Take proximity into account when prioritising storage chests for logistic bot drop off
Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2026 11:18 pm
TL;DR
When dealing with multiple storage chests at the same priority level, use the closest one with space in it instead of using the last one to have its inventory updated when choosing where to drop off materials.
What?
Consider when you have a large base with a number of yellow storage chests meeting the following conditions:
When bots pick up from an active provider chest and have to decide which of the storage chests to drop off in, I understand that the chosen chest ends up being the one that has had its inventory updated most recently (I was informed of this when I mistakenly raised it as a bug here viewtopic.php?p=690273#p690273)
I feel it would be far more intuitive, efficient and consistent for the closest of these storage chests to be chosen instead. I would also argue it makes them more useful.
Why?
An example of where this would make far more sense would be where you have multiple large recycling setups on Fulgora. You want all of these chests connected to the logistics network so that the materials can be used anywhere, but this leads to an issue if you want to convert one item to another in one of these recycling setups under the condition of overflow.
The save attached in the bug post linked above has an example of this where I wanted to convert excess copper into copper cable until the copper cable stock reached a certain level. I expected the copper to be taken from the closest setup's storage chests (which it was) but was mistaken when I expected the copper cables to be dropped off in the nearest storage chests.
It just so happened that the copper wire chests in that particular setup weren't having more wire inserted into them at that point (despite having the filter, having some items and not being full), so were totally ignored by the bots 100% of the time. As such, the copper cables in the setup never increased as it was all dropped off in a setup elsewhere and all the copper in that nearby setup would be converted into cable and lost.
Even if every recycling setup had copper wire flowing through the chests, it would just lead to the bots flying to random chests all over the place in complete anarchy.
When dealing with multiple storage chests at the same priority level, use the closest one with space in it instead of using the last one to have its inventory updated when choosing where to drop off materials.
What?
Consider when you have a large base with a number of yellow storage chests meeting the following conditions:
- Every chest has the same item filter on it
- Every chest has at least one item in it, but is not full
When bots pick up from an active provider chest and have to decide which of the storage chests to drop off in, I understand that the chosen chest ends up being the one that has had its inventory updated most recently (I was informed of this when I mistakenly raised it as a bug here viewtopic.php?p=690273#p690273)
I feel it would be far more intuitive, efficient and consistent for the closest of these storage chests to be chosen instead. I would also argue it makes them more useful.
Why?
- It would be far more intuitive. Bots flying a vast distance to storage chests that happen to have been interacted with inserters more recently is not the obvious behaviour, and it can take a fair amount of observation and luck to even realise that's what's happening. It certainly felt random to me for a while when I was trying to puzzle it out.
- It's much more efficient for bots to behave in this way, as it means bots don't fly as far, are less likely to need to recharge on the way and don't take as long to complete their task. This becomes much, much more apparent when dealing with large or particularly spread out bases. The distance that bots may choose to fly with the current logic can become absurd and demand undesirable workarounds like splitting the logistics network when you don't want to. As such, I would argue that this suggested logic makes the logistics network behave much more sensibly at scale.
- Consistency with the way storage and requester chests interact. The closest storage chest of the top available priority appears to be used when a requester chest asks for items. This made perfect sense to me and I was surprised when transfer from active provider chests to storage chests didn't work the same way.
- Being able to predict where bots will drop off (without having to engage in complex circuit logic to trigger distant inserters or something) makes it much easier to take advantage of the active provider-storage chest interaction, with local setups able to operate smoothly and not interfere with setups elsewhere in normal circumstances. Local circuit logic can be used to control storage levels without having to worry about what's far away. I discuss an example below.
An example of where this would make far more sense would be where you have multiple large recycling setups on Fulgora. You want all of these chests connected to the logistics network so that the materials can be used anywhere, but this leads to an issue if you want to convert one item to another in one of these recycling setups under the condition of overflow.
The save attached in the bug post linked above has an example of this where I wanted to convert excess copper into copper cable until the copper cable stock reached a certain level. I expected the copper to be taken from the closest setup's storage chests (which it was) but was mistaken when I expected the copper cables to be dropped off in the nearest storage chests.
It just so happened that the copper wire chests in that particular setup weren't having more wire inserted into them at that point (despite having the filter, having some items and not being full), so were totally ignored by the bots 100% of the time. As such, the copper cables in the setup never increased as it was all dropped off in a setup elsewhere and all the copper in that nearby setup would be converted into cable and lost.
Even if every recycling setup had copper wire flowing through the chests, it would just lead to the bots flying to random chests all over the place in complete anarchy.