything have to come from passive provider. Because if storage actually have something in them it is because your factory was not able to drain it yet or is something very rarely used. Further more, with your setup, only deconstruction is likely to put walls and laser turrets in storage chests near your work zone. Any new walls and turrets would need to come from the far away factory. My setup would preemptively fill my storage chest with requested goodies, but only if my robots have nothing better to do. So going moving far away from the factory is unlikely to affect production.
2) You assume that storage chests are actually farther away than provider chests. This do not need to be the case. You can actually control which items goes were by placing the first item in the chest or chests yourself. The robot will fill items in chests that already have that item first. You can purposefully place your storage chests for specific items right next to a cluster of requesters.
Keep in mind that my system will not systematically drain storage without mercy. So the storages will be allowed to keep items and their designated purpose by the same occasion. You can also protect the status of your storage chest by combining it with a steel chest and a smart inserter. Place a few items in the steel chest and have the smart inserter pull item from the steel chest and place them into the storage chest only if that specific storage chest is empty. So if I ever request every single items available from the logistic network for stupid reasons, the inserter will put some back into the storage chest and restore it's designation and purpose in the network. At this point production is definitively in high gear and the provider chests are alive and well. Any further request will be filled by the providers until the stockpile is refilled in downtimes and that the providers are killed and emptied again.
You can go farther with an intricate setup with involving a requester chest to auto refill the steel chest. That way if your ever have an extreme resources shortage and your factory completely drain and every single items anywhere have been used... when the factory get resources again and production resume, the requester chest will automatically reset the designation of the storage chest. But that is some what space consuming considering that you would need that for every storage chests and is only ever useful in the most extreme of circumstances.
So yeah, with my system you can decide where storage chests goes and ensure that robots use the proper one. You can even take steps to protect this setup against stupid mistakes. But with your setup that is impossible because storage chests are systematically drained. It doesn't matter what kind of gimmick you have to put stuff back into them... they will constantly be threatened by requesters.
I never said that you don't need storage chests. You should definitively have them. I said that you might not even need some when looking at the factory production alone (I even gave an example of what would happen in storage chests in case of random overflow caused by the player). Robot deconstruction is a good example of why there are suddenly way more walls and laser turrets in the system then was meant to be built. I was always aware of that. While I don't often use logistic robots (at least not in fancy ways) I do make heavy use of construction ones. Especially with 0.12 personal roboport. That thing is awesome. (again not knowing about requesters doesn't mean that I'm 100% clueless about everything else. To be honest, that train of thought you seem to have toward me is starting to annoy me).Tallinu wrote:Also, you always want to have at least one storage chest...
But as far as the factory and only the factory is concerned. Instead of using storage chests you can simply control your smart inserters with providers chests and use a low limit. But of course for overall gameplay you need storage chests. Never said otherwise.
I definitively know the difference between the two... and for the purpose of what I was trying to do it is obvious that using active providers would be best. My mistake about requesters only simplify setting stuff up by removing some math. But using active vs passive It is more of a question of should you actively try to empty providers or should you let stuff sit in them. I think that a logistic network powered by active providers and with conveniently placed storage hubs is an interesting way of doing things.Tallinu wrote:This makes me wonder if you've been using only active providers, without realizing the difference between active and passive.
I wasn't trying to describe a typical logistic network either. I know I was mistaken about requester chests but what I wanted can still be done. You may disagree with my strategy, but I hope your are not claiming that there is only one good way to use robots. Some people find a way to do things and then stick to it. I like to explore and experiment with alternatives. In other word, I'm actively trying to find the next best thing instead of sticking with time tested design and wait for someone else to have a brilliant idea on the forum or something.Tallinu wrote:It's not an accurate representation of how the system typically works
I'm definitively not convinced that an active provider and storage hub oriented network is all kinds of wrong or at the very least will never outperform a passive provider oriented network.
I figured all of that the very instant you corrected me about requester chests. It is not like the concepts of "supply and demand" and "throughput" are unique to robot control factories. All factory types need to deal with that. All types of well designed factories require fine tuning and trial and error.Tallinu wrote:Since the contents of requester chests don't show up as available stored items, a smart inserter set to work until there are 500 circuits will drop items into its provider chest until all requests have been fulfilled and there are an additional 500 circuits stored, counting all storage chests and passive provider chests within the network, not just the one the inserter is filling. If all the circuits keep getting pulled out, that just means your system is consuming them faster than you are producing them -- or your requester chests are set to request more items than necessary. Since items in one requester are not available for use anywhere else, the requests should be just large enough that the amount stored will not be completely used up before bots can arrive with another delivery of materials. The best quantity to request is affected by a number of factors, including the typical rate of consumption of the items, the distance between the usual source (provider or storage) and the requester, your logistics bot speed and carrying capacity, and the number of available bots (ones that aren't busy doing other work). It often takes some trial and error, and typically, a slightly higher than necessary request amount won't do any harm -- but requesting, say, 1,000 or more of something is (in typical situations) massive overkill.
Well you assume use of passive where I meant to use active. The debate is again centered around the philosophy of whether or not providers should be emptied in favor of storage or kept with stuff in them. The only thing I was wrong about with my explanation is that you can't track requesters with the logistic network.Tallinu wrote:This manages to be correct even though the explanation is different - as storage empties out, items will be produced and typically wait in passive providers, and once storage of that item is empty, requests will pull the items from the providers instead of storage. The smart inserters will then refill the providers from the assemblers (up to the set network-wide limit) as quickly as the assemblers can work, so even if the providers get emptied out by a sudden large request, they shouldn't stay empty for long unless production simply can't keep up.
Looks like we agree on something. Again, I do know the difference between active and passive and yes I know that active providers will still be emptied if your robots manage to catch a break. Yes you should use smart inserters to avoid filling your storage and make it bigger and bigger. You want a factory that naturally drain storage and only produce what is needed. Been saying this the whole time... While I do agree, I do not know why you feel the need to explain this to me. Unlike the other things that you commented on so far, it was very obvious that I was aware of this.Tallinu wrote:Active providers do have a higher priority than storage, and in fact, even if nothing is requesting their contents, they will be actively emptied into any available storage space. This gives them a high potential for overproduction (and potentially filling up all your storage) if you fail to assign correct logistics conditions on the smart inserters putting items into them. Setting a hard limit by redding out all but one slot instead of using smart inserter conditions simply doesn't work, since that slot will still be continually emptied no matter how many items end up in storage.
The only thing I disagree with is that you make it sound horrendously hard to properly setup production limiting conditions. Really ? It is drastically easier to handle than a combinator controled factory let me tell you that.
TL/DRTallinu wrote:Keep in mind that using active providers instead of passive causes each item to be moved twice by your logistics bots, once when produced and again when requested. Heavy use of them can potentially double the amount of work your bots are required to do, increasing power consumption and reducing number of available bots, as well as forcing more storage space to be consumed by items that could otherwise simply wait in the providers at their factories.
I have already answered this, so this will be the short version or recap of my post.
First of all, items will be moved twice only if they are not currently needed. Otherwise it would go straight from active to requester. If it is not needed right now, it means that you are not in any hurry to move it to storage and totally can afford to possibly spend extra time doing so. It also mean that your factory is idle or running slow and therefor totally have extra power available for this. Further more, as soon as storage count drop a little the active providers will refill and items after that items WILL come from active and storage is ignored. So Only a tiny fraction of items that makes it to requesters will have actually been moved twice as you say. The only time storage would be used for extended periods of time is when the player artificially create a overflow with item counts way above production limit. But your setup have the same problem.
Second, if your storage is actually closer to requesters then having items preemptively moved to storage would be a good thing as robots would have even less distance to travel to feed requesters when they need refill. Because choosing which chest is used for what and picking it's location is something actually possible with my setup. I understand that it might be hard to imagine for a passive provider user. Because it is strictly impossible to do with passive.
3rd, providers might be closer to requesters but not likely to be closer to you. Factory is important, but when I request items I like to receive them ASAP. I use different chests for each tasks and determine the location of specific storage chests for specific items based on where they are most likely to be used the most often.
So with this kind of layout. Items are moved once when currently needed and move twice in down time. However in downtime the robot are actually preemptively moving items closer to where they will likely need to be in the future. Whether that is stuff for assemblers or finished products shipped to the latest construction zone. That doesn't sound like a bad thing to me like you are trying to paint it as.
