Changing behavior of logistic network with items lower than 100% condition

[Tami]

Actually, there is a big issue in the game, that is not clarified as bug, but cause weird behavior in your factory. For example, if you have an ammo clip, one with 5/10 and one with 6/10 ammo, you can mix without any problems. Also you can mix science flasks, that have different conditions. But if you base is growing and things are more and more automated, you will run into the issue, that somehow items with lower than 100% condition totaly shutdowns your factory. The issue is, you can't track these items, nor they can be filtered. Even items filters are set to 100% condition by default (no health bar), items with lower than 100% condition may get delivered. It will be more complicated, if you use belts to deliver items. Each item on the belt has its own property, for example, if you have 1000 walls on the belt, there is a change that any wall is lower than 100% condition and if you try to craft something, like military science, you can't mix these walls.

There are some possible ideas to fix this issue:
* Change receipes, that allow different conditions of items, to only allow 1 of this kind. For example military science would take 1 wall instead of 2 walls.
* Allow damaged items to be mixed with undamaged items inside a processing machine. So an assembler, that has a 50% condition wall and a 100% condition wall would have 75% condition, round up, so 100% and 99% = 100%
* Add more slots for processing machines in the case that may process damaged items. So a assembler, that produces military science would have 2x wall, 1x grenade and 1x ammo slot
* Allow itemfilters to respec item conditions. So a requester chests, that requests walls, only take walls with 100% condition.
* Repair damaged items to 100% if inserted to a processing machine (exploitable?)

[ssilk]

I had problems to understand this. AFAIK there is no issue. When you assemble items with health lower than 100% the resulting item is just 100% again. I assume, that you want to change this.

somehow items with lower than 100% condition totaly shutdowns your factory. The issue is, you can't track these items, nor they can be filtered.

... if you have 1000 walls on the belt, there is a change that any wall is lower than 100% condition and if you try to craft something, like military science, you can't mix these walls.

In other words (using Factorio terms): your suggestion is, that you cannot assemble military science from walls, that are not 100% health, as it is now?

[ickputzdirwech]

AFAIK there is no issue.

There is. Assemblers can't craft recipes that require more than one entity-item of a kind per cycle, if some but not all of the items provided are damaged and therefore don't stack with the full health items.

Change receipes, that allow different conditions of items, to only allow 1 of this kind. For example military science would take 1 wall instead of 2 walls.

A big no imo!

Add more slots for processing machines in the case that may process damaged items. So a assembler, that produces military science would have 2x wall, 1x grenade and 1x ammo slot

This can become very chaotic very quickly if recipes require lots of different items.

Allow itemfilters to respec item conditions. So a requester chests, that requests walls, only take walls with 100% condition.

Would this mean you can only request items with full health? Or that there are two filters for all entity-items? Either way not very practically I think.

Repair damaged items to 100% if inserted to a processing machine (exploitable?)

Repairing items when moved by an inserter would be exploitable. If you mean that items should be repaired when inserted in an assembling machine, than this would only really solve one side of the issue (but probably most cases).There would still be the issue, when the full health items are inserted first, since you than can't insert the damaged items and they therefore won't be repaired either.

Allow damaged items to be mixed with undamaged items inside a processing machine. So an assembler, that has a 50% condition wall and a 100% condition wall would have 75% condition, round up, so 100% and 99% = 100%

This is the option I would go for, as long as the items mix only inside a processing machine.

[Tami]

Actually, a 50% wall and a 100% wall are 2 different kind of items, for this reason, item filters should respec this, adding a checkbox with a single choice:

( ) Damaged
(x) Undamaged
( ) All

Inserter for example handle 50% wall and 100% as one type of item while processing machines say, that are 2 different types of item, so they dont stack inside the assembler.

Loewchen for example says: Don't mix these items and every is fine.
The truth is, the player does not intend to mix these items, the game mix these item while the player has no care about the factory is trying to mix these items.

For example if you use upgrade planer to upgrade some structrures, you need items from logistic network and the exchanged items go back into the logistic network. There is so much potential to have damaged items in your logistic network. Also you can't repair items in the player inventory, you have to place them first, so if you have 500 damaged walls in your inventory, you have to place these walls first, repair them, and deconstruct them again.

I think the easiest way to fix this, is to handle damaged and undamaged items as one item inside processing machines.

[ssilk]

Hm, that is a nice found. I didn’t know that, never was in that situation, because I try to avoid wasting more than 1 slot for an item-type.

That is such an edge case! Only beginners, only if you don’t have robots, only if you don’t repair, only if you pick it up, only if you put it on a belt/chest...
.vs.
This can be quite hard to be fixed.

It would be much more easy that an broken item put in assembly is magically auto-repaired.

[foamy]

It's especially screwy because while a machine won't accept a damaged item, an inserter will happily try to add one to it -- a behaviour that jams the inserters in a fashion that can't occur in any other setup. I've had it hit with both belts and walls and it's a real pain to actually track the cause-of. In every other case if a recipe doesn't call for a material an inserter won't even try to add it in the first place -- why not here, too?

[ssilk]

I think either it’s one of those hidden features which makes the game so interesting or it has never been thought of before.

[Tami]

The code stacking of different kind of items is presence already. You can stack different size of ammo clips, you can stack different size of science post, you can even stack different condition of item, for example 99% wall and 50% wall. So if you add a condition in the code, that 100% wall can be stacked with 50% wall inside an assembler, would be the easiest fix.

[yagaodirac]

I think if this issue would be handled in the future, the solution should be that, all the items which could have condition are not possible to be any ingredients.

[ssilk]

That would block also... which can be seen as a bug. And it needs the inserters to check every time, if the item is full health, which takes for some thousands inserters some extra CPU.

[mrvn]

I think the most sensible would be to turn the item stacks inside an assembler/furnace into a float and have a 50% health wall simply count as 0.5 walls. So whenever an inserter tries to insert items it adds the health * count to the item stack. Removing the stack from an assembler would give you whole items and possibly one damaged one.

Unlike with the player inventory I don't have the expectation that if I put 5 damaged centrifuges into an assembler then I can still place the 5 furnaces back on the ground and repair them. The assembler uses up the input as it produces stuff so I think it's OK that you loose items when the health gets added up.

In a way that could be misused to repair items. But it will cost you health of the last item or even the whole items. That's often more expensive than repair packs. So not really an exploit or only on entities with trivial cost.

[Hares]

TL;DR

Damaged items should be automatically repaired once they enter logistical network

Why?

1. Currently, there's no way to repair them remotely as there's no way to tell robots to deploy an exact item
2. Damaged miners & pumpjacks can only be repaired if placed on a resource node, which there might be none nearby
3. Robots do already heal any damage upon reaching roboport, personal or not
4. Damaged items can stack only with damaged items, which can break logistical trains conditions. No more wonder why the train never departing
5. For the automation purpose, these items are indistinguishable from the normal, undamaged items

Yep. Logistical train

12-11-2024, 20-43-50.png (79.21 KiB) Viewed 1378 times

12-11-2024, 20-43-52.png (334.95 KiB) Viewed 1378 times

See Also

• 118674: Train condition progress should look clearer when at 100%

Edit: Attachments disappeared & reuploaded
Edit #2: Added "See Also"

[dmikalova]

There's a mod for that

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/inventory ... discussion

[Hares]

There's a mod for that

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/inventory ... discussion

That:

1. Is a mod which limits its usage
2. Only repairs items from your inventory, according to mod's description

[secelt]

this is a great idea! i can imagine construction bots moving over to the logistic chest containing the item and repairing it like an entity. they could also repair damaged items in the player's inventory by hovering over them. personal roboports would be even more useful!

speaking of which, being able to hold a repair pack and right-click on any item (whether in an inventory or on the ground, maybe even on a belt) to repair it without building it first would be great, too!

all this would consume repair packs, of course.

[mooklepticon]

+1 request for this.

I had a stack inserter line get clogged because the ingredient inserter were damaged and thus the assembler wouldn't craft.

[BrainlessTeddy]

A very small but nerv racking thing. I have somehow a damaged blue inserter on Gleba. And it keeps clogging up my green inserter production since damaged items and healthy items don't stack. In this pic: The inserter says target full because the assember (target) has only healthy inserters in it.

Screenshot 2025-08-24 134948.png (20.77 KiB) Viewed 404 times

The worst thing, I can't very easily get rid of the inserter because I am on Nauvis. And destroying or repairing items that are not placed down is pretty hard without being there physically.

[Tertius]

You *can* get rid of the deadlock in remote view quite easy.

If your inserter has a damaged item in its hand and cannot insert it because it cannot merge it with the stack of already existing undamaged items in your assembling machine, open the assembling machine and right-click the existing undamaged item. It will be marked with a red X to be carried away by construction robots. When that's done, the damaged item will be inserted. Production will continue and your damaged item is crafted away.

In case the damaged item is already in the assembling machine but the machine will not run because it needs more ingredients, and the one inserter has the next undamaged item in its hand so it it all stalled, open the assembling machine and pipette the item slot with missing items so you get a ghost stack of that missing item in your hand. Insert the ghost stack into the machine. The item request will be fulfilled by construction robots, crafting can continue, and the damaged item is crafted away. You need the required ingredients in your logistics network, of course. If you don't have some, open some container or even some other assembling machine that has this item, right-click a stack to mark it with the red X so it is carried away by construction robots and stored somewhere into the logistics network. This is then available for satisfying the ghost stack request.

Keep in mind: manual remote requests, i. e. the red cross for pickup requests and ghost stacks for delivery requests are handled by construction robots, not by logistic robots.

[BrainlessTeddy]

I didn't know damaged items can be crafted away. To be fair.

[Shadow_Man]

Periodically I encounter a situation when the drone mall stops working because one of the components in the request chest is damaged (for example, a pipe or a wall).
I suggest adding a parameter “Only undamaged items” for request chests and buffer chests.
(And "damaged" for collecting for repair).

Or, better, add an "Item Integrity Filter" like on an example below.