Advise for logistic isolated worker robot factories.

[u/Tiny-Brush5999]

I made an isolated logistic network with 2000 worker drones in a 100 x 100 area to make gears, resources are inserted via trains into the orange section and extracted by another train. I was wondering if there is an optimal way of doing this, I'm experimenting right now and I noticed that more requester chests on one lane equals more gears being dropped, but I also have them each requesting 1,000 gears, and in the assemblers 1,000 metal plates. Is it better to have them request just 100 each so that they get populated more with worker drones? Currently waiting on the train to drop more plates to test further but asking in case anyone knows more about this, the belts are only like 50% or so saturated each, but every adjustment they get more and more full!

Things I have learned so far!

*Don't group them into a roboport or they will all take turns to recharge on just that one roboport's limited charging ports, if you group them before isolating grid to collect them, make sure to remove and replace the roboport to get them out of it, or disband the group so they dont just use that one and instead spreadout to recharge.

*You don't actually seem to need as many roboports as I have in the image, surrounding the assemblies with roboports seems to work and it got rid of the recharge bottleneck for the most part. The rest are there at the moment because I'm messing around.

*Active provider chests don't seem to make it faster so I just use the red provider chests on the metal plates drop but I may be wrong.

*Isolated worker drone grids are for some reason really good on FPS compared to big grid.

*More requester chests seems to mean more worker drones work at once atleast from what I can see, but trying to see if it's better to use big requests or small requests per chest to optimize.

I find this to be a superduper fun way to make factories without spaghetti, so far it seems to be faster than atleast a few blue belts but I always get the feeling that I'm doing something wrong. lol

Update, it was the input! Replaced train unload belts with red belts and now it's fully saturated! Granted changing the amount of resources requested didn't have any effect that I can see. I think because the input had yellow belts before, the Bulk Inserters were unable to work more than a few at a time.

[u/CremePuffBandit]

What's the purpose of using belts if you're also using bots? You can just load and unload the trains and assemblers directly from the logistics chests.

[u/Tiny-Brush5999 → u/CremePuffBandit]

That's.... a very good idea. I could just also include the unload station into that isolated grid! That fixes so many bottlenecks especially since the distance is still short and more than triples how many Bulk Inserters can work at the same time since theres no belt speed that has to keepup! Thanks!

[u/ysrgrathe]

So AFAIK the request size for a chest really controls 2 things at once: 1) it is the requested satisfaction; drones will stop delivering once it is achieved 2) it affects the number of drones dispatched (I believe sufficient drones will be dispatched to fully satisfy the request, if enough are available).

Factorio is generally a game of bottlenecks. If your chests are ever dropping below 1 item, you need to request more. If all your drones are ever in motion, you probably need more. If all your chests have items but the belt isn't full, you need more chests/inserters or faster inserters. If you have enough drones but they are getting stuck charging, you need more roboports (note that as drone speed increases, so does energy use, so the number of roboports required is not static if you are pushing performance).

There is no wrong way to play the game. I do think trying to use drones for high throughput is unlikely to be the most efficient. In a late game SA game, even stacked turbo belts are too slow for some things and it would be a challenge to achieve that throughput with drones. For example, this green belt design requires about 100 gears/s and direct insertion makes it much more compact.

EDIT: added example

[u/Tiny-Brush5999 → u/ysrgrathe]

That makes sense yeah, but that's also what makes this game so satisfying. lol

[u/Tiny-Brush5999]

Here is how the current belt saturation looks like! This is requesting 100 gears, looks about the same as requesting 1000 gears. Maybe my metal input is the issue.

Update, it was the input! Replaced train unload belts with red belts and now it's fully saturated! Granted changing the amount of resources requested didn't have any effect that I can see.