Factorio Forums

I think that is need for robots, wchich allow automatization of placing/picking up or upgreading transport belts.

If we have a lot of belts to place or remove we need big amount of time to do it. So let's do something what do it for us and save our time!

how would one tell it which way to go? when would it know when you want to turn?

speaking as if I was going to make on mod that does this: using lua it wouldn't be too difficult, just check around it for belts and then have it 'mine' them then replace them with the new belt (simultaneously decreasing either an internal inventory or one that the player placed). Not sure if there is a move function to make it look proper however. The difficulty would actually be having it find ALL of the belts that have been placed without running a 50000, 50000 find entities and storing that to a table... Also to expand on this if you wanted to have a single robot that could replace ANY item with another you'd need a gui of some sort.

Also if you want it to lay out belt 'tracks' for you that would again require some sort of gui or it would just do a set number in a preprogrammed pattern (probably x belts north of your current position) not the most useful.

I'm hoping these limitation will change in the next update

As for the devs adding it to the game, idk lol

FreeER wrote:Also if you want it to lay out belt 'tracks' for you that would again require some sort of gui or it would just do a set number in a preprogrammed pattern (probably x belts north of your current position) not the most useful.

what about placing one track/belt then placing that robot, filling it with coal and however many belts you want it to place, and it just follows the belt or track that it was placed on(or just moves forward like a train.....

Isn't this already in the game? there called logistics robots

Dakkanor wrote:

FreeER wrote:Also if you want it to lay out belt 'tracks' for you that would again require some sort of gui or it would just do a set number in a preprogrammed pattern (probably x belts north of your current position) not the most useful.

what about placing one track/belt then placing that robot, filling it with coal and however many belts you want it to place, and it just follows the belt or track that it was placed on(or just moves forward like a train.....

Yes you could do robot that follows belt track. One problem is there is no way to find out belt's orientation, but you could set belts orientation same as robot's moving direction (could be also use to turn belts around). Another problem is how to handle intersections. Naturally you would pick the one that exits, but again can't see orientation. getorientation() mayby in next update?

I think they would be quite useless. There's not much effort in holding right click and running.

True I was thinking more along the lines of having a massive factory and wanting to replace all of your old belts with the new ones you just unlocked or (in the case of mods) all of your furnaces with iron furnaces or something. Not as something designed to lay down belts (I mentioned it because it was in the original post). It would be a convience/luxury simply to not have to use up 30 minutes replacing all of your old belts (if you didn't get them early).

rk84 wrote:One problem is there is no way to find out belt's orientation

I always forget about that

I think that to find the path to fill by belts can be used algorithm which is used to find way for creepers. First clicked point can be used as point of input and last point as point of output, or something like that.

Other way is to place robot on the begginnig of belts and direction of belts is the same as direction of robot moves. This require to place robot on the begginning.

The most important use for this robots is tu remove or upgrade of belts, because placing is quite simply.

This technology could be more advanced than technology of logistic robots, so logistic robots could bring fuel/belts to this robots.

Not a bad idea however, I don't believe that there is a way (currently) to pass coords to code by clicking though I may be wrong.
I can certaintly see the use Just don't think it could be done too well until the next update at the least (not like that's a long ways off or anything lol)

This has been implemented through construction robots and personal ports