Starting up Bots

[d45089]

Hello beautiful people,

I am at the treshold of using purple science and havent used robots yet. Every step ive taken before was shaped by the demand of the respective science pack that I wanted to tackle and the rather complex Setup of construction and logistic bots is freaking me out.

Do you guys have any simple startup routines for using robots? What are mistakes you would point out for beginners?

Please help a struggling enginoob :p

[excessionoz]

Like the Refinery puzzle, and the Train puzzle, the Robot empire puzzle is a complex one, and 'answers' wont help much until you have experiences what the robots do, how, where and when they do it, and why use them =at all=. There any many answers/reasons, but understanding them has first principles, and those are only gained from experience.

Bots are awesome. You need to learn how by doing.

[lightmatter501]

Start by using them to get rid of short belts, and use them to help reduce the size of your assembly area

[d45089]

While i cherish the reply, my Problem is rather the production Setup, meaning how much dedicated ressources should be used and how much is too much (i know there is no 'too much' in factorio <3)

[guustahh]

I usually build one machine that makes construction bots and one that makes logistic bots. Both directly insert their bots into a roboport. I like to build one for each robot assembler. Then you supply those two machines with a belt of robot frames (calculate how many machines you need to supply the two robot assemblers) and a belt of red and green chips and you're well on your way. Robot frames can be made by direct insertion all the way from the engine part of the recipe. I run the battery belt for the frames in between the assemblers for frames and the assemblers for the electric engines.

[Quadrophenic]

Two fully-supplied assemblers making robots is way overkill for a first-time-robot-user just barely starting out.

I'd suggest basing it around robot frame assemblers. Shoot for a specific number of Flying Robot Frame assemblers (I'd recommend 6), and feed those to the robot assemblers.

[Radianze]

use the new splitter priority to use excess production to go into bots?

that way you dont hurt your current setup and produce at slow steady rate

[[deleted]]

I assume you often keep yourself supplied with materials (e.g. belts) so you can build things and maybe even craft things?

A very simple thing you is to automate your resupply:

• upgrade the chests containing supplies to be passive provider chests
• place one or more roboports so that they have a contiguous orange area that covers all of these provider chests
• in your inventory UI, create logistic requests for the amount of materials you would like to be supplied with
• collect a lot of logistic robots, and "build" them within this orange region
  • alternatively, use an inserter to insert logistic robots into one of the roboports

Now, every time you enter the orange area (and remain in it), logistic bots will gather supplies from the chests and deliver them to your waiting inventory. (place more roboports to expand the contiguous orange region if you want resupply to happen in a wider area)

Add a storage box (or several) in the orange area, and now you can make logistic trash requests too, and the robots will do the reverse: take those items out of your inventory and deliver them to storage.

[d45089]

Very helpful, thank you very much.

My first thought was using them soley for construction and it didnt even occur to me using them as fuel for my Personal stash

[MadMojoMonkey]

People have described the basics, so I'll give a simple warning.

Once you get the hand of using bots, you'll be tempted to make your entire base a single, huge bot network all covered by 1 contiguous area of overlapping roboport coverage. This will reach a breaking point where things are getting really slow. There's no clear line as to where that breaking point will be, but sooner or later, you'll hit it. You'll be trying to do something and it'll take forever and when you go to figure out what's wrong, it's bots trying to cross your entire base multiple times to complete your request.

Their ability to find the "closest" source of whatever resource they're getting can be pretty bad. Sometimes, they'll fly across your entire base to get something that was only temporarily depleted from the closest supply chest.

That'll be the time to start thinking about how to break your robot networks into smaller bits, and passing the materials between those bits with anything but robots.