Factorio Forums

First to make sure I'm on the right page:

Given 2 or more requester chests requesting the same amount of a single material (let's say Iron plates), and assuming there's insufficient supply of these items so that these chests never fill up:

Does the logistic network always supply them evenly? Does the logistic robot choose randomly which to give it to or does it always choose the one with the least material? Or is there some sort of internal priority relating to placement order and location?

Second question:

Let's say in the above setup, I decide I want double the number of plates to go to the second chest. So the split is 1/3, 2/3. Will doubling the amount requested in the second chest (i.e. changing from 50 plates to 100) result in the second chest getting 2/3 of the plates compared to the 1/3 delivered to the first chest? Or will I have to set down a third requester chest and insert the output of that into the second (or the machine that the second inserts into) to get the desired effect?

If I understand it correctly, the logic works in reverse. The Bots don't look for jobs, the jobs look for bots to fill them. The black box is in the the order the job queues are processed. Aside from a 1000 jobs per tick limit, and working the whole queue before starting over from the top, I haven't found any clear explanation as to how jobs are added to the queue order. From anecdotal observations, single requests involving multiple items (IE Stacks) appear to work like a batch order; which will pull multiple bots into that task at the same time.

I'm looking into this right now, since its an interesting question that the wiki doesn't seem to cover.


As to the second question..... you can set an item count higher then the stack size for logistics chests (and personal logistics slots). If you set the Iron plates to 200, it just results in 2 stacks of Iron plates being delivered (taking up 2 slots in the storage). The only limitation is the arrangements of stacks you can have in a given chest.

So after posting this question I remembered I can just go find this out myself. The setup is providing infinite bricks into the provider chest and a single logistic robot transfers them into the requester chests (which are then offloading them into void chests). The chest on the right has 6x the request size of the chest on the left (so 600 brick vs 100 brick)

The robot alternated between delivering to the left and right chest. Request size has no effect on the distribution of materials.

Other things I noticed:

-The above remains true when one system is using up the materials faster than the other. I replaced the blue inserter with a yellow one, and the pattern kept alternating.

-With 3 or more chests, the robots service the requester chests in a pattern that repeats, but sometimes changes when they go to recharge.

-If you want more stuff to go to a certain location, you need more chests. There appears to be no way around this.

-These aspects remain the same when you have more robots, providing you still don't have enough to satisfy demand.


These results mean I will need to rethink aspects of my robo-only base. Blue circuits require quite a lot of green circuits per requester chest. I've been finding that despite the huge amount of green circuit production, barely a trickle makes it to my blue circuits. Guess I'll have to do the traditional factorio 'Git Moar Supply'.