How to get rid of item less than 100% health?

[NineNine]

I have a single item that is less than 100% health. I have a blue chest that asks for those items. Invariably, when that one item ends up in my requester (blue) chest, and tries to get inserted into the assembler, everything stops. I have to manually clear it out of the inserter to get things moving again. I can't, for the life of me, figure out how to get rid of this item. I'd be happy to fix it, destroy, it, whatever, just so that it stops stopping my factory. How do you get rid of an item that is less than 100% health?

[Rseding91]

Repair pack and fix it?

[NineNine]

Repair pack and fix it?

Sure, but how do I grab it, physically? You can't select for partial health things to deconstruct, or to grab with an inserter. If you right click on it when an inserter is holding it, it just gets dropped into a yellow chest, and then it arrives again, eventually. I don't know how to do anything with it inside of my bot network. As far as I know, there's no way to select things of varying health.

[coffee-factorio]

There's inventory slots in a roboport. If the area of the factory is not remote, anything in the construction area gets automatically repaired. The port itself needs construction bots.

If it is remote, a spidertron or tank might have to be driven near it, with a personal roboport in the equipment grid and adequate power (of course).

Edit: By remote, I mean it's disconnected from a large robot network hub.

[NineNine]

There's inventory slots in a roboport. If the area of the factory is not remote, anything in the construction area gets automatically repaired. The port itself needs construction bots.

If it is remote, a spidertron or tank might have to be driven near it, with a personal roboport in the equipment grid and adequate power (of course).

Edit: By remote, I mean it's disconnected from a large robot network hub.

I didn't know that stuff in robotports gets automatically repaired. That's super cool.
But, how would I get this thing into a roboport?

[coffee-factorio]

If it's a part of the base, the logistic network does this automatically.

A passive provider chest will let your construction robots use any items put into them. I would assume it is the same for a buffer and storage chest, but not a requester chest.

If you have logistics far away from your repair kit section, then opening up the roboport with right click will let you see its inventory.

Do you know how to do the temporary or construction logistic requests that are in 2.0?

[robot256]

Repair pack and fix it?

Sure, but how do I grab it, physically? You can't select for partial health things to deconstruct, or to grab with an inserter. If you right click on it when an inserter is holding it, it just gets dropped into a yellow chest, and then it arrives again, eventually. I don't know how to do anything with it inside of my bot network. As far as I know, there's no way to select things of varying health.

You cannot repair *items* (without a mod). You have to use that item to build an *entity* on the map. The entity (building) will be repaired automatically by robots. Then you deconstruct the building to get an item again, and the new item will have full health.

To make sure it's that particular item that gets built, you either have to go pick it out of the yellow chest manually with your character, or you just get lucky that a bot picks it.

[NineNine]

Repair pack and fix it?

To make sure it's that particular item that gets built, you either have to go pick it out of the yellow chest manually with your character, or you just get lucky that a bot picks it.

Right. That's the problem I'm having. How do I single out a single item among many thousands? I can't believe I'd have to manually move my engineer there. I haven't moved my engineer in probably 500 hours (~6 months of real life).

[Tertius]

I tried to recreate this in remote view with a bunch of damaged yellow inserters to craft fast inserters in an assembling machine 3.

A requester chest requests all ingredients, and eventually the damaged inserters will get into that chest.
As soon as the inserter in front of the assembling machine inserted a hand full of damaged inserters, the machine continued to craft until the ingredients already in the input slots of the machine were exhausted. 2 of the damaged inserters were consumed for crafting, resulting in perfectly fine fast inserters. The other 2 were still in the input slots. The input slot for the green chip was empty. The input inserter for the machine has 4 more damaged inserters in its hand, but it didn't drop it into the machine so the whole thing is stalled.

Why was it stalled? My guess is that the input inserter was told to insert inserters but was unable to merge its hand content with the content of the input slot in the destination because of different damage state.

I was able to make the machine continue by manually requesting the missing green chips into the machine. In remote view, you take a ghost of a stack of green chips into your hand, and you insert that ghosts into the machine. Bots will satisfy that request, the machine has ingredients again, and will craft the damaged items away.

[NineNine]

Why was it stalled? My guess is that the input inserter was told to insert inserters but was unable to merge its hand content with the content of the input slot in the destination because of different damage state.

I was able to make the machine continue by manually requesting the missing green chips into the machine. In remote view, you take a ghost of a stack of green chips into your hand, and you insert that ghosts into the machine. Bots will satisfy that request, the machine has ingredients again, and will craft the damaged items away.

Exactly. I can't figure out a way around this without having to manually intervene. I manually click on the less than 100% health in the inserter's hand to have the bots remove them now.

[coffee-factorio]

Bots kind of have their own logic. Your fix is what I would do if I thought this was a problem.

You can change your behavior so damaged items don't get stored. Extend robot coverage to the area where things are getting damaged. Either by going for a big single network or running a train to a distant location. If your goal is to repair damaged units you're in a good place with that.

If it still bothers you, I'd check for a mod. Because now that I'm understanding what you mean, it is unfortunately as you say.

By the way. Are the items causing the failure walls?

[NineNine]

Bots kind of have their own logic. Your fix is what I would do if I thought this was a problem.

You can change your behavior so damaged items don't get stored. Extend robot coverage to the area where things are getting damaged. Either by going for a big single network or running a train to a distant location. If your goal is to repair damaged units you're in a good place with that.

If it still bothers you, I'd check for a mod. Because now that I'm understanding what you mean, it is unfortunately as you say.

By the way. Are the items causing the failure walls?

It's all one big bot network, and it's on Gleba, so things get randomly damaged when eggs spoil, so there's no real way of avoiding damage. And, no it happens to be a single bulk inserter that is continually jamming up my production for stack inserters.

[Tertius]

I can't figure out a way around this without having to manually intervene. I manually click on the less than 100% health in the inserter's hand to have the bots remove them now.

No, don't remove the less than 100% health items from the inserter's hand. Instead, go to the assembling machine the inserter is feeding and add ghost requests for missing ingredients. It's trivial: use the pipette tool on the empty slot and you have a ghost stack in hand. Click the slot to add his ghost stack to the slot. The request will be fulfilled, the machine will continue. Eventually the slot of the item where the inserter has these less then 100% health items in its hand gets empty, and then the inserter will insert its less than 100% items. Keep adding ghost requests to make the machine continue until all less than 100% items are gone.
I don't see a way to automate this, but it's a way to manually get rid of the items instead of sending them back into the loop.

It's all one big bot network, and it's on Gleba, so things get randomly damaged when eggs spoil, so there's no real way of avoiding damage.

I also have biter eggs on Gleba, but I never saw ingredients being damaged by hatched enemies. Only buildings - items that are actually built as machines. You need to make sure that if you deconstruct things, so they might be used as ingredients later, the deconstructed things are 100% repaired. To achieve this, have a few construction bots in your logistics network and have repair kits in your logistics network and repair is automatic and immediate after damage.

About biter eggs hatching: I have a small circuit that counts the ticks since last biter egg delivery. If more than 72000 ticks elapsed (20 minutes), all biter eggs are being requested by a special requester chest and fed into a heating tower to destroy them. And I make sure they're constantly being consumed - I use them for nutrient production, because they're 75 times more efficient than bioflux directly.

[NineNine]

I can't figure out a way around this without having to manually intervene. I manually click on the less than 100% health in the inserter's hand to have the bots remove them now.

No, don't remove the less than 100% health items from the inserter's hand. Instead, go to the assembling machine the inserter is feeding and add ghost requests for missing ingredients. It's trivial: use the pipette tool on the empty slot and you have a ghost stack in hand. Click the slot to add his ghost stack to the slot. The request will be fulfilled, the machine will continue. Eventually the slot of the item where the inserter has these less then 100% health items in its hand gets empty, and then the inserter will insert its less than 100% items. Keep adding ghost requests to make the machine continue until all less than 100% items are gone.
I don't see a way to automate this, but it's a way to manually get rid of the items instead of sending them back into the loop.

Great idea, thank you! That will at least stop that one item from getting put back in again! I think I manually removed the same broken item maybe 6 times before it disappeared forever (got repaired).

It's all one big bot network, and it's on Gleba, so things get randomly damaged when eggs spoil, so there's no real way of avoiding damage.

I also have biter eggs on Gleba, but I never saw ingredients being damaged by hatched enemies. Only buildings - items that are actually built as machines. You need to make sure that if you deconstruct things, so they might be used as ingredients later, the deconstructed things are 100% repaired. To achieve this, have a few construction bots in your logistics network and have repair kits in your logistics network and repair is automatic and immediate after damage.

About biter eggs hatching: I have a small circuit that counts the ticks since last biter egg delivery. If more than 72000 ticks elapsed (20 minutes), all biter eggs are being requested by a special requester chest and fed into a heating tower to destroy them. And I make sure they're constantly being consumed - I use them for nutrient production, because they're 75 times more efficient than bioflux directly.

That's also a good idea, but I'm not that organized. I just let them do their thing, and scatter laser turrets everywhere on Gleba.

[MEOWMI]

I've had this happen on Gleba, when buildings being super force deconstructed took damage from Boompuffs. It just so happened the Boompuffs got deconstructed first, dealing damage to nearby entities that then got removed afterwards before any other bots had time to repair them, thus placing damaged items in the logistic network.

Fortunately I had the foresight to notice that it had just happened and hunted down the items manually. A search through the logistic network eventually found me the items before too long, after which I remote controlled a Spidertron and manually shot the chest.

The main problem was just that I had to have the knowledge and presence of mind to catch it. I don't think there was any automatic way for me to prevent it. It was completely necessary to have the foresight to deconstruct the Boompuff first and then wait until any eventual damage was repaired before issuing a super force build command. It is a rare occurrence, since it involves chance, and it would have to be a building that's also an ingredient to then eventually cause an assembler to stall in the future, but it can happen.

[NineNine]

I've had this happen on Gleba, when buildings being super force deconstructed took damage from Boompuffs. It just so happened the Boompuffs got deconstructed first, dealing damage to nearby entities that then got removed afterwards before any other bots had time to repair them, thus placing damaged items in the logistic network.

Fortunately I had the foresight to notice that it had just happened and hunted down the items manually. A search through the logistic network eventually found me the items before too long, after which I remote controlled a Spidertron and manually shot the chest.

The main problem was just that I had to have the knowledge and presence of mind to catch it. I don't think there was any automatic way for me to prevent it. It was completely necessary to have the foresight to deconstruct the Boompuff first and then wait until any eventual damage was repaired before issuing a super force build command. It is a rare occurrence, since it involves chance, and it would have to be a building that's also an ingredient to then eventually cause an assembler to stall in the future, but it can happen.

Oh yes, you're right. It's entirely possible the things were damaged by the local flora of Gleba. And you're right... if you can predict that something's going to get damaged by a plant, that's the best way to do it. That's also sort of tedious when you're copying/pasting and/or slapping down big blueprints and/or moving stuff around.

[kpreid]

I feel like the game ought to offer some improvements in this area, to keep things “automatable”. Here are a couple of options that come to mind:

• Damaged items become ineligible for fulfilling logistic requests, only construction ghosts. (This might be hard to implement efficiently, and it breaks some things that you might want to work, like bringing damaged items to a player's or spidertron's inventory for later construction.)
• Put up an alert whenever an inserter is trying to move items but can't because the inserted item is of different health. Leave it to the player to go to that inserter and remove that item — or for a brute-force fix that works remotely, destroy the inserter or machine its contents. This doesn’t automate the fix but it lets the player catch the problem faster than noticing a factory is stuck.

[coffee-factorio]

It's all one big bot network, and it's on Gleba, so things get randomly damaged when eggs spoil, so there's no real way of avoiding damage. And, no it happens to be a single bulk inserter that is continually jamming up my production for stack inserters.

I'll have to watch out for my factory on Gleba. Ah, I'm new at this again.

Thank you!

[NineNine]

I feel like the game ought to offer some improvements in this area, to keep things “automatable”. Here are a couple of options that come to mind:

I've spent some time thinking about this, and the best way that I can think of doing this without adding a lot of complexity is to not include things that are not at 100% health when requesting things to blue chests.