Circuit-Established Landing Pad Requests Not Truly Fulfilled

[dracofalconi]

Hello all,

After being alerted to this by a user in a mutual Discord, I have run into what I believe is a bug when it comes to setting Cargo Landing Pad (CLP) requests using Circuit Logic.

1. What did you do?
The goal of said circuitry is to have X quantity of specific items in a planet's Logistics Network, and request quantities from Space Platforms to settle any shortages. To this end, a Comcast Combinator (containing the items I want and the max quantities I want on hand) is connected via red wire to an Arithmetic Combinator, whose green wire input is tied to a Roboport with "Read logistic network contents." The logic on the Arithmetic was set to "EACH Red MINUS EACH Green" (what I want, minus what I have, equals what I still need), and then the output connects directly to the CLP, which has "Set Requests" as its active Circuit Mode. I then added a Logistics Request on the Constant for Bioflux x1000 and added 552 Bioflux to the CLP by hand. There is a ship in orbit that has more than 600 Biofux in its capacity.

2. What happened?
There is a request controlled by the Circuit Network for 448 Bioflux, but hovering over the request with my mouse shows the request is being satisfied with the 552 Bioflux that is within the CLP. No Bioflux is coming in from the orbiting platform until the amount in the CLP is less than the amount being requested by the circuit network.

3. What did you expect to happen instead? It might be obvious to you, but do it anyway!
Expectation was for 500 Bioflux (five stacks) to come down from the orbiting ship, bringing the on hand Bioflux total over 1000 and satisfying the request by turning the value of BioFlux on the inbound red wire to a negative number, as a negative value cannot be requested. I was also expecting the behavior of requests controlled by the circuit network to only factor in the circuit network (and no other source) to bring material down, and not check the request against the amount of the item in the CLP -- that behavior should be meant for requests manually established in the CLP interface.

4. Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?
Always, though I am confident that this behavior began only recently, and that it operated as I had believed it should have in the past (see #3).

Screenshots and Log File:

clp1.png (419.4 KiB) Viewed 299 times

clp2.png (268.93 KiB) Viewed 299 times

clp3.png (618.23 KiB) Viewed 299 times

factorio-current.log

(20.27 KiB) Downloaded 11 times

Thank you.

[waterBear]

It's not a bug, but you're overthinking it. Request 1000 in the landing pad (or set that request). It will subtract the contents and request the remainder automatically.

[dracofalconi]

My problem with that approach is that doing so does not consider any amount of the item that is in the Logistics Network but NOT in the Cargo Landing Pad.

In my example, if I had 450 Bioflux in the CLP AND 150 BioFlux in a Storage Chest on the same surface, when I request 1,000 Bioflux I only want to see 400 Bioflux come from orbit, not 600.

My setup worked as intended before, though I cannot identify the exact version where it last worked.

[jdrexler75]

If it worked before that would've been a bug, or you've been handling the items differently. Possibly you've been removing the items from the CLP so that they are immediately in the logistics network instead? Or maybe items just got removed quickly enough since the logistics network needed them right away.

The CLP requests specify how many items should be in the CLP, and fills them up from orbit if necessary. It's basically a requester chest for the orbital platforms, and a passive provider chest for the logistics network.

So you can either just set fixed CLP requests to work as a buffer for your logistics network. Set X amount to be filled from orbit, and use that X amount to satisfy logistics requests as needed, to be filled up again from orbit. This probably requires a increasing numbers of cargo bays.

Or you can remove items as soon as they drop from orbit and distribute them to logistics chests, and then only request the items you're short on. Because of limited storage capacity of the CLP this is probably what most people do beyond a certain factory size.

Trying a mix of these strategies will not work satisfactorily.

[waterBear]

what he said. Either leave in the pad (what I do, since there will be a million cargo bays on Nauvis anyway for drop volume) or pull it out and into the logi net.

I don't think it's worked like that ever, or not in a long time. I did something similar last year when SA launched, pulling things out into the net and requesting the diff. Eventually I stopped, but it did work.