TL;DR
A feature to prevent robots from leaving their last known roboport when it has no power.What?
A small checkbox for each roboport, toggled off by default, which prevents all nearby robots from leaving its area.It can also be implemented as a toggle to allow “sharing” robots with other roboports, when it is low on power or another roboport needs more robots. In this case, it would be enabled by default.
In terms of internal logic, it might be implemented as a boolean value for each robot, off by default, which prevents them from moving too far from any nearby roboport.
Why?
It can help on Fulgora, due to its random nature, both item‑ and energy‑wise.During my playthrough I stumbled upon a pretty annoying situation, when my main scrap base lost its power, and every robot from it (around a hundred of them) decided to fly over oceans to the nearest working roboport. Moving them manually back to their usual places was pretty tedious.
On other planets it can help too, in any situation where your roboport can lose its power and you don’t want your robots to fly away.
As for Tertius response about the similar topic (viewtopic.php?p=666595#p666595):
I fully agree with the principle you’ve described: the game’s beauty comes from a set of independent, sensible rules that create emergent complexity. I’m not asking for a change to the core simulation, and I definitely don’t see the current behavior as a bug.
However, on Fulgora, the existing rules can create a situation that goes beyond an "engineering challenge" and borders on pointless busywork. Lightning-dependent power on isolated islands means a single roboport’s energy buffer can occasionally hit zero, even with a well-built accumulator setup - especially during early base-building. When that happens, robots don’t just "slowly fly to the nearest powered roboport", they fly across an oil ocean to an entirely different island. Manually reassigning a hundred lost robots afterward is just tedious, not challenging.
My suggestion isn’t to alter the default simulation at all. It’s a small, optional checkbox per roboport - off by default - that simply tells its local robots: "If this roboport loses power, stay in the area instead of trying to reach another one." For people who never need it, the game remains exactly as it is today. For those building isolated island networks on Fulgora (or in modded content), it would be a quality-of-life tool to prevent absurd cross-ocean migrations, without removing the core engineering problem of keeping the rest of the factory running.
I believe this addition respects the game’s simulation integrity while giving players a little more agency over robot behavior in edge cases.