Logistic Robots deliver too much!

[FISHAnarchist]

Hey, a big fan of Factorio here. Just an issue that has caused me some complications recently.

Anytime I ask for logistic robots to deliver a large quantity of items, they usually over-deliver past the capacity of a chest.

For example, say I have 10 passive provider chests that are full with iron plates. I also have 10 empty storage chests. If I convert these 10 passive provider chests to active provider chests, you would expect the logistic robots to deliver the contents of the chests to the 10 empty storage chests. However, what occurs is that they all deliver to the same storage chest, deliver 10 times the amount of material held in a chest into just one storage chest.

I think that by not allowing logistic robots to deliver at all to chests that are either already full, or already have enough robots en route to delivering to them, this issue can be fixed.

Thanks!

[kovarex]

I don't get it, how can they deliver it to the chest when it doesn't fit there?
They switch to empty chest when it is full already right?

[Rseding91]

I don't get it, how can they deliver it to the chest when it doesn't fit there?
They switch to empty chest when it is full already right?

This is what they do and what's broken:

The logistic network has a chest that's full of item A minus 1.

1. Robot gets 1 of item A and needs to drop them in a chest
2. Robot asks for a chest from the logistic system that can hold item A
3. Logistic system finds "first chest with *any* inventory space that has item A"
4. Robot sets out to drop the item in that chest

Now, repeat that 1,000 times over the course of 17~ seconds and if the chest is far enough away that the first robot doesn't reach the chest by the time the last robot has been assigned then you have 1000 robots all bringing items to the same chest. But, that chest only had room for 1 item and the remaining 999 robots and 999 items will keep going and try to stick items in that chest each failing and then repeating the entire cycle from step 2 until they eventually deposit all of the items into chests.

It's super inefficient.

Instead what should happen at step 3 is the logistic network should check the count of items scheduled to be delivered to a given potential chest and look for one that doesn't already have robots scheduled to deliver enough to fill it. (of course accounting for the part where robots over-allocate the count-to-be-delivered due to stack size bonuses).

[kovarex]

Well, if this is the problem, it isn't really a bug, it is just limitation of the way it was programmed. The robots only take into account things that are planned to be added/removed when the pick from a chest, not when they deposit, but the deposit is tricky, as it would have partially simulate the inventory storage logic to do it precisely.

Anyway, it is not a bug, but rather a feature request.

[FISHAnarchist]

I agree with what Rseding91 wrote. And with what kovarex wrote. This is not necessarily a bug but rather a new feature request.

Basically, I think that in the logistics network, the logistic robot should check whether or not a maximum number of material is already being delivered to a storage chest when deciding which storage chest to send the item to.

Refer to the attached picture. The storage chest is already full (4.8k) yet logistic robots are still delivering 12k worth of material to it just to find it is already full. It would be much better if the robot made a decision prior to flying to the storage chest whether or not it would be full by the time it arrived there. It would be much more efficient if it just delivered the material to one of the empty surrounding storage boxes.

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[rosilisk]

I would really like to see this issue fixed - it's a big problem for me.

I'm currently stocking up on items for a big base in vanilla, and I get to low/10k logistics bot used because they're all stuck bouncing between storage chests and failing to deliver. I can provide more info about my specific case, but FISHAnarchist described it well in my opinion.