0.16 Allow logistic Buffer chests to supply Requester chests

[cbhj1]

Currently we only get 2 out of the 3 use cases described in https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-203
1. Construction caching
2. Player supply caching

The third, sorted storage and caching is currently not in the game, I reported this and received viewtopic.php?f=23&t=54615#p321662

Thanks for the report. We changed them so they currently only provide to the player requesting and construction robots to prevent silly situations where robots would flow from one side of the factory to the other to fill the buffer chest then from the buffer back to the other side when low on resources.

I feel this cuts out one of the bigger uses of these chests and am posting this as a request for the full potential of the chests to be available.

edit: KScorp brought to light this post on reddit by Klonan https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... r/dr730oe/

[_alphaBeta_]

I'm extremely disappointed by this change and was really looking forward to this working as it was outlined in FFF #203. I had the same use case in mind as mentioned in the bug thread with being able to have storage self-regulating and organized and returning certain items to their original storage locations for suitable upgrade. I had pictured replacing a lot of passive provider chests with buffer chests once available within the factory so they would pull orphaned items from storage and make them available for upgrade where applicable. (As an example, have yellow belts put into a buffer chest instead of passive provider. Set the request amount to be slightly higher than the inserter (under circuit control) putting in belts from assembly. This would ensure storage is cleared out of yellow belts before more are made, especially if there's a demand on red or blue belts and you have too many yellow belts.) I had also hoped to return raw resources to the main bus, but also have these same raw resources accessible to logistic requests, if needed.

I think the "silly situation" is buffers pulling in items a distance away, and then having requesters run dry that then pull from the buffers. Couldn't this be addressed by being able to select a particular requestors' pull priorities? Klonan mentioned a general priority in the thread for FFF #203 as follows:

How does the Active Provider Chest fit into that? Does it also provide items for the Buffer Chests?

Active providers just push out to everything, so they will push to buffers just the same way, to clarify, this is the current priority:
1. Requesters/Player
2. Construction orders
3. Buffer chests
4. Storage chests
...

I take this to mean that this is priority whenever items need to find a new home (i.e. they're in an active provider or being trashed etc.) or which entity gets an available item if everything is requesting. So a requester chest is on the top of the list, and then pulls from a buffer chest, which is the problem I believe. In many cases we'll want this to happen though; it's a buffer afterall. As I said above, if you could specify that requestors deep in the factory should pull from passive providers / storage / buffers (in that order), and then requestors on the perimeter pull from buffer / storage / passive or whatever combination works for the player's intent and setup. Generic rules aren't going to allow for all use cases we were looking forward to, so why not make overrides possible? This game is already so customize-able that I think this option fits in nicely.

As was said already, I don't see myself really using these anymore as implemented. Which is a shame since this was the big change I was waiting for.

[mh_]

this defies the reason the chest was implemented in the first place. Just put a passive provider next to it and an inserter in between.

[cbhj1]

mh_ this 'workaround' is mentioned as a reason for the chests to exist in the first paragraph of the buffer chest part of FFF#203

[KScorp]

This may just be a misunderstanding due to their definition of "not-a-bug". Just because the current behavior is intended, doesn't mean it's permanently intended.

According to Klonan, this change is temporary until they figure out a solution to a chest priority issue. Source on Reddit

I'm guessing based on that post and the bug report post that items always try to go through buffer chests first when being delivered to requester chests, instead of being delivered directly to requester chests if possible.

[feildmaster]

I think the "silly situation" is buffers pulling in items a distance away, and then having requesters run dry that then pull from the buffers

That "situation" was the only good thing about buffer chests though... it holds them in a certain area then pulls when needed. The other 2 benefits are absolutely useless without the ability to pull to requester chests. The other 2 use cases get solved with requester chests which request small amounts of items.

EDIT: I'm going to go ahead and copy this post here

So this feature/half bug is fairly nice:

• Requested items count towards the logistic network

Currently it creates a buggy situation with requester chests, where if you buffer too many on a limited production, requester chests dry out and never fill. However in specific circumstances this behavior is nice. So... I'll just keep using requester chests and storage chests everywhere besides the situation where I want the count to go towards the network.

[_alphaBeta_]

This may just be a misunderstanding due to their definition of "not-a-bug". Just because the current behavior is intended, doesn't mean it's permanently intended.

According to Klonan, this change is temporary until they figure out a solution to a chest priority issue. Source on Reddit

I'm guessing based on that post and the bug report post that items always try to go through buffer chests first when being delivered to requester chests, instead of being delivered directly to requester chests if possible.

Ah, thanks so much for the Reddit post. That actually gives me a whole lot of hope. The way Rseding91 put it in this post, it sounded rather permanent.

[mh_]

mh_ this 'workaround' is mentioned as a reason for the chests to exist in the first paragraph of the buffer chest part of FFF#203

As I understand FFF#203 you couldn't do this workaround prior to the buffer chest. Now you can. What's the deal then? Please can someone help me, I don't understand.

[feildmaster]

mh_ this 'workaround' is mentioned as a reason for the chests to exist in the first paragraph of the buffer chest part of FFF#203

As I understand FFF#203 you couldn't do this workaround prior to the buffer chest. Now you can. What's the deal then? Please can someone help me, I don't understand.

Your workaround was possible before the update. It just used different chests. As it is implemented now, there is no difference between 0.15 and 0.16 when it comes to the chests. The buffer chest is pointless without being able to requester chest from it, it was intended to lower the amount of chests used.

[mh_]

mh_ this 'workaround' is mentioned as a reason for the chests to exist in the first paragraph of the buffer chest part of FFF#203

As I understand FFF#203 you couldn't do this workaround prior to the buffer chest. Now you can. What's the deal then? Please can someone help me, I don't understand.

Your workaround was possible before the update. It just used different chests. As it is implemented now, there is no difference between 0.15 and 0.16 when it comes to the chests. The buffer chest is pointless without being able to requester chest from it, it was intended to lower the amount of chests used.

Nope it isn't. Say I want to get rid of the circuits stored on my player via bots using the trash slots. If I don't want those to end up in the storage chest I would use an requester chest to get them. But if I have a passive provider chest with circuits it would be sucked try by the requester. Therefor I use a buffer chest instead of the requester. It doesn't suck dry the passive provider. This is the thing you can do with the buffer-chest, therefor I would call it passive requester chest if I had a say in this.

If you want to provide to requester chests from it just to the inserter to passive provider thing and you're good.

Please provide me with how what I just told you would have worked with the old chests (and not with a sh*tt*n of smart inserters).

[agmike]

Therefor I use a buffer chest instead of the requester. It doesn't suck dry the passive provider..

This is not true. Buffer chest does suck items from passive providers. There is no difference between requester and buffer in this regard, just that buffer allows items to be taken for construction and player requests, but not for requester chests.

[Xerkus]

Buffers to refill my inventory are useful but they never were a real problem, nuisance at best. Here are use cases that caused me to be hyped about buffer chests:

• Intermediate product that is also occasionally used elsewhere and excess of which you want to pull back from the rest of the base:
  
  Buffer cannot be used, because it does not provide to requesters. Cannot be combined with passive provider because it loops.
• Production line on the outskirts of the base, would be perfect to have its own buffer when far away from main production area: buffer chest cannot be used because it does not provide to requesters.
• My defences are supplied with ammo by logistic robots, one requester chest for every gun, can't have ammo buffer by every roboport. Buffer chest would solve the problem, wait, oops, it can't provide to requesters
• Anything else that might need buffered storage that requests from storage and provides to requester. Buffer chest with inserter into provider have exactly the same problem requester into provider have: it loops.

Robots going far on low supply is something i can live with. I have just that right now on abundant supply anyway.

mh_, I hope that explains the problem

[feildmaster]

Xerkus, when they eventually fix the buffer chest it'd be great to depend only on the logistics rather than the circuit in that picture, no?

[Omnifarious]

Why not just have requester chests get things from other chests in this priority, highest to lowest: active provider, storage, passive provider, buffer

Yeah, things might get shipped halfway across your base and stuck in a buffer, only to be shipped all the way across your base later. But that's the player's problem for not producing enough to meet demand.

The only real problem with this is that it kills off the use-case of a buffer chest holding materials for a far away outpost that's still connected to your logistics network. Which, of course, is the use-case the devs claimed buffer chests were created for.

Of course, I think that's a pretty useless use-case anyway because robot availability in different parts of your base is also a problem that requires logistics network segmentation to fix, and that causes all the same problems as materials availability with regards to repairing walls and such. IMHO, the only way to fix the problems that currently cause people to segment their networks is to have some kind of soft segmentation technique where you have sub-regions within a network and those sub-regions try to maintain a particular set supply of various goods within themselves.

The use-case I thought they'd be extremely useful for was when you have something that's both an end-stage product, and also used in the production of other things, and aren't consumed in the course of using them for their end-stage purpose. Belts, inserters, and assemblers fit into this category. This allows you to easily recycle them while still making sure they're available to use.

What I do right now is use yellow chests and rely on the system hunting down the yellow chest that already contains an item when it wants to put it store it. There is no other way to handle this issue right now in any reasonable sort of way. I keep thinking through circuit network designs, and they all fail for one reason or another.

Also, it'd enable me to stuff that switched trains or boilers to wood work better. Right now I have to have a lot of logic that pulls wood from the network to burn only if there's more than a certain amount, and also makes sure there's always some wood to use to build small phone poles. With buffer chests I could just have them request all the wood, then only feed it to trains if the amount of wood was higher than a few hundred.

Right now, buffer chests are worse than useless because items in them are counted as being part of the logistics network, but they can't provide to requester chests. This leads to situations in which your logistics network has tons of stuff in it and so your factory isn't producing anything because it thinks you have plenty, but there are, in fact, nowhere near enough.

[Omnifarious]

From FF-#222

I also feel, that we should add 2 things to the logistic system in 0.16:

• A checkbox in the requester chest that would allow the player to specify whether it should or shouldn't take from buffer chests, as even with the priorities, it might be annoying if robots took all the stuff from buffer stations to the requesters just because the supply train is going to arrive 10 seconds late, so the buffer chests would be supplied again soon. I would even say that the option might be to not take things from buffer chests by default.
• A filter for the storage chests. Buffer chests somewhat help to sort the storage, it doesn't really replace the need of storage chests to have a single filter for the whole storage chest. This would allow it to be reserved just for something specific, which would solve a lot of different problems

Unsurprisingly, a better solution than I was thinking of. Implementing the storage chest filter alone would nearly completely make buffer chests obsolete for me.