Make bots aware of spoilage

[Luptoom]

TL;DR

Storing and transporting spoilable items in a logistic network isn't ideal, robots pick up the last item in an inventory first causing old items to spoil.
A mechanic similar to the spoiled priority of inserters could improve this.

What?

When using a logistic network for spoilable items I usually buffer some amount of items in a buffer or provider chest.
Since robots will pick up the last items from a inventory first, this causes old items to spoil in the buffer chest.

This could be improved by adding a mechanic similar to the spoiled priority of inserters to the logistics.
I have three possible solutions in mind:

• Always take spoiled items from a inventory first
• Add a configuration option which can be configured for a whole logistic network
• Add a configuration option to logistic storage (provider chests, buffer chests, requester chests)

Introducing spoiled priorities to requester chests and the whole logistic network opens the question if a spoiled priority is only evaluated for a targeted inventory or over the complete network. My senses tell me the latter one might be to complex to implement, if even possible without to much of a performance impact.
But only evaluating spoilage priorities per inventory which is targeted by a robot, seems fairly easy to implement for me.

Thus the option to add spoiled priorities to logistic chests seems more intuitive to me.

Why?

My current solution to this problem is to only allow a single stack of a spoilable item in a provider chest.
In several places I used a non provider chest for buffering amounts larger than a stack in combination with a provider chest with a inserter (with spoiled first priority) next to it.
In my opinion the proposed solutions wouldn't make the handling of spoiled items to easy but rather remove the annoying additional setup, which is currently needed to handle spoilables in a logistic network.

[dannyb21892]

TL;DR

Inserters have a feature to prioritize more or less spoiled entities. It would be cool if logistic bots could do something similar.

What?

In the UI for any logistic chest that can passively provide materials to the network (red, yellow, green chests), I propose a spoiled level setting similar to the one on inserters. Check it on or off, and select whether to prioritize providing the most or least spoiled items in that box. That way when bots come to take items from the box, they'll grab from the most or least spoiled stack as indicated by the selection. Alternatively (or even additionally), any requester (blue or green) chest could have a similar setting indicating what to prioritize. Having both could cause conflicting situations though, if a blue chest is requesting least spoiled items from a provider that is prioritizing most spoiled for example, some logic would need to exist there (perhaps requester conditions supercede provider conditions).

Why?

Bots very often will carry spoilable items across the network, and since the transfer of those items via belts and inserters can already be sorted in spoilage order, it seems logical that bots should be able to do it too. An example use case is a modular gleba factory based on logistics bots to carry spoilable components between subfactories. I would want only the freshest fruit, bioflux, and eggs to be in my science production chain so that I can get the most research out of each pack. Currently, the spoilage level of the item brought by the bots is unknown. So unless the requester chest accumulates a buffer of multiple stacks, the spoiled priority setting on inserter going from the requester chest to the production machine is mostly useless. Perhaps the provider chest could have sent us better ingredients in the first place in this situation.

Thanks for reading, would love to hear thoughts on whether this has any big gameplay downsides, or if it's prohibitively hard to implement.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into an older thread with the same suggestion.