Factorio Forums

Currently roboport type entities are limited to energy_source = "electric" or "void" which means burner type roboport entities are not possible without any hacky workarounds. (https://wiki.factorio.com/Prototype/Rob ... rgy_source)
Allowing "burner" as energy_source would make this a lot easier

TL;DR

Add various types of power source for roboports, not only electricity (or void).

What ?

I wanted to make a mod with several tiers of roboports at different levels of technology: solid fuel (burner) roboport, heat roboport, liquid fuel roboport, etc.
However, when prototyping and loading the game, I got an error message “only electricity and void can be a source of energy for roboports”.
Please add the ability to assign other energy sources to roboports.

Why ?

Expanding technological capabilities and having more fun with different styles of play

+1 because it’s funny.

in all seriousness, i find it arbitrary and needlessly restrictive that roboports can only take electrical and void energies. it would be pretty cool to have a heat‐powered roboport on Aquilo or a light‐oil‐powered roboport in an industrial‐themed, dieselpunk mod. down with these restrictions, i say!

+1. there’s already a post suggesting this in the dedicated “modding interface requests” subforum, by the way.

This one's actually not that arbitrary. I remember conversations about this some time ago, and it's disallowed because of how the energy is used in roboports. There's a base power draw, but then a rather dynamic power draw depending on how many bots are charging and how much power they can draw. Electric energy sources have an internal buffer (the green bar on the side) that's just refilled to the top on tick. If it was a burner energy source, it would need to calculate then subtract that amount of power from the burner buffer every tick. Not exactly optimal, especially considering how varied fuel effectiveness can be.