Initial thoughts on the logistic system

[BinaryMan]

I was noticing in the late game actually having problems feeding some factories despite a large mining operation and then it occurred to me, you do lose control of where the bots put stuff to some degree (this or that assembly gets the electronic circuit?). It tends to starve some factories rather than feeding all requester for the item the same amount.

The other thing was to limit output, yes you can take a chest and limit the content but there is no system-wide way to limit total stored. I guess storage moving too many items out causing production of things you don't need is solved in current release with active/passive chest? But, if you wanted to output multiple to same provider chest and if you had like requester, the option to say maximum (rather than requester minimum) of the item is to be stored here ? It's the function that the green wire/smart inserter sort of does, but in the logistics network.

[AlexPhoenix]

you can connect smart inserters to many smart(and logistic) chests, and they will be in one network.

[LoSboccacc]

As the factory scale i remove dependencies from mid products from the logistic system

Midgame the logistic bot helps a lot optimizing the tight space you have.

As soon as I expand I have everything built from iron/copper belts. Including smelting steel on the spot.

So for example mid game I build circuit and logistic movw them to the advanced circuit chain. Later I build adv circuit in a chain from scratch, then put it in the logistic system.

Late game basically I use the logistic bot to fetch modules, processors, rockets and whatnot to me and to move science around, skipping mid products entirely

That allows to move only smelted copper&iron by train and to have production chain feed by train which is awesome albeit impratical

[ssilk]

I was noticing in the late game actually having problems feeding some factories despite a large mining operation and then it occurred to me, you do lose control of where the bots put stuff to some degree (this or that assembly gets the electronic circuit?). It tends to starve some factories rather than feeding all requester for the item the same amount.

Hm. My experience with the bots is different. They fill the chests very equally. This can be seen if you make some requester chests in different distances: At the end all chests are nearly equally filled.
The problem with the chests more far away is, because of the distance. The logistic system knows, how much items are on the way to the destination and it looks, that this is equal for all. So the distant chests get less, if you don't have enough resources to fulfill all requests.
I think this is very fair, and makes much sense.

The other thing was to limit output, yes you can take a chest and limit the content but there is no system-wide way to limit total stored.

There are two (or three) ways you can limit:
- limit active provider chests it by logistic network with smart inserters. Does exactly what you want. This enables you to use storage chests, without overproducing.
- limit by passive provider chest with stack limitation. The chest is filled to its limit and because nothing fits in, the production stops. This does also the prevention of overproducing. Can be used also with circuit network for more differentiated production.
- complicated: with circuit network and smart inserter. This makes sense: there is an upper limit on the logistic network (like not more than 5000 circuits in total) and a lower limit of max 100 per chest (with circuits). Now you have 10 assemblies configured like that. The added lower limit is 1000, but the maximum is only 500, so some chests are not so filled as possible. With this you guarantee, that also the more distant assemblies will produce stuff, and not only the 3 most nearest. This guarantees a much faster reaction to sudden needs.

I guess storage moving too many items out causing production of things you don't need is solved in current release with active/passive chest? But, if you wanted to output multiple to same provider chest and if you had like requester, the option to say maximum (rather than requester minimum) of the item is to be stored here ? It's the function that the green wire/smart inserter sort of does, but in the logistics network.

Well. Circuits have nothing to do with logistic network. The factorio wiki explains it, but a pure textual description is hard to read and understand. I recommend to experiment a lot with the chests to understand, how they really work. Some let's play videos explain it more or less well too. This are things, which are really hard to explain by text in a way, that it is understandable, but very easy, once you tried the right things yourself.