Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Allow us to switch off the logistics and building areas for a given roboport via the circuit network

What?

One of my outposts got into a bit of a weird situation - my construction bots had run out of laser turrets, but still had walls available to replace existing ones. Biters were attacking my wall and had destroyed all of my laser turrets, but not the walls themselves. They continued to attack the walls, and bots continued to run out and repair/replace the walls, totally in vain, and slowly dying, wasting repair packs, and wasting walls.

Behind this wall was a second gun battery (this time of regular gun turrets), ready to fire, just slightly out of range. I guess it was my stupid fault for not putting them in range of the walls, but I had expanded this outpost in a very ad-hoc way and it was only through luck that the old gun turrets were there in the first place.

A simple way to temporarily disable the bots via a constant combinator would have been a neat and easy way to resolve this, which would have made the biters run straight into the gun turrets without killing all the bots first, and without the bots trying to replace and repair walls constantly to simply delay the inevitable.

This would also help out certain mods which allow you to detect enemies and such via the circuit network (like this one: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/asteroid- ... -detection), which would then allow people to automate turning off certain roboports to save bots from being killed needlessly.

I feel like being able to temporarily disable a roboport would be generally useful in various niche cases, many of which I probably haven't thought of yet.