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

[Kyralessa]

• Damaged items become ineligible for fulfilling logistic requests, only construction ghosts.

I agree with this. If a damaged item can't be used as an ingredient, the bots shouldn't be grabbing it.

If that means it just sits in a chest damaged for the rest of time, that's still better than having it clog up an assembly machine.

[coffee-factorio]

i definitely feel like this is an edge case that should be dealt with somehow. Currently working on a remote artillery outpost setup, i've seen it happen before, where you accidentally load a damaged item, and it effectively soft locks that entire item stack.

I don't feel like you're wrong. My mind went to "how would this happen" and used 1.x logic.

Never experienced it myself but that's not 2-Space Age reasoning.
That might be evidence that the edge case got likelier as combat elements got added in.

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.

An alternate solution would be a specific wildcard request for damaged items, but this is not obviously better to me than what you are suggesting. You have to train a player to use that or ignore it when it is relevant to them. That is different. Not better.

It's not an easy problem to fix, you have to look at it in the context of a big network.

If everything (in this case all the "move 1-4 items requests") has to go through one more question, in a network with a lot of bots that hurts performance. It might be possible to have another solution, like a table of items that are always black listed. But having a table like that also has it's own set of issues. You have to make the robots respect that table before fulfilling other logistics requests (another issue with my suggestion).

It isn't impossible but you may have to be patient waiting for a practical solution or word on it. It depends on how likely this is now.

Just knowing it's there is helpful though.