Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Harvester robots (automated trucks?) for harvesting small resource patches back to (warehouse like) facility.

What ?

Harvesting drones that work in a field around the storage facility they're bound to like robots to roboport.
These drone or truck like entities (like harvesters from for example command and conquer) will harvest all resources in the working area around the storage facility.
Like placing one near (or in) a small iron ore patch and selecting harvest iron ore, drop some drones in your facility and they will harvest all iron ore in the vicinity.
For balancing reasons this harvesting should probably be significantly slower than placing drills but the area could be quite big.
This will allow drones to sort of venture outside you base/walls to harvest near trading the idea of building an close outpost for sending (un)protected drones out.

Maybe make them upgradeable so they can hold a defender capsule so they can be defended somewhat.

I think this will open some really great alternative ways to play.
Let me know what you guys think/would add or change

Why ?

It opens up more ways to set up your resource chain and can maybe battle some of the tedium of having to constantly set up new outposts.
I like setting up my first dozen outpost but after they start to run dry and resource demand starts to rise i find myself getting bored running aroung setting up outposts.
This would allow for the harvesting of closer/smaller resource patches which would normally not be "worth"building an outpost over.

See the following mods:

Robot Mining Site
Nougat Mining
Logistics Mining

Jap2.0 wrote:See the following mods:

Robot Mining Site
Nougat Mining
Logistics Mining

Something like the robot mining site mod but i was thinking of making the robots gather slower.
When they gather resources this fast there would be no more reason to build normal drills anymore.
I mean to make it so it's pretty much only viable for small resource patches which are not worth the trouble of making an outpost, not making mining drills obsolete because you can do it with robots.

I don't know how others are doing but personally, I skip smaller resource patches and go for the bigger ones. This makes the smaller patches feel like a waste.
If bots could completely replace drills it would also rule out the logistics part, which is not my intention.

Thanks for the suggestions though. I think i'll try the robot mining site anyways

okay I'm gonna go try nougat right now I have a tonne of ore under my mega base that I've just plowed over it'd be cool to recover some of it for free ^_^ (and it'll save me setting up mining outposts for a little while)