0.14.20 Personal Roboport Behaviour (BUG)

[stefu1992]

Now this is the problem/ bug/ feature I've found which behaves more like a bug than a feature (opposing how it should work)

Now lets say you have the Power Armor Mk2 with bunch of fusion reactors and roboports.
Now lets say you can send out 50 construction bots to build a blueprint you just placed which requires a ton of work (or deconstruct thousands of trees)

All of your bots will go out to do the task you assigned them to.
But this is where I found an issue when the bots return to recharge and or get more materials:

All of the 50 bots will path themselves to the first available personal roboport you have fully or partially charged in your suit.
Meaby half of the returning bots will recharge themselves and reach out to continue the work.
But the first half of the bots completely depleted the electricity on that first roboport in your inventory and only then the electricity of the second one is being used once the first half of the bots which returned earlier are returning again.

This will cause the second half of the bots you sent out in the first place to never get the power they want from that first roboport they are pathing to. And they will not stop recharging before the assigned task (blueprint) is completed and the first half of robots return and stop working so the first roboport starts recharging its electricity again.


P.S.

That was the bug or actually behaviour I found upon personal roboports. This causes the first/"one" wave of bots to always be more effective than if they had to go out a second time. And the problem causes it to be kinda useless to have more than one personal roboport unless you have them sent out in just one wave and wait for that one personal roboport to recharge every time before sending the bots out again.

Thank you, hope I was the first one who has found this issue as I couldn't find anything about this by searching through the forums.

[matjojo]

I feel like this only happens when you have too less power? If you would have enough power the roboports would get filled up immediately.

[posila]

Hi, thanks for the report.
Unfortunately I am not able to reproduce behavior you described.
Here is what I have tried to do:

• Equip Power Armor MK2, two personal roboports, and two fusion reactors
• Wait for both personal roboport to charge fully and then remove fusion reactors
• Place blueprint of big conrete flooring and watch robots work

It is true roboports discharged one by one (not in parallel), but no robots were charging longer than others because "they were charging on depleted personal roboport". Only after both roboports were depleted they stopped charging. I repeated the test several times with more roboports and with fusion reactors equipped (usually just one, so roboports don't charge quicker than discharge).

All of the 50 bots will path themselves to the first available personal roboport you have fully or partially charged in your suit.
Meaby half of the returning bots will recharge themselves and reach out to continue the work.
But the first half of the bots completely depleted the electricity on that first roboport in your inventory and only then the electricity of the second one is being used once the first half of the bots which returned earlier are returning again.

This is not how it works. Robots don't see individual personal roboports, they see character as walking roboport entity. Personal roboport equipment just modifies parameters of character's "roboportness" - like construction area range, number of charging spots, etc.

I have to think about implications of personal roboports being discharged one by one instead of in parallel, but I don't think it causes any serious issues.

[credomane]

blueprint you just placed which requires a ton of work (or deconstruct thousands of trees)

Factorio has a job limit of around 600 for bots. While the job queue can be any size only 600 jobs will get assigned per game tick. This is done for performance reasons. Once you start getting 700+ jobs in the job queue the personal roboport starts to lag like mad.


I'm just confused on how Factorio goes through the job queue. In my head I feel like I should be able to have 36000 jobs in the queue before noticing any significant delay. 600 [jobs per tick] *60 [ticks per second]. Yet, 700 jobs tend to make the Personal roboport work like molasses.

Perfectly good reason behind it I'm sure but I can reason it out myself.

[Rseding91]

blueprint you just placed which requires a ton of work (or deconstruct thousands of trees)

Factorio has a job limit of around 600 for bots. While the job queue can be any size only 600 jobs will get assigned per game tick. This is done for performance reasons. Once you start getting 700+ jobs in the job queue the personal roboport starts to lag like mad.


I'm just confused on how Factorio goes through the job queue. In my head I feel like I should be able to have 36000 jobs in the queue before noticing any significant delay. 600 [jobs per tick] *60 [ticks per second]. Yet, 700 jobs tend to make the Personal roboport work like molasses.

Perfectly good reason behind it I'm sure but I can reason it out myself.

The personal roboport dispatches jobs on its own when you have a large amount of tasks so unless you're on an old version you shouldn't' see this. Also it's not 600 per tick it's 3 per tick.