[MOD 0.12.20+] Logistics Mining 1.0.1 - Mining With Robots

Afforess · Post by **Afforess** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 5:48 am

Type: Mod
Name: Logistics Mining
Description: Adds Logistics Mining Drill and the Logistics Mining Hub, which can automatically create and coordinate mining for a large area
License: MIT License
Version: 1.0.1
Release: 2016-05-08
Tested-With-Factorio-Version: 0.12.33
Category: Gameplay
Tags: Mining, Logistics
Download-Url: https://github.com/Afforess/LogisticsMi ... _1.0.1.zip
Website: https://github.com/Afforess/LogisticsMining

Long description

Version history

Contributions welcome.

Post by **Koub** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 9:04 am

This is very sexy

Is it possible to have an estimate of how long it takes to refill the mining drills' batteries, and how much mining time empties them ?

Factorio2016 · Post by **Factorio2016** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 10:41 am

it is really wonderful, excellent!
This is what we should strive at the end of the game.

orzelek · Post by **orzelek** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 11:26 am

While I'm not a fan of robots in general this looks cool.

I think it could go to base game as solution for late game mining

PS. Can you move the fuel amount to config file?
Playing with marathon mod means that miners are more costly so thay might need to work a bit longer. I'm not sure if miner cost won't exceed amount of mined stuff.

StanFear · Post by **StanFear** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 5:24 pm

interesting way of handling mining with robots

huge advantage ? all ressources are compatible ! which wasn't the case with MoMining

When I'll be done with my Nestt play, I'll use it for sure (I hope by then the graphics for the logisitc mining drill will have changed !)

Afforess, I think you should add selectable_in_game=false to the logistic container the drill outputs to instead of setting everything to false at runtime !

Still, great Job !

Afforess · Post by **Afforess** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 6:08 pm

Koub wrote:This is very sexy
Is it possible to have an estimate of how long it takes to refill the mining drills' batteries, and how much mining time empties them ?

It takes 33 seconds to charge a battery, you need 10 batteries to create a logistics mining drill, and 2.7 minutes of mining time drains the batteries.

orzelek wrote:While I'm not a fan of robots in general this looks cool.

I think it could go to base game as solution for late game mining

PS. Can you move the fuel amount to config file?
Playing with marathon mod means that miners are more costly so thay might need to work a bit longer. I'm not sure if miner cost won't exceed amount of mined stuff.

I can... but I actually track fuel in terms of MJ required. Right now a logistics mining drill that is fully charged has 50MJ of stored power, and it drains at 300KW. 50MJ / 300KW = ~2.7778 minutes. I can move these figures to a config file so this is easy to adjust.

StanFear wrote: huge advantage ? all ressources are compatible ! which wasn't the case with MoMining

Yes, all resources are compatible. I find valid ores by checking the game entity_prototypes and any that are a "resource" type are valid. So mods that add new ores should work just fine.

StanFear wrote: Afforess, I think you should add selectable_in_game=false to the logistic container the drill outputs to instead of setting everything to false at runtime !

Thanks, I wasn't aware that existed.

Yinan · Post by **Yinan** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 7:59 pm

Frankly, I changed some of the values in your mod for me because the way you had it, it felt useless to me as not only creating charged batteries take an extremely long time, but then you also need 10 of them for one single mining drill and that drill then didn't even last for 3 minutes.
I changed your coal calculation to look for 500 MJ, and not only 50. That way, the drills will last for around 27 minutes, which, considering that they're only 1x1 in size, is a better amount imho.

A nice addition would be that they change their energy mode depending on wether there is any energy or not.
Because seriously, why shouldn't they just tap the energy from your energy network directly if it is available? That's what bots do as well after all (well, more or less, as they need special charging stations for that, but I hope you know what I mean).

StanFear · Post by **StanFear** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 9:21 pm

Yinan wrote:Frankly, I changed some of the values in your mod for me because the way you had it, it felt useless to me as not only creating charged batteries take an extremely long time, but then you also need 10 of them for one single mining drill and that drill then didn't even last for 3 minutes.
I changed your coal calculation to look for 500 MJ, and not only 50. That way, the drills will last for around 27 minutes, which, considering that they're only 1x1 in size, is a better amount imho.

A nice addition would be that they change their energy mode depending on wether there is any energy or not.
Because seriously, why shouldn't they just tap the energy from your energy network directly if it is available? That's what bots do as well after all (well, more or less, as they need special charging stations for that, but I hope you know what I mean).

actually, having a new recipe added to charge mining drills would make more sense I think ( mining a mining drill would result in an uncharged drill, that you recharge in a special assembling machine) that way, it would look even more like a logistic entity that needs to be recharged

Yinan · Post by **Yinan** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 11:16 pm

Well that's basically how it currently works.

The bots place a robot mining drill, and after 2.7 minutes it has no fuel left so the bot's automatically a "mine this drill" set for them. Once the drill is mined, it returns a normal mining drill, not a robotic one.
You can now recycle this by putting it in an assembly with 10 charged batteries and you get a new robot mining drill.

My point is that it's far to much of a hastle to go through all this just for 2.7 lousy minutes of mining, considering that the creation of a single charged battery is 33 seconds.
So even when you have 10 Assemblies, you will only get 1 robot mining drill every 33 seconds, meaning that you will only be able to support 5 mining drills at the same time with that.

And that is far to little in my opinion.

Also, I really don't see any reason why the robot mining drill should even run out of power when there is an electric pole right next to it. Why not get the energy directly through the the energy network?

Choumiko · Post by **Choumiko** » Sun Mar 20, 2016 11:28 pm

Yinan wrote:Also, I really don't see any reason why the robot mining drill should even run out of power when there is an electric pole right next to it. Why not get the energy directly through the the energy network?

My guess (without having used the mod):
This would either require the mod to also place poles (and calculate where to place them) or you'll have to place the pole, and at that point you could as well place down a blueprint with normal drills+active providers+poles?
Perhaps also to add some sort of consumable besides power.

Afforess · Post by **Afforess** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 2:30 am

Yinan wrote:Well that's basically how it currently works.

The bots place a robot mining drill, and after 2.7 minutes it has no fuel left so the bot's automatically a "mine this drill" set for them. Once the drill is mined, it returns a normal mining drill, not a robotic one.
You can now recycle this by putting it in an assembly with 10 charged batteries and you get a new robot mining drill.

My point is that it's far to much of a hastle to go through all this just for 2.7 lousy minutes of mining, considering that the creation of a single charged battery is 33 seconds.
So even when you have 10 Assemblies, you will only get 1 robot mining drill every 33 seconds, meaning that you will only be able to support 5 mining drills at the same time with that.

And that is far to little in my opinion.

Also, I really don't see any reason why the robot mining drill should even run out of power when there is an electric pole right next to it. Why not get the energy directly through the the energy network?

The charge time is definitely long... mostly so that it works out to roughly the right amount of power. I think there's a strong case to be made for a special assembler building to quickly create charged batteries (at the expense of high power consumption).

And while I chose the 1x1 size drill to make a lot of the code simpler, I don't know whether I am totally happy with the result... Because you can end up needing 1000+ drills to mine a large deposit.

I've only just gotten enough time to begin playing with this mod properly, so there are definite improvements and balance changes coming.

MtnDew · Post by **MtnDew** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 5:07 am

Very neat way of adding a logistic way of mining. I added the mod to try it out and have gotten the batteries and drills successfully but the mining hub doesn't show up. I believe it is a conflict with DyTech. Your tech is called "logistic-system-2" and I believe DyTech uses that same name. Maybe a rename of the tech to "logistic-mining" or something like that would be better and resolve the conflict???

I look forward to trying this out in the future.

Afforess · Post by **Afforess** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 1:21 pm

MtnDew wrote:Very neat way of adding a logistic way of mining. I added the mod to try it out and have gotten the batteries and drills successfully but the mining hub doesn't show up. I believe it is a conflict with DyTech. Your tech is called "logistic-system-2" and I believe DyTech uses that same name. Maybe a rename of the tech to "logistic-mining" or something like that would be better and resolve the conflict???

I look forward to trying this out in the future.

Well, I can't rename the tech (or it won't match the existing vanilla logistics systems tech it follows), but I can add some extra checks to verify that if the technology has been replaced by another mod, to re-insert the recipes it should unlock. That would allow it to work with both mods using the same name,

Yinan · Post by **Yinan** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 1:41 pm

The question is, why even the need for the batteries?
Why not use an existing pwerline, if one is present? The drain on power will already be enough to balance it.
I just don't see the reason why to use those charged batteries since nothing else in factorio works like that. It either produces energy, directly consumes energy or stores energy and then gives this energy to whatever it needs.
The last thing could work for the Mininung hub. It stores energy and the mining drills ask for energy whenever they run low on power. If the minig hub doesn't get enough energy, then those drills will be marked for mining (like currently) but stay robot mining drills.

Afforess · Post by **Afforess** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 3:07 pm

Yinan wrote:The question is, why even the need for the batteries?

Mostly to keep code simple. Automagically coordinating the placement of power lines is not really a problem I want to solve.

Yinan wrote:Why not use an existing pwerline, if one is present? The drain on power will already be enough to balance it.

The logistics mining drills are just burner mining drills with a hidden fuel slot. So they aren't actually aware of electricity. However, even if I made them electric mining drills, right now there is no way to detect whether an entity is receiving power from the power grid or not. I did request this be added to the mod api, too: viewtopic.php?f=28&t=17290

Yinan wrote:I just don't see the reason why to use those charged batteries since nothing else in factorio works like that. It either produces energy, directly consumes energy or stores energy and then gives this energy to whatever it needs.
The last thing could work for the Mininung hub. It stores energy and the mining drills ask for energy whenever they run low on power. If the minig hub doesn't get enough energy, then those drills will be marked for mining (like currently) but stay robot mining drills.

I am considering having mining drills consume batteries as fuel directly, and having the mining hub coordinate requesting more batteries, so the logistics mining drills wouldn't need to be replaced.

Yinan · Post by **Yinan** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 3:27 pm

Afforess wrote:However, even if I made them electric mining drills, right now there is no way to detect whether an entity is receiving power from the power grid or not.

Why would you have to? Just place them. When they don't receive any energy, well then you have to add more energy poles (and with "you" I mean the player, not the mod ^^).

Edit:
Or, just make the mining hub a hybrid of roboport and power pole (if that is possible), so that it not only stores energy for the robots, but also distributes energy to the nearby robo mining drills.

StanFear · Post by **StanFear** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 4:52 pm

Yinan wrote:I just don't see the reason why to use those charged batteries since nothing else in factorio works like that.

I'm going to have to disagree with you,

the way I see it, this mod makes entities that run the same way logistic robots works : by having internal batteries and going to get charged when needed !

so don't tell nothing in factorio works that way, it is not true !

The way the mod is right now seems to me like it is the best way to make it seem like an actual logistic robot doing the mining !
(which was the reason I was suggesting to directly recharge the drill in an assembling machine actually)

Afforess wrote: I am considering having mining drills consume batteries as fuel directly, and having the mining hub coordinate requesting more batteries, so the logistics mining drills wouldn't need to be replaced.

or, have the hub be a roboport, and transfer energy from it to the drills using the control.lua file on each tick (using the field energy, just set it to an enormus amount it will max out at the capacity of your entity)

Yinan · Post by **Yinan** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 6:49 pm

StanFear wrote:so don't tell nothing in factorio works that way, it is not true !

Nothing in Factorio works that way.

NOTHING in Factorio needs anything BESIDES Energy to run.
In this case you need to completely reforge the robot mining drills because you can not just recharge them.
NOTHING in Facorio works that way.

Afforess · Post by **Afforess** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 7:32 pm

Yinan wrote: NOTHING in Factorio needs anything BESIDES Energy to run.
In this case you need to completely reforge the robot mining drills because you can not just recharge them.
NOTHING in Facorio works that way.

At this point, I believe the debate has devolved into semantics. I think the most important fact from the discussion is that the general idea is good but not well-executed. I am going to take another stab at this, rewrite some of the behavior, then we can resume yelling.

Yinan · Post by **Yinan** » Mon Mar 21, 2016 7:49 pm

Afforess wrote:At this point, I believe the debate has devolved into semantics. I think the most important fact from the discussion is that the general idea is good but not well-executed. I am going to take another stab at this, rewrite some of the behavior, then we can resume yelling.

Agreed.

And just pro forma:
I think that the idea is awesome and that you already put much work into it is awesome as well.
It just so happens that I personally don't agree with some of the choices you made with the current implementation.

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[MOD 0.12.20+] Logistics Mining 1.0.1 - Mining With Robots

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