Bots Stopped Working

[jsg92]

My construction bots stopped responding to blueprints and deconstruction planner in the middle of a game. Replaced my personal roboport and bots, same result. Tried using a fixed roboport, same results. Is there a keyboard command that makes bots go inactive? Maybe I accidentally hit it?

[Koub]

No, but bots lacking the construction parts will have the same effect.
Can you add your save to your post please ?

[zOldBulldog]

This might not be your case, but I noticed that even if you have a single logistics network covering your area, sometimes bots get confused if the direct route isn't all covered by roboports. I once had a similar problem and plopping a roboport to close a gap in the "direct route" fixed it.

[bobucles]

Bots should be active all game long. The only reason they should stop working is if you somehow are playing with teams and aren't on the same team anymore. You can check your team settings by walking into turrets. There may also be server settings that define whether players are allowed to use blueprints or not.

There are a few reasons why bots may seemingly not obey the player:
1) A robot is already en route. In the battle between "player roboport vs. base robo network" if your bots aren't the first ones out then it means bots are being summoned from base. If the bots are travelling long distance it can take a while. If the bots have to cross an empty void outside of roboport range then they may never finish the trip at all.
2) No materials. It's obvious when you don't have rails or power poles, but it can be a bit more subtle when you don't have assembler 1's vs. assembler 2's or the exact modules for a thing. Make sure you have the stuff of course.
3) Too many construction requests in the game world. Factorio has a hard cap on how many things it will "try" to build at one time, around 600 warnings. If you place down thousands of concrete then the game has to cycle through everything it can't build. This can take seconds, but in extreme cases it can be up to a minute or more before anything happens.
4) Lack of energy for personal roboports Actually you don't need a single ounce of suit energy to use personal roboports. All the bots start off fully charged, but without energy they will never return to your inventory. You must manually pick them up, at which point the engineer hand cranks them to full.

[Zavian]

To expand on what zOldBulldog and Bobucles said, if bots are trying to cross a big gap in your roboport range, they may get part way across, and run low on energy, at which point they start heading for a roboport to recharge. If they are less than halfway across the gap, the nearest roboport is likely to be back on where they started before attempting to cross the gap. Hence they might never actually manage to cross large gaps without roboport coverage.

[Aeternus]

Another cause could be another huge construction/deconstruction project elsewhere. If you place 600ish ghosts anywhere in the game then not all ghosts will be "active" at any given point anymore. The game will slowly cycle through them. Especially paving requests (ghost placing concrete) and massive deforestation (deconstruction across a wide area) can slow things down immensely.

[mrvn]

Also bots can have something in hand from desconstruction but no place to drop it off. You should get a warning about missing storage space though.

[Gradenkos]

Alt+R turns your personal Roboport function on and off.

[zOldBulldog]

Alt+R turns your personal Roboport function on and off.

Curiously, after many years I found my Alt-R not working. Went to settings and defined Right-Alt R... and it worked