[0.13.9] Personal robotport stops working when bots are busy

[gridstop]

Not sure if this is new, I never built any very large bases before 13, but it could be related to the new longer ghosts.

If you have a huge amount of work queued up at home due to the long life of ghosts but it is bot and/or materials limited, anywhere you go, your personal robotport construction bots seem to get confused and stop working. This occurs even if you're miles away from base and obviously not connected to your main bot network.

To reproduce:
1) Put a couple assemblers making concrete, or have some furnaces putting brick into passive providers.
2) Paint a huge area in concrete/brick ghosts. Such that it would take 10-15 minutes to assemble & place it all.
3) Walk away from the bot network.
4) Try to place a blueprint that takes more items than you have personal roboport bot space for (but you DO have plenty of materials for). IE blueprint that takes 50 items but you only have 3 robotports and thus 30 active bots. Also if part of the blueprint is outside of your personal bot area, it seems to happen too.

The bots will assemble the first 30 items (or the items in range) in this case, but then they will come back to you, recharge, and disappear. They will not take the remaining 20 items out and place them, at least not right away. Sometimes walking away from the blueprint and coming back will cause them to place a few more. Sometimes just waiting for a few minutes eventually they will pop out and place a few. Unfortunately you cannot place the blueprint again over the ghosts, nothing happens and it doesn't trigger. You have to erase the ghosts and then place the blueprint again, and repeat this sometimes multiple times based on the # of personal bots compared to size of blueprint.

I don't notice any problem with the network bots, the original job of 1000's of concrete will eventually finish and place every single item. It's just the personal roboport that misbehaves.

[Klonan]

Thank you for the detailed report, and welcome to the forum

This is a known issue, and more of a side affect of some optimizations, and thus isn't strictly a bug, but we are aware of the annoyance of the issue and might have a look at it in the future

[gridstop]

I've noticed the system only seems to 'think' about a certain number of ghosts at once (600-ish? maybe that's a coincidence with number of bots I have), and sort of cycles through ghosts in waves when there are large numbers of them. I'm guessing this limit is global and thus ghosts produced by the player can temporarily be 'asleep' and not get attention from the player's roboport. I suppose constantly processing thousands of ghosts trying to find a bot & materials would bog things down.

Maybe as a partial/quick fix, make it so stamping a blueprint again erases & re-creates the ghosts underneath it so they get immediately triggered again?

Thanks for letting me know the status.