So, after a brief search that yielded little, I decided to post this on here.
What it is, is a simple yet effective way to get drones to make drones without drone populations exploding out of control. The circuitry is really simple, but it’s also really effective at what it does. As always, keep in mind that I’m using 32-bit Factorio, so some things may be out-dated compared to 1.0 or whatever it is you crazy kids are using these days.
This setup comes in 3 parts as follows: Roboport, Flying Frames Factory, and Bot assemblers.
- robo3raw.png (168.9 KiB) Viewed 2927 times
- Robo2raw.png (104.87 KiB) Viewed 2927 times
- robo1raw.png (360.64 KiB) Viewed 2927 times
When you connect the Roboport to the circuit network and click “Read Signals or something like that”, then the below picture is what you see. If you want to go with those signal letters as your outputs that’s fine, but I always rename them when I’m doing things for personal use. However, for this thread we’ll be referring to them by these letters. For the purposes of this thread we’ll only be using X and Z, the available signals. The other two, while not useless, we can ignore as they will not be used for this project.
- RoboRef.png (52.91 KiB) Viewed 2927 times
So to start off the setup, we have this factory here producing Frames, the requester chest (blue circle) is simply requesting materials. The inserter linked to the Passive Provider (green circle) is set so that it activates when the Passive Provider Chest’s Flying Frames are less than 3 (but you can pick whatever number makes you happy
).- Robo2.png (129.96 KiB) Viewed 2927 times
Over here, we have the Robot Assemblers. Red signal is carrying XYZT from the Roboport, and connecting to the inserters. The two chests are requesting Green Circuits and Red Circuits respectively, and both are requesting Frames. The amount of frames I’ll leave up to the reader, but I recommend not to set it too high, as you will likely never need a full stack of drones made all at the same time (but in reality idk how your factory works).
Red signal connects to the two inserters, and the inserters are set so that the Logistics Bot inserter activates when X=0, and the Construction Bot inserter activates when Z=0. Meaning that when all the frames in this particular Roboport network are all active and doing their thing, the input arms will activate and start makin’ some drones! The output simply goes to this Provider chest. This one is an Active Provider, but in reality it could be a Passive Provider as well, either is fine.
- Robo1.png (434.27 KiB) Viewed 2927 times
The last part of this setup is the Roboport. Simply put a Requester down next to the Port, and request in your bots. This doesn’t have to be the Roboport that you’re drawing your signals from, it can be any Roboport in the network. Just as long as they’re all linked you shouldn’t have any trouble.
- robo3.png (204.22 KiB) Viewed 2927 times
It must be noted that, while I normally keep most of these parts relatively close to each other, and in theory no requester chests are necessary, one thing I wanted to do is highlight the fact that these parts can be spread out over a large area, and don't necessarily have to be near each other to work. It's also theoretically possible for this setup to supply bots to a different logistics network as well, but I haven't messed around with that yet so I don't know exactly how it would work. It'd probably be easier to just create a bots factory in the other network if possible at any rate.
Now that you’ve seen all of the setup (and hopefully understood it), some of you might still be asking, “So why do I need this?” And the answer is you don’t, but it definitely makes your life easier if you use a lot of bots as you really only need to seed the system with one bot, and it will take care of the rest. When at rest, no bots will be produced, and even if you use construction bots a lot, they’ll craft enough bots so that you always have what you need. These even work well for surges in activity, like, say for example a train comes in and starts offloading its cargo. You may go from using a few dozen bots to a few hundred all at the same time. And, while rampant systems are definitely fun to watch sometimes, ultimately, it's my opinion that any serious system plagued with rampancy shows a lack of foresight, as things that go rampant are ultimately unsustainable.
On a slightly related note (but not really), I once read somewhere while I was browsing Factorio stuffs that “The mark of a great designer is not how much stuff he can add, but when he can take no more stuff away”, or something like that. I don’t know where the original quote is, but I agree, and I also disagree with the quote. That is because the quote is correct…but only from a certain perspective. The quote implies that there is only one perspective to view the world from, and all other perspectives must acknowledge the correctness of this minimalist attitude. And while I agree that minimalization can be fun at times, it’s not the only way to do things, and minimalization is also not correct in every situation. In reality, it depends on the intent of the designer, if the intent is to design something with a minimalist approach, then so be it. But no two designers are the same (or at least they shouldn’t be), and some may seek other paths of logic to create something, and that’s not a bad thing, it just doesn’t agree with the original quote. Unless, of course, you feel that disagreeing with that quote is bad.
But I digress, before I rant on forever. Let me know what you guys think of the design. Mind you, this is just a prototype as well. There is still PLENTY of room for improvement, so I’d love to see what kinda tweaks some of you guys would make to it.
Take care
-Ranger
