-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 13
Chapter 25 ‐ Worker robots part 2 ‐ Logistics networks
Previous page: Chapter 24 - Pollution
Logistic networks can be summarized by the premise of logistic robots moving items between special logistic chests that are within range of roboports. Depending on how you set up your chests, this idea can be very powerful. Logistic chests and robots become an alternative to using transport belts, although both systems have key advantages and disadvantages.
You can partially set up a logistic network as soon as you unlock logistic robots, which unlocks storage chests and passive provider chests. This also allows you to run personal logistics, which is great for inventory management. Meanwhile, using the full potential of the logistic network requires you to research the technology of "logistic system" with utility science packs. This allows you to unlock chests that can make logistic requests.
Transport belts do not require any power or other infrastructure to set up and they can carry large amounts of items without any interruption. Regular transport belts are also quite cheap. On the other hand, transport belts take up floor space, even when most of them can be moved underground, and making them move around each other or around buildings can have limitations. As a major disadvantage, managing more than one type of item on a transport belt requires being careful about lanes, and more than two item types requires serious planning using filtering and other means of belt analysis.
In comparison, logistic robots move through the air without bumping into each other. This allows you to completely ignore everything on the ground as long as you are within 50 tiles of a roboport. One robot can carry only one item, or up to four items with upgrades, and this is slow compared to belts unless you use hundreds of robots, which consumes a lot of electric power for recharging them. Logistic robots fly quite slowly until they are upgraded a few times, and even then the way they distribute themselves might cause them to take a while to fulfill a particular logistic request (although fun fact, the Factorio 2.0 update will make robots considerably smarter and the community is going wild about it). As a major disadvantage, logistic robots and their infrastructure in total is quite expensive, but after enough investment it is completely the feasible to use hundreds or even thousands of them at once, possibly even abandoning transport belts altogether.
Ultimately when comparing belts and bots, you should consider which advantages and disadvantages matter more for each use case and use both of them accordingly.
There are five types of logistic chests, each with its own set of properties. A basic logistic network can be made using only storage chests and requester chests, but it is a good idea to use passive provider chests as well. Meanwhile, buffer chests and active provider chests have more niche uses.
Unlocked early, with "logistic robots".
Passive provider chests are quite simple: Items inside them are visible to the network, ready to be taken. Logistic robots take requested items out of them if the needed items cannot be found in any storage chests or active provider chests. Logistic robots never put items into these chests.
Passive provider chests are excellent candidates for assembling machine output chests, because they make newly crafted items immediately available for the network without forcing the items into it.
Unlocked later, with "logistic system".
Active provider chests are quite simple, but rarely needed: They want to get emptied out as soon as possible. As soon as an item goes in, an available logistic robot will be dispatched to take out the item. If the item is needed for a logistic request at the moment, it will be used to fulfill it. Otherwise the item will go into an available logistic storage chest. Therefore an active provider chest rarely is (and never should be) full. Logistic robots never put items into these chests.
Unlocked early, with "logistic robots".
Storage chests are versatile and important. Firstly, storage chests are where the robots take items that need to be collected but do not have a destination set. In particular, items that end up in player trash slots are taken to storage chests. Secondly, when an item is requested from the network, storage chests are where robots collect from first, with the exception of active provider chests (and player trash slots) because these chests already want to be emptied out immediately anyway.
It is generally a good idea to set up a central storage area where you keep a good number of storage chests. If all the storage chests in a logistic network are full, this will raise an alert and disrupt the network from functioning properly. Therefore you usually want plenty of storage chests as well as some type of system or policy for emptying the network storage every once in a while.
A storage chest can have an item filter. When this item filter is set, logistic robots will not be allowed to dump other item types into this chest. However, they will NOT try to remove the other item types from the chest just because the filter has been set. Items will be removed only when they are requested, as usual. In addition, the item filter makes logistic robots generally prefer to dump the filter item type into this chest rather than other chests, but this will not immediately come into effect: If there is already another logistic storage chest that has no filter set but is partially filled with the filter item, the robots will prefer to fill up that chest first and then switch over to dumping to the filtered chest.
Unlocked later, with "logistic system".
Requester chests are quite simple: They can make logistic requests, and the logistic robots will try to fulfill the requests. Any item that is dropped into these chests is no longer visible to the logistic network, and robots cannot take items out of these chests.
Normally, requester chests can only request for items out of storage chests or provider chests. However, there is a setting that allows their requests to take from bugger chests as well. This can be toggled by pressing "CONTROL + ALT + L".
Unlocked later, with "logistic system".
Buffer chests are like a hybrid of requester chests and storage chests. They offer some benefits but you do not need them in order to have a functional logistic network. They can make their own requests, but other machines or the player can make requests from them.
This section is still being written.
Consider the following:
- Place one roboport to start a network. You can rename it if you wish. If you place another roboport within 50 tiles, it will join the same network.
- Add 10 logistic robots to the roboport. You can get things going with 10 robots or less, but the typical network functions best with 100 to 1000 logistic robots.
- Optionally, add 10 construction robots at 20 repair packs to the roboport so that the robots can do repair work for you. However, you might prefer to reserve the construction robot work to your personal roboport only, because mixing jobs between personal construction robots and network construction robots tends to be annoying because you end up waiting for a couple robots from the other side of the factory to come and do something. Therefore it is best to have either zero construction robots in your network or hundreds of them.
- Place at least one logistic storage chest within 25 tiles of the roboport, so that you can use the network for personal logistics and for robot-assisted construction.
- To supply the network with items, go to assembling machines producing items ready for use and replace their output chests with passive provider chests, or simply add new passive provider chests to them. This makes gets the items indexed by the network.
- To use the network to supply an assembling machine, place a requester chest next to it. You can then set the chest requests yourself to match the ingredients of the assembling machine, or you can copy entity settings from the machine and paste the settings onto the chest for it to set its requests according to the needs and the speed of the machine. This is done by "SHIFT + RIGHT BRACKET" to copy and "SHIFT + LEFT BRACKET" to paste.
- To make the network reach every chest that it uses, all chests must be within 25 tiles of a roboport and all roboports must be within 50 tiles of each other.
This section is still being written. Sometimes robots may oversupply the chests if they happen to be carrying more of an item than was requested. For example, if 1 unit is requested and the robot can carry 4 units, it will try to grab from the supplying chest as many units as it can instead of 1, and deliver all of them.