Not a fan of unloading

[factorio_player]

I have a number of satellite bases off nauvis mining the asteroids and building stuff to auto drop. Ok, that's very cool and very fun.

Problem is now when I try to manually offload using the shift click that I brought from another planet, it takes like an hour(!) for stuff to unload. There is some fuzzy messed up queue. Whatever that visual indicator is on the stuff unloading is not clear at all, when it is present.

01-22-2025, 10-41-05.png (5.54 KiB) Viewed 302 times

[NineNine]

You need more of these on your planets and your platforms.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Cargo_bay

[factorio_player]

Weird. Everything was working fine and nicely balanced. It was just annoying I couldn't manually transfer stuff. Anyways, it fixed it I guess.

Still not a fan. Seems silly I have to add so many cargo bays just for this.

[Tertius]

A cargo bay doesn't just add inventory space to the landing pad, it also adds an additional slot for the landing pods. The amount of landing pods simultaneously on the way down to the planet isn't unlimited.

[factorio_player]

Yeah, I didn't mind the limit. It made my orbital bases more interesting as I built more higher order products to minimize the down load. It worked well. With all these cargo bays it just seems lazy and messy.

[NineNine]

Yeah, I didn't mind the limit.

You started this thread with: "Problem is now when I try to manually offload using the shift click that I brought from another planet, it takes like an hour(!) for stuff to unload.".

So, I don't understand what you're looking for, exactly. But, you can enjoy limited landing pod slots, or you can add cargo bays. Your choice.

[Tertius]

That's not a question of laziness or prettiness. It's just how the game mechanics work.

To clarify: if you have a landing bay without cargo pods, and 10 orbital platforms, and each of them wants to send down a landing pod at the same time, 3 of them are actually being sent down, since the naked landing bay accepts 3 landing pods actually landing at the same time. Manual or automated doesn't matter.
The other 7 are queued and waiting. After the first 3 landed, the next 3 are released and landing, then again 3, than the last one. Each batch takes 30 seconds as far as I remember, so all 10 cargo pods require 4*30 seconds or 2 minutes until all are down.
If you add 7 cargo bays, you have 3+7=10 landing slots, so all 10 pods are sent down at the same time instead, requiring just 30 seconds all together.

In case you placed your landing bay in the center of your base with no space left to add cargo bays, you have to make space at least at 2 tiles, where you connect 1 cargo bay. Or deconstruct the landing bay and rebuild it nearby. There's no way around adding cargo bays. All other cargo bays can be connected to this and other cargo bays, building some kind of wall or whatever shape. They just have to be connected to each other. You don't have to encircle the landing bay with cargo bays.

[factorio_player]

It seems odd to me they don't just prioritize manual offloading. I use it infrequently but I have to add all these cargo bays just to enable it.