Factorio Forums

So in my current game, I made a bit of a ****up. I wanted to build a new outpost, so I put down a blueprint, placed a roboport, fed it the bots and placed the materials in a storage chest. However, I forgot to power the roboport. This of course made all the bots head for the nearest powered roboport, which was quite a distance away. This is all pretty much expected behaviour and primarily a matter of operator error.

The (in my opinion) bug is that, after charging, these construction bots will retain ownership of the build job they had picked up. So they'll make their way back to the new outpost, get about halfway then decide they won't make it all the way there so turn back to go charge. And this then repeats until the ghost buildings time out.

Ideally, I think a bot should release the job it was performing the moment it moves outside of construction range of a roboport (or the construction range disappears because the last roboport was removed or lost power). At that point, it should just move to the nearest powered roboport, charge, then do whatever it's supposed to do with the, now "orphaned", item it's carrying.

Hm, It shouldn't change the network-owner just because it has no more energy. That would make big problems, with non-well shaped robot networks. You would suddenly have no more bots in one and all bots would be in the other network.
Hm. Not that easy to solve this.

ssilk, I think you're forgetting that when a roboport runs out of power, it drops off the logistic network, if it is the only roboport, that entire network is effectively deleted.

Ah, I read it wrong:

The (in my opinion) bug is that, after charging, these construction bots will retain ownership of the build job they had picked up

I read something like "ownership of the building that picked them up (first)"...
Too much done today, sorry.

Your remark did make me consider one case that my idea would cause problems in: irregularly shaped construction networks, which have some blank areas inside them (for instance, there's a body of water in the middle of the base that's too big to completely cover). I suppose a better approach would be to check job location when entering a construction area - if the current job doesn't fall within the just entered construction network, forget it.

I was going to do as you said: after recharging check if the construction target is out of construction range. However, after thinking about it more this would break deconstructing existing roboports and entities in range of the roboports.

Picture this:

You have 2 roboports at the edge of the logistic range from each other
You have several entities in the range of roboport 1 you want to deconstruct including roboport 1
You mark everything in the range of roboport 1 for deconstruction - including roboport 1
Robots begin taking down the entities and as soon as you deconstruct the roboport providing the coverage all of the robots in that zone abandon their tasks and go back to dock in roboport 2

This is quite common when taking down buildings and would break with the change. I think the (rather edge case) issue you experienced will just need to be resolved manually when it happens since normally that functionality is desired. If it becomes a bigger issue in the future or some better solution is found we might do that. Until then I'm going to move this to minor issues.

Or prefer recharging at roboports in the network the current job belongs to.

It'll fix the issue in the OP