Factorio Forums

I believe this is a minor issue.

I built a plot of 4 Agricultural Towers for direct train insertion with some overlapping tiles. The Agricultural Towers will spend a significant amount of time moving to gather resources and place seeds where that action has already been performed by another tower. It seems like there can be a significant gap of time between the moment the original task has been performed and the new one is initiated and fail. It's as if the tower, once enabled, builds a list of all the tiles it intends to work on and then proceeds through that list without checking if the task is still possible. The tower also seems to stutter and wait for half a second before getting back to work.

I would expect an Agricultural Tower to not attempt to perform a task that isn't valid at the moment it would otherwise be initiated. The check could be performed both at collection of a tree and placing of a seed.

Since the order in which the towers perform planting/collecting is seemingly random, the sequence is relevant in reproducting the issue. But in this particular example, it is quite obvious and one doesn't have to wait longer than a few minutes to see the issue occur.

The attached save-file is an OnlyGleba game, but I loaded the save with the mod disabled to see if the issue occurs. It seems the game loads and runs exactly the same if the mod isn't enabled. One doesn't have to look very long to see the triple-plot above the mall. Each plot has a timer preventing the train to go collect fruits before the plot is fully grown.

Thanks for the report however this is not a bug. The towers already work how you describe they should work: at the time a task is picked it validates it's acceptable to do that task (plant the seed). This logic does not account for other towers already mid-swing trying to plant near/at the same location. When the tower finishes moving to the planting spot it detects it's no longer valid and aborts that task. Towers only pick new tasks every 1.06 seconds (64 ticks). So, when it fails to plant, it doesn't try again until 1.06 seconds have passed. This is also working as intended.

Towers also won't harvest trees other towers planted (unless you remove the tower that planted the trees, or build a new tower by existing world-generated trees). So you will never see them fighting over harvesting operations

If you don't want them to fight over planting spots then you simply can't have them overlap planting areas.

Sweet. Cheers!