Factorio Forums

I'm late game. I'm at the point where a stacked and packed green belt doesn't provide enough throughput to get enough material to my rockets. I considered putting individual rockets near my manufacturing, but since rockets are loaded by bot, there's no guarantee that the material I drop into chests (green) next to the rockets will be loaded into those rockets. Is that the best choice? Should I get trains involved, somehow? Is there a general technique for loading many rockets simultaneously?

NineNine wrote: Sun Mar 23, 2025 2:06 pm I considered putting individual rockets near my manufacturing, but since rockets are loaded by bot, there's no guarantee that the material I drop into chests (green) next to the rockets will be loaded into those rockets.

That is a problem with bots, but you do not have to load rockets only by bot. If you turn off “Automatic requests from space platforms”, you can fill them using inserters and the rockets will still launch automatically once they are full and a space platform has a matching request. (Though, this only works when a rocket is full of only one item type, and not for rocket fuel, low density structures, or processing units.)

kpreid wrote: Sun Mar 23, 2025 2:36 pm

NineNine wrote: Sun Mar 23, 2025 2:06 pm I considered putting individual rockets near my manufacturing, but since rockets are loaded by bot, there's no guarantee that the material I drop into chests (green) next to the rockets will be loaded into those rockets.

That is a problem with bots, but you do not have to load rockets only by bot. If you turn off “Automatic requests from space platforms”, you can fill them using inserters and the rockets will still launch automatically once they are full and a space platform has a matching request. (Though, this only works when a rocket is full of only one item type, and not for rocket fuel, low density structures, or processing units.)

Oooooohhhh.... So, then it sounds like the answer is to put resource-specific rockets right near the manufacturing facilities? That's a really good idea. I've been playing with the rockets on auto-load for so long, I don't know if I ever would have thought to turn that off.

I tell ya... whoever says that the game ends once you reach the solar system edge is really missing a lot of game.

The other option is dedicated roboports separate from the rest of the network serving only specific rocket(s). And then belting the goods in.