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Related but different prior suggestion; 689209

What?

Why?

Currently I use Uncommon Logistics Bots to force a Roboport to be empty.
This is the same underlying idea behind the Deconstruction Planner filter for Splitter trick; it's an impossible request that produces a desirable effect.

This works for me because I like playing with Quality.
This does not work in Factorio without Quality.
Without Quality, Factorio and Space Age only have 2 types for Roboport requests, and neither of them is practical to use as an impossible request.

Sure, we can keep on using a Deconstruction Planner as a menu-selectable item till the end of days for Splitters. That would be atrocious and honestly I'm shocked and disappointed that the linked suggestion hasn't already been implemented, but at least Deconstruction Planner is a slightly flawed answer, instead of no usable answer.

There is no usable answer without Quality.

Okay, but, why?

Roboport requests are primarily used to express "I want X bots in this area."
We should be able to express "I DONT want X bots in this area."

One use case of such an expression is "Roboports that are charging-only".
I know this is a desirable use case because there are popular mods (ex. Bob's Logistics Mod) which implement that.
What I'm saying here is that this is already possible with both community mods, and Quality.
It's even possible in base game by playing without one bot type, but that's a terrible solution, so let's fix it.

Note that this doesn't make modded charging-only ports irrelevant; they can have faster charging speed and more charging slots than a regular Roboport, so they still have a use.

Another use case is "Force Bots Into Network".
Currently, there is no way to automatically force bots into a network in the base game, except for doing the dumb thing and playing with only one bot type.
If you have both bot types, then it's possible that all slots in any Roboport you have set up to add bots to the network via Inserter are filled with the opposite bot type to what you want to add.

For example, let's say you have a moderately developed base with 10,000 logistics and 30,000 construction bots. You undertake a very large construction project, and all 30,000 construction bots are in the air. You may want to add more... but your logistics bots are currently relatively dormant, and too many of them have nested in the roboports being fed from your construction bot assemblers.

What are your options?

Well, if you are on the same surface, you can manually unjam the situation. But there should really be an answer that doesn't require you to be on the same surface, that was the whole point of the massive overhaul to Remote View...

You could use construction orders to unjam the roboports, hoping that some construction bot will randomly prioritize the unjam over the existing overloaded construction queue...

You could have a dedicated tank or spidertron sitting nearby with its own construction bots to unjam if you ever wind up in this situation... but that's basically just implementing a roboport where excess surplus from the main network can't fill it up and which excess demand cannot draw from. So, effectively a weird roboport which is forced to 0 bots. Where have I heard that before...?

You could use a filtered inserter to pull any undesired bots out, but that just kicks the can down the road because now you have to do something with these bots that happened to try resting in the wrong roboport, and the best thing to do with them is to re-add them to the network but in the right spot, which is what we're already trying to do in the first place...

You could set the bot request on the roboports to be only construction bots. That would allow you to be able to grow your bot swarm when it's highly stressed... but ONLY when it's highly stressed. You can't use this to gradually add more bots over time during low stress periods to prevent the high stress periods from happening in the first place.



Or you could skip all these complex answers and their downsides and just use an impossible request to say "No Bots Here".

TL;DR

"impossible item filter" already exists in the game for Splitters. Wube has already made it for Roboports with the Quality mod. Please add it to the base game for Roboports.

The first thing I tried was to set a request for Max 0 robots, and it didn't work. That would probably be the most obvious way to do it, since it mirrors how all other logistic requests work.

Admittedly, you would then have to ban all robot types then.

Ranakastrasz wrote: Sun Sep 06, 2026 5:50 am The first thing I tried was to set a request for Max 0 robots, and it didn't work. That would probably be the most obvious way to do it, since it mirrors how all other logistic requests work.

Yeah, the way the requests work is that defines the minimum request. Like, if you set "50 logistics bots" then its equivalent to "50 minimum infinite maximum", so setting 0 robots of any type has basically no effect.