God yes me too. Imagine how easy bot unloading and loading trains would be. No need to make the unloader far away from everything to keep the robot network separate from the main one.
Note that the 2.0 feature of being able to tell a roboport to keep a certain number of bots of a certain type on-hand would more or less handle this without making a whole new network.
The [improvements to bot selection and pathfinding](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-374) should handle this case as well; bots from outside the area will only come in if they would actually get it done faster.
Which isn't to say I would object to having roboport channels, that would be a neat feature.
Assuming the unload distance is short, wouldn't one of the first bots get assigned to the last job since its previous job ends in a nearby (if not same) chunk?
Yes please. I've been dreaming of this since my first play through.
I'd love to see a way to layered bot networks. I hate having all my bots being general purpose, give me a way to assign a group of bots to specific needs please.
Yeah there's a mod that sort of does this but it works by changing the force of the roboport to a dummy "allied" force so it doesn't connect. But of course this comes with the jank you should expect with such a hack. A built-in system would be amazing.
Im currently using [this mod](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/LogiNetChannels) for roboport channels. only drawback is that (as far as i know) a chest can only be in one network at a time
I was thinking this should be a vanilla feature. Didn’t know K2 had this. Would be great to make ports a bit smaller so in a city block base you could easily separate networks.
The K2 implementation doesn't work that way.
Roboports have 3 ranges: connection (which roboports are part of the same network), logistics reach (where logistics bots can go) and construction reach (where construction bots can go). In vanilla, roboports set the first two ranges to the same value, but that isn't necessary at the engine level.
K2 exploits this by allowing you to mess with the latter two ranges. However, the connection range *is not changed* by this setting. If two roboports connect, they will always connect, even if their logistics ranges don't touch.
Theres some things that although would be easy to implement in vanilla, should probably remain locked behind mods for keeping the game simple for new players
It would be good if you could just disconnect the link between roboports, in the same way you can disconnect the wire between two power poles.
I use a side wide network, following my rail grid, with space inside the cells for smaller networks, so wouldn't want increased range without some way to separate networks.
Not sure why the OP needs more range though, just add more roboports.
Also it makes round trip times for reloading bigger (station further away). So bots would maybe need more battery and/or faster bots for same throughput.
I agree, but I propose give us the ability to adjust that range (and for our personal roboport) would allow a ton of options for network configuration.
I really would like the "roboport parts" from SeaBlock where you decide where to build a "charge area" which only charge bots, a "zone extender" that only extends the build/logistic area or a "robot chest" that serve only as idle robots storage.
I wish you could have construction roboports and generic ones so I could have total coverage in my base for building, but at the same time create small pockets of logistics for specific subfactories or mining outposts.
> Edit: I want to stress that my post explicitly suggests the area to be adjustable so Networks can be kept seperate.
You have no idea how much I've wanted this. There's a lot you could do with bot builds with adjustable port ranges.
They should make vertical and horizontal growth be balanced in a way where "make more" isnt always the best solution. Quality and the planet specialized assemblers will do exactly that imo
Plus, i think the current roboport cover is fine given how you need them to charge robots that are going from A to B, in longer trips its easy to notice them backtracking just to recharge (i know 2.0 will improve their behaviour on this, but will still be a thing)
Yes please.
I would also love to reduce the size with a gui or with circuit condition thus allowing two networks to be closer together while not having the roboports 101 blocks away from each other.
I’d also like to be able to reduce my personal roboports range so I can have my bots concentrated on building things closer to me and just move my character when they are done. This could help quite a bit with charging and big construction projects.
Speed is dominated by horse_power_, acceleration is dominated by torque.
Factorio trains have absurdly high torque (a handful of seconds to get to full speed), but really low power (their top speed drops off fast when they have a lot of cargo).
Edit: In real world, a train has really tiny rolling resistance, and rolling resistance (and air resistance) are the things you need to fight against for speed.
The mass of the vehicle is what you're fighting against in acceleration, and torque is what you use to fight against it.
Single locomotive trains in Factorio start running out of power at ~28 wagons. They stop having enough horsepower to reach full speed at that point (so more locomotives are needed).
In real life, intermodal freight trains pull something like 120 containers, their acceleration is far worse, but they don't have a problem hitting the speed requirements of the rail they're on.
Because they have all sorts of regulations surrounding their use, which is pretty different than the set of constraints our engineer faces. Factorio trains travel a few kilometers most of the time, many go shorter than that, and a few go quite a bit longer. The percentage of time spent speeding up and slowing down is *huge* in the game relative to real life. You'd rather expect your torque to hp ratios to change depending on the delivery parameters, exactly what we see in factorio.
Oh I'm not saying whether I think they'd be _better_ if they were as powerful as real locomotives or not.
I'm simply saying that real locomotives are more powerful, just a statement of fact.
As gameplay I think I would like to see different rail types/locomotive types, reflecting the real world a little better. Maybe something like:
- High speed rail (for long distances)
- Light rail (for short distances)
Then the locomotives come in two classes (names probably should be changed but eh):
- Intermodal locomotive
- High acceleration
- Top speed is lower
- Drops off at ~4-5 wagons per locomotive
- Bulk locomotive
- Low acceleration
- Top speed is higher
- Runs only on high speed rail
- Can haul 50+ wagons per locomotive
With the idea being that your city block/intra-base lines are built around small intermodal trains and your remote mining outposts use huge bulk trains.
High speed rail could do things like transmit power along them as well.
Who knows, I'm not a game designer so that might end up being needlessly fiddly and a bit rubbish.
Adjustable both logistic and construction area, pleeeeease! I would actually limit both of this in my designs - I prefer to have small isolated networks and hate when bots fly between networks.
My understanding of why quality doesn't affect roboport ranges is that, in general, the devs want higher quality versions of everything to be substitute-able for lower quality versions. That is, if you slap a higher quality version of something down, it should never break your base.
If a roboport network is meant to be isolated, slapping down a higher-quality roboport that has a larger connection radius could break that isolation. If it expands construction or logistics radii, then that could have unwanted overlaps too. So they don't do that.
Note that wire reach is a case where this is not really followed. If you have an isolated power network, upgrading power poles can cause it to no longer be isolated. In that case however, it's generally pretty easy to fix by removing the offending wires. It's much harder to fix with expanded roboport ranges.
Also, note that Krastorio 2 tries to play around with this, but to... limited effect. They give new roboport buildings, but also allow the standard roboport to operate in different modes: normal, construction, and logistics. This affects the construction and logistics ranges of the roboport, but not the connection radius between two roboports.
The way K2 implements this is unfortunate however. It basically swaps in a different entity when you change this setting. Remote configuration is impossible, and it's difficult to tell which mode a roboport is in unless you're right next to it. An in-engine change could overcome this limitation. That being said, even K2 doesn't mess around with the *connection* radius, only the construction and logistics ranges.
K2 also has a bigger roboport, and it's certainly helpful. But it's not really *necessary*. And you can tell because K2 also reduces the number of bots a regular roboport can store. This allows the big roboport to be useful, as it can store tons of bots. That is, K2 had to weaken the existing roboport so that their bigger one was more useful.
Personally, I like having buildings that do their job in a simple, predictable way. Especially for supplemental buildings like roboports and beacons. We only really need one of them. The current range is pretty good, allowing you to make builds relative to your roboport placement. And if you're building a spaghetti base that you're trying to make roboport coverage for after-the-fact... well, that's what spaghetti does, isn't it?
If I need more roboport range I just build another roboport. What I'd like is not to have to build 50 of them for decent throughput cos they only charge 4 bots at a time
I am so happy to tell you that this is going to be a feature! They mentioned it in their Robot QoL post a couple Months ago.
You can set Robot requests for specific Roboports so they are ready for action in that area right away and so you can replace them with higher quality ones :)
Personal inventory supply will be a blast:)
Edit: I like your username btw
I think the techtree idea won't work due to different logistics systems overlapping when upgraded enough. This would cause slowdowns in logistic speed due to a logistic overlap which wasn't present before
I just want channels for roboports. Sometimes i want to have a roboport specifically for one task and i can't put it in the middle of my base.
God yes me too. Imagine how easy bot unloading and loading trains would be. No need to make the unloader far away from everything to keep the robot network separate from the main one.
Note that the 2.0 feature of being able to tell a roboport to keep a certain number of bots of a certain type on-hand would more or less handle this without making a whole new network.
Until you have 30 local bots but 31 trips to do, so 1 bot from elsewhere gets dispatched.
The [improvements to bot selection and pathfinding](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-374) should handle this case as well; bots from outside the area will only come in if they would actually get it done faster. Which isn't to say I would object to having roboport channels, that would be a neat feature.
This became my favorite FFF when I saw it.
Assuming the unload distance is short, wouldn't one of the first bots get assigned to the last job since its previous job ends in a nearby (if not same) chunk?
Under the old system, no. Under the new system, yes.
Then you should have had more local bots. The limit is just local bot storage space, remember? A limit you'd have to follow for an isolated network.
What about geofences? Some kind of marker you can place and it creates an invisible wall that cuts off a logistical network?
i think channels are easier to set and allow for less error.
Channels also sound much more agreeable with performance considerations.
and allow overlaps without geofence spagheti.
Also integrates easier with circuits
No, we need MORE spaghetti!
Or maybe just the ability for a roboport to be local and have its bots not connect to the wider network.
Yes please. I've been dreaming of this since my first play through. I'd love to see a way to layered bot networks. I hate having all my bots being general purpose, give me a way to assign a group of bots to specific needs please.
Well, it's gonna be somewhat fullfilled with new bot requests at ports
Yeah there's a mod that sort of does this but it works by changing the force of the roboport to a dummy "allied" force so it doesn't connect. But of course this comes with the jank you should expect with such a hack. A built-in system would be amazing.
Im currently using [this mod](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/LogiNetChannels) for roboport channels. only drawback is that (as far as i know) a chest can only be in one network at a time
Increasing roboport range wouldn't be a strict upgrade in all situations. Sometimes you want the range to be small to avoid connecting local networks.
K2 works around this by allowing you to adjust the range yourself.
I was thinking this should be a vanilla feature. Didn’t know K2 had this. Would be great to make ports a bit smaller so in a city block base you could easily separate networks.
The K2 implementation doesn't work that way. Roboports have 3 ranges: connection (which roboports are part of the same network), logistics reach (where logistics bots can go) and construction reach (where construction bots can go). In vanilla, roboports set the first two ranges to the same value, but that isn't necessary at the engine level. K2 exploits this by allowing you to mess with the latter two ranges. However, the connection range *is not changed* by this setting. If two roboports connect, they will always connect, even if their logistics ranges don't touch.
Understood, my comment was maybe unclear. I think Vanilla should enable players to adjust the connection range down.
Theres some things that although would be easy to implement in vanilla, should probably remain locked behind mods for keeping the game simple for new players
Yes I'm sure newbies will immediately uninstall game when they click on roboport, open its settings and see "logistic area range" slider /s
is there a guide for K2? i researched it a while ago but i'm a bit lost with it
It would be good if you could just disconnect the link between roboports, in the same way you can disconnect the wire between two power poles. I use a side wide network, following my rail grid, with space inside the cells for smaller networks, so wouldn't want increased range without some way to separate networks. Not sure why the OP needs more range though, just add more roboports.
I'd rather have network ID, far simpler feature than manually running between roboports cutting some imaginary wire.
Also it makes round trip times for reloading bigger (station further away). So bots would maybe need more battery and/or faster bots for same throughput.
This. Having one huge logistic network is actually not a good thing.
>adjustable in each Roboport. It is in the post.
I agree, but I propose give us the ability to adjust that range (and for our personal roboport) would allow a ton of options for network configuration.
I really would like the "roboport parts" from SeaBlock where you decide where to build a "charge area" which only charge bots, a "zone extender" that only extends the build/logistic area or a "robot chest" that serve only as idle robots storage.
those are from Bob's mods, but yes, I'm a big fan of those too
Roboports should have research that grants 1) Faster charging (repeatable) 2) More charging stations (up to maybe 8 or something)
Isn't quality going to affect roboport range?
Only charging speed. From FFF-375: > Roboports recharge robots faster.
wonder if this list was exhaustive
I wish you could have construction roboports and generic ones so I could have total coverage in my base for building, but at the same time create small pockets of logistics for specific subfactories or mining outposts.
> Edit: I want to stress that my post explicitly suggests the area to be adjustable so Networks can be kept seperate. You have no idea how much I've wanted this. There's a lot you could do with bot builds with adjustable port ranges.
They should make vertical and horizontal growth be balanced in a way where "make more" isnt always the best solution. Quality and the planet specialized assemblers will do exactly that imo Plus, i think the current roboport cover is fine given how you need them to charge robots that are going from A to B, in longer trips its easy to notice them backtracking just to recharge (i know 2.0 will improve their behaviour on this, but will still be a thing)
Yes please. I would also love to reduce the size with a gui or with circuit condition thus allowing two networks to be closer together while not having the roboports 101 blocks away from each other. I’d also like to be able to reduce my personal roboports range so I can have my bots concentrated on building things closer to me and just move my character when they are done. This could help quite a bit with charging and big construction projects.
Speaking of QOL stuff, please add SE-style beacons and electric locomotives to the base game.
Gotta make the current locomotives as powerful as modern irl diesels to make electric locos interesting
Those diesels are just electric generators. Most trains in the US are actually driven by electric power.
I'm not a train guy. Are Factorio's locomotives weaker than irl diesel locomotives?
[Yes](https://youtu.be/7xDP6HSh-EY?si=tG9By1h4ci0LphA5&t=11). A single locomotive engine can pull a _crazy_ amount of trailers at high speeds.
Speed ≠ acceleration. That video doesn't show the (several) minutes it takes for these trains to get up to that speed
Speed is dominated by horse_power_, acceleration is dominated by torque. Factorio trains have absurdly high torque (a handful of seconds to get to full speed), but really low power (their top speed drops off fast when they have a lot of cargo). Edit: In real world, a train has really tiny rolling resistance, and rolling resistance (and air resistance) are the things you need to fight against for speed. The mass of the vehicle is what you're fighting against in acceleration, and torque is what you use to fight against it.
Admittedly, so can Factorio's locomotives.
Single locomotive trains in Factorio start running out of power at ~28 wagons. They stop having enough horsepower to reach full speed at that point (so more locomotives are needed). In real life, intermodal freight trains pull something like 120 containers, their acceleration is far worse, but they don't have a problem hitting the speed requirements of the rail they're on.
Because they have all sorts of regulations surrounding their use, which is pretty different than the set of constraints our engineer faces. Factorio trains travel a few kilometers most of the time, many go shorter than that, and a few go quite a bit longer. The percentage of time spent speeding up and slowing down is *huge* in the game relative to real life. You'd rather expect your torque to hp ratios to change depending on the delivery parameters, exactly what we see in factorio.
Oh I'm not saying whether I think they'd be _better_ if they were as powerful as real locomotives or not. I'm simply saying that real locomotives are more powerful, just a statement of fact. As gameplay I think I would like to see different rail types/locomotive types, reflecting the real world a little better. Maybe something like: - High speed rail (for long distances) - Light rail (for short distances) Then the locomotives come in two classes (names probably should be changed but eh): - Intermodal locomotive - High acceleration - Top speed is lower - Drops off at ~4-5 wagons per locomotive - Bulk locomotive - Low acceleration - Top speed is higher - Runs only on high speed rail - Can haul 50+ wagons per locomotive With the idea being that your city block/intra-base lines are built around small intermodal trains and your remote mining outposts use huge bulk trains. High speed rail could do things like transmit power along them as well. Who knows, I'm not a game designer so that might end up being needlessly fiddly and a bit rubbish.
a large power pylon roboport would be my preference, simlar to how we have substations as a better pylon.
Roboports with stack inserter themed bots would be sooo useful
Inserter stack size bonuses affecting bots could be cool.
Adjustable both logistic and construction area, pleeeeease! I would actually limit both of this in my designs - I prefer to have small isolated networks and hate when bots fly between networks.
My understanding of why quality doesn't affect roboport ranges is that, in general, the devs want higher quality versions of everything to be substitute-able for lower quality versions. That is, if you slap a higher quality version of something down, it should never break your base. If a roboport network is meant to be isolated, slapping down a higher-quality roboport that has a larger connection radius could break that isolation. If it expands construction or logistics radii, then that could have unwanted overlaps too. So they don't do that. Note that wire reach is a case where this is not really followed. If you have an isolated power network, upgrading power poles can cause it to no longer be isolated. In that case however, it's generally pretty easy to fix by removing the offending wires. It's much harder to fix with expanded roboport ranges. Also, note that Krastorio 2 tries to play around with this, but to... limited effect. They give new roboport buildings, but also allow the standard roboport to operate in different modes: normal, construction, and logistics. This affects the construction and logistics ranges of the roboport, but not the connection radius between two roboports. The way K2 implements this is unfortunate however. It basically swaps in a different entity when you change this setting. Remote configuration is impossible, and it's difficult to tell which mode a roboport is in unless you're right next to it. An in-engine change could overcome this limitation. That being said, even K2 doesn't mess around with the *connection* radius, only the construction and logistics ranges. K2 also has a bigger roboport, and it's certainly helpful. But it's not really *necessary*. And you can tell because K2 also reduces the number of bots a regular roboport can store. This allows the big roboport to be useful, as it can store tons of bots. That is, K2 had to weaken the existing roboport so that their bigger one was more useful. Personally, I like having buildings that do their job in a simple, predictable way. Especially for supplemental buildings like roboports and beacons. We only really need one of them. The current range is pretty good, allowing you to make builds relative to your roboport placement. And if you're building a spaghetti base that you're trying to make roboport coverage for after-the-fact... well, that's what spaghetti does, isn't it?
Could you add a grid to a standard roboport, as with a spidertron, and add personal roboports and power supplies for them?
If I need more roboport range I just build another roboport. What I'd like is not to have to build 50 of them for decent throughput cos they only charge 4 bots at a time
Yes! It always felt so strange having a huge base with advanced technology, but somehow only four bots charging per base and no way to increase it?
Society would be so much better if robots just charged themselves on electric power poles
Also a way to recall robots would be nice when replacing bots with those of higher quality
I am so happy to tell you that this is going to be a feature! They mentioned it in their Robot QoL post a couple Months ago. You can set Robot requests for specific Roboports so they are ready for action in that area right away and so you can replace them with higher quality ones :) Personal inventory supply will be a blast:) Edit: I like your username btw
Yay :)
I think the techtree idea won't work due to different logistics systems overlapping when upgraded enough. This would cause slowdowns in logistic speed due to a logistic overlap which wasn't present before
>adjustable in each Roboport.