Factorio Forums

Hi together,

I used Google and tried a Forum search but i could not find answers to my Questions so far so i thought i give the Forum a try.
There are basically to thinks that interest me.

Roboports and Robots

How does the whole Roboport thing work exactly in regards to Power Consumption.
1. What is Internal buffer recharge rate exactly?
2. Does it use power when its not charging?
3. Does it use 4x200kW while charging 4 Robots?
4. How much power does a Robot store and how much power does it use per Tick/move???

Modular Armor
Dont know how this works powerwise too so lets make up an Example

Lets assume i have a mk2 Suit with 3 x Fusion Reactors 4x Basic exoskeleton equipment and 5x Personal Roboports
That Results in
+225Kw Power from Fusion Core
- 0.8KW from Exoskeleton
- 20KW from roboports (again does 10 recharging slots mean potentially 200KW need?)

So does that mean i never run out of power cause i need maximum 201KW and i produce 225KW??

Thanks for Reading ans Sharing your Knowledge about this

I assume you're referring to the personal roboport only.


1) The internal buffer recharge rate is exactly what it sounds like - the roboport has its own built-in batteries which is the buffer (with a capacity of 7MJ), the recharge rate is so high even 4x fusion reactor can't recharge a single roboport at full rate. But even a single portable solar panel can slowly recharge it - the fact that the maximum recharge rate is 700kW doesn't mean you have to provide 700kW, it's merely a maximum. Power armor uses an equitable power-allocation strategy meaning it can allocate up to 700kW to each roboport - the largeness of the number probably acts to give roboports a fairly high priority.
2) It consumes power only if it needs to recharge the internal buffer, otherwise it does not use any energy at all. The transmission rate is not applied whether or not robots are out doing stuff (likely a bug). You can in fact use personal roboports without any power supply at all - robots can't recharge so you have to "mine" them but otherwise they are perfectly functional (likely a bug).
3) It seems to use 200kW per robot being recharged, if you have 4x fusion reactor (300kW) and a single roboport and watch the roboport buffer energy as robots recharge you'll see it drop down meaning the 2 charging slots are drawing more than 300kW.
4) A logistic robot stores 300kJ, it uses 0.001kJ per tick and "1kJ per move" (not sure what that means - it's taken from the lua source). Construction robots are identical.

10 recharging slots would mean 2MW draw while charging 10 robots although that energy is taken from the internal buffer not directly from the power supply. Note that robots only take as much energy as they have used, also you also don't pay to recharge robots which have used less than 20% of their internal batteries or ones you hoover up ("mine"), a robot which doesn't bother to recharge is effectively restored to full charge for free.

There is no way to never run out of power when using even a single roboport as their power draw is so high. However the equitable power allocation ensures other modules (like exoskeletons) wont be completely starved. Also the game drains the buffers of roboports in sequence - if you have 5 roboports and 10 robots are continuously charging, first one roboport will be completely drained, then the second, then the third and so on. Even though the game drains them in series, it recharges them in parallel and each roboport being recharged gets its own share of the power, so you will get slower and slower as more roboports are drained and thus more roboports are recharging and an ever greater share of the energy is being devoted to roboports rather than exoskeletons.

Thanks for the Detailed answer
that helps a lot in understanding the whole power stuff. And a good idea to check things in the source did not even think about it

Greetings Loki