Afforess wrote:Peppe wrote:I think most of the energy numbers are about 5x of what they were.
Thanks for pointing that out!
AFAIK, they wanted to allow less energy usage for just covering a large area with roboports,
while increasing energy usage for really using many bots
TLTR: a really nice mod, running pretty well in 0.13.13, giving a nice alternative to faster modded miners and their required belts in a robot factory. thank you.
here comes some fun, a few observations, and a real bug ...
THE FUN
I just tested this mod with cheats enabled to get a preview what can be achieved in the late game, and i love it.
couldn't stop ROFL when i saw 500 robots working with 500 logistic mining drills on an ore field 16 kilometers distant from my base which had 20 million ore. the robots got 16k ore per minute (almost 1 million ore per hour) and filled an entire warehouse (2000 slots) in a matter of minutes. energy usage was something like 4 MW for the mining roboport, 7 MW for 3 groups of rechargers (each had 1 assembly for making drills and 7 rechargers around it for the batteries), and 70 MW for recharging the bots (which was my biggest problem, to have no big queues in front of the normal roboports; maybe I'll use FusionRobots later :-). to finally smelt that much ore at the same speed, i needed 6 or 7 rows of furnaces, each with a blue belt and 12 electric furnaces 3 (from another mod) with maxed speed modules for speed 12 :-) of course, the smelters required another 80 MW, and to power the whole system with coal, i would probably have needed another robot mining site to get 2k coal per minute :-)
to make it look nice, I hid all the furnaces in factorissimo buildings (4 rows with a total of 48 furnaces in each) and handled the compressed blue belts by simply putting requester and interface chests at the input lines and interface chests to store the plates. it will be quite a challenge to build the same again in a real game with only the robomining and a large smelting complex, with lots of spaghetti belts :-) and no big warehouses.
THE OBSERVATIONS
a few things that i noticed about this mod while playing around:
- even when the recharging assemblers had no work to do when i stopped mining, they still used 7MW. it would be nice when they used lots of energy, but only while really recharging batteries.
- you can use fast assemblers to make the drills, but each one needs 10 recharged batteries. since you can use fast assemblers with 4 speed modules, or even faster assemblers from other mods, i had problems to get enough batteries to the assembler fast enough. there is only enough space for 7-8 rechargers in a circle around one such assembler, and the rechargers accept no kind of modules. i don't want to start using belts to recharge batteries for robot mining and i didn't try setups with groups of rechargers that output to provider chests so that the assembler can request more charged batteries. anyway, it would be nice if the rechargers could get slots for speed modules too (which of course would multiply the power usage).
- the mining roboport has the button to connect to circuit networks, but i didn't succeed in attaching colored wires to it. connecting it to a circuit network (or even better to the logistic network) would allow for nice options, eg to pause the mining roboport (to stop getting more resources when the current drills are done) instead of having to delete it manually when the storage gets full (I hate when active providers fill every storage they can find)
- why do the drills use active providers at all, and not passive providers? with passive providers smelters (and boilers, plastic assemblers, etc, and also chests at a train loader station) could request only exactly as much or as little ore/coal as they need. especially at a remote outpost, it's difficult to watch whether storage is flooded, and to adjust mining quantities to the main factory's needs. and even a small traffic jam on a train line could easily cause the whole outpost to be filled with ore, blocking other important functions like storing a bit of ammunition. having more than one kind of resource (eg iron and copper at a smelting outpost, or iron and coal when using fossil energy) is near impossible when active providers start flooding the wrong type of storage, causing ore to jam boiler feeds, copper to jam steel smelters, etc.
THE BUG
and there is probably also a real BUG:
when i placed a mining roboport, i noticed that the red area skipped a few locations. on several attempts (placing the mining port at different places), it seems as if it was always the same locations that were skipped, when marking the area with red, as well as later when placing the drills.