Any way to control where construction bots dump their load?

[xnmo]

As you can see from this screenshot, even though there are several storage chests close by, after cutting down the trees, the bots decide to fly all the way back to the far end of my factory to put the wood in some other random storage chest.

Obviously this wastes quite a bit of time and energy so I'm wondering if there's any way around this, other than the obvious and completely impractical solution of not having any storage chests apart from one or two right next to whatever it is I want to deconstruct. It's not a huge deal at the moment but I can imagine that as I spread out the bots will start to waste exponentially more and more time.

[-root]

Nope, no way to control it as of yet (short of having one and one only storage chest ). Hopefully something like this gets implemented in later updates.

[ssilk]

Some weeks ago, I thought the same. But now: The more I play around like so (big areas, long distance) the more I think it is a missing feature, some teleport gates, which let you walk from a to b and let also the bots "jump" large areas.
Costs quite a lot of energy to jump... But will make those Ideas kind of worthless ..

[DaveMcW]

Yes it's possible.

Bot dumping order is:

1. Requester chests and player logistics slots
2. Storage chest with the same item already in it
3. Empty storage chest
4. Any storage chest with room

So put 1 wood in the nearest storage chest, and bots will use it.

[-root]

Yes it's possible.

Bot dumping order is:

1. Requester chests and player logistics slots
2. Storage chest with the same item already in it
3. Empty storage chest
4. Any storage chest with room

So put 1 wood in the nearest storage chest, and bots will use it.

I didn't know this! Thank you for posting!

What if you have a storage chest with 20 wood somewhere else in the map, which one would it use first?

[ssilk]

The bots try to fill always the non-empty chests first, before they begin another chest.

This systematic is definitely aimed to a "centralized" layout with a diameter of < 200-500 tiles (depends on robot speed updates). Indeed it is a good idea, if you go much over this size to split up your logistic networks. The problem is then, how do you bring items from one network into another? That question has caused some discussions in the suggestion board. ( https://forums.factorio.com/forum/sea ... t&fid[0]=6 )

The most favored solution is in my eyes:
- having logistic networks in different colors, which can overlap. That enables to have very small and very big robotic areas at the same place, so you can have very differentiated tasks.
- some entity (or some entities), which is able to see the requested and provided stuff in the different networks and requests/provides it.

And my current thought about that is, that this special device needs to have some kind of "teleport", so that it exists in both networks at the same time.

In other words: An easy solution would be some "magic chests", I call it now "source" and "target"-chest, which are on the source side a requester chest, which reflects the requests of the target side, and on the target side it is just a provider chest, which provides the requested material of the source side.

Hm. But this comes now more to a suggestion than a help; sorry for that, but I this problem is in my eyes currently not really solvable in a satisfactory way.

[Xterminator]

Yes it's possible.

Bot dumping order is:

1. Requester chests and player logistics slots
2. Storage chest with the same item already in it
3. Empty storage chest
4. Any storage chest with room

So put 1 wood in the nearest storage chest, and bots will use it.

I also did not know that. Thanks! I had a very similar issue as the OP but with lasers/walls etc when turret creeping. But after your post it makes sense now. Because I already had the items in a chest on the opposite side of the base. :p I can see things so much clearer now!

[DerivePi]

For my treefarm modded game, I separate the robot zones so that all of the trees/ rubber trees only have one storage area they can be delivered to. As for prompting the bots to store wood in a wood-primed chest, this has been hit or miss for me (I usually mess it up initially and can get messed up as the game progresses).

As for a "satisfying" game solution, I'm more inclined to implementing the railroad wagon option of limiting what items can be stored in each slot in a storage chest - (center mouse button click on storage slot in wagon and you can select what item can be stored in that slot). Seeing as I rarely use storage chests, this wouldn't be too painful, but perhaps a more satisfying solution is in the works.

Maybe have the option to promote (green), allow (blue) or exclude (red) specific items for each slot? This complication is far enough into the game that it wouldn't be part of the initial learning curve, but maybe we should just accept this as a built in challenge that we need to contend with?

[xnmo]

Yes it's possible.

Bot dumping order is:

1. Requester chests and player logistics slots
2. Storage chest with the same item already in it
3. Empty storage chest
4. Any storage chest with room

So put 1 wood in the nearest storage chest, and bots will use it.

This is very helpful to know, thanks for that. As DerivePi pointed out it's not quite a perfect solution but will certainly ease my troubles. I do hope that the developers add more rules to this dumping order. For example one method that would fix this problem would be if bots preferred a storage chest with the same item already in it, but only if it's within let's say 50 tiles or so (Or go by chunks), and if it is outside that range it will simply go to the closest chest.

I definitely think there needs to be some more advanced functionality to the logistic system added to the game as ssilk mentioned. For example, if you could draw out zones within your existing network to 'separate' them so that they can act as unconnected logistic networks, or maybe simply had some additional rules. The way I'm imagining it would be that you could set it up so that logistic robots would only try to refill your inventory if you are inside your factory. Or control the number of bots to say have no more than 500 logistic bots in your factory and spread out the rest out among your outer territories, and do the same thing with construction bots. Or have an interconnected logistic networks that can request items from the surrounding networks. And have this be able to function like how you have with smart inserters: so items would only move around if certain conditions were met. The possibilities are endless! And very, very complicated