Bot Exclusion Zones

KeyCollector · Post by **KeyCollector** » Sat Dec 07, 2024 7:39 am

I'd like to suggest a tool for marking chunks as restricted zones for logistic robots, preventing them from flying over dangerous areas. For example, in Fulgora, robots often take the shortest path across a U-shaped zone covered with lightning rods, only to get struck by lightning. Similarly, on Nauvis, they might fly over enemy nests and get attacked. I’ve added a screenshot of Fulgora to demonstrate this. With this tool, you could redirect the robots to safer paths, ensuring their protection.

Post by **Koub** » Mon Dec 09, 2024 8:37 pm

[Koub] Merged into an older thread with the same suggestion.

Tinyboss · Post by **Tinyboss** » Mon Dec 09, 2024 10:05 pm

What is your attrition rate? Is it significant for a base like that?

KeyCollector · Post by **KeyCollector** » Thu Dec 12, 2024 3:19 pm

Tinyboss wrote: Mon Dec 09, 2024 10:05 pm What is your attrition rate? Is it significant for a base like that?

What do you mean with "attrition rate"?

Tinyboss · Post by **Tinyboss** » Thu Dec 12, 2024 5:15 pm

KeyCollector wrote: Thu Dec 12, 2024 3:19 pm
Tinyboss wrote: Mon Dec 09, 2024 10:05 pm What is your attrition rate? Is it significant for a base like that?
What do you mean with "attrition rate"?

How many bots are you losing per hour?

KeyCollector · Post by **KeyCollector** » Fri Dec 13, 2024 4:12 pm

at 1000 logistic robots working, I lose 500 to 600 per hour. Assembler is crafting new bots until there are 1000 in the network.

: grafik.png (8.7 MiB) Viewed 1531 times

stormtrap · Post by **stormtrap** » Mon Sep 15, 2025 4:16 am

TL;DR

Can we get a feature to implement drawable no fly zones for robots?

What?

A feature where you can draw an area where the robots will not fly through, they will have to find a path around the NFZ (No Fly Zone). Alternatively you could setup a safe fly zone where your drones either have to fly through or will prefer to fly through.

Example image 1;

: factorio_iEoTTSxtRS.png (499.51 KiB) Viewed 511 times

In this image is a space between my main base and a copper mine, there's an iron mine far north from there too. but if I could tell my bots to not fly where the bugs keep spawning then i could avoid deaths.

Example image 2;

: factorio_iEoTTSxtRS.png (499.51 KiB) Viewed 511 times

This is the base in Fulgora. Fairly often, logistic bots will fly over the oil lakes which cant be protected without foundation (which I'm far from) and will be struck and killed by lightning. The green line is a pretty common path over the lake they take.

Why?

On Fulgora and Nauvus (not sure about other planets, haven't been that far yet), I find that I get unnecessary robot deaths from either the lighting storms or the aliens. These deaths would be avoidable if either the bots would follow paths from the roboports or if players could set up No Fly Zone's.

crimsonarmy · Post by **crimsonarmy** » Mon Sep 15, 2025 3:43 pm

Rseding91 mentioned in another post on something similar that this won't happen for performance reasons.

Rseding91 wrote: Sun Aug 03, 2025 12:26 pm
Shirasik wrote: Sun Aug 03, 2025 10:09 am Would be a better solution to force bots to follow roboports during travel? Like if there is a port nearby then that area is considered safe and being allowed for bots to fly over. In other words to disallow bots to make shortcuts through areas without logistic/construction coverage.
That is also not going to happen for performance reasons. Robots don’t do any path finding - they move directly towards their target.

Stargateur · Post by **Stargateur** » Mon Sep 15, 2025 10:42 pm

not going to happen ever.

Post by **Koub** » Tue Sep 16, 2025 7:35 am

[Koub] Merged into an older thread with the same suggestion.

ikarikeiji · Post by **ikarikeiji** » Mon Sep 22, 2025 8:17 am

Here's a possible way this could be implemented without causing pathfinding/performance hell:

1. Something I've always wanted is the ability to simply manually split roboport networks without having to keep roboports far enough away from each other for them not to combine. It might be a bit tricky to do a good UI for this but it clearly wouldn't cause a problem for performance since the game can manage multiple "air gapped" networks just fine.
2. Separately you could consider a "roboport network link": given two networks, if one is very low on available construction bots, and another has lots of them available, the game could issue orders for robots to fly from one to another. The same check would be done again for logistic bots. If you're able to manually split networks as above then you could state that when flying from one network to another, robots must only fly to roboports of the target network that are also geographically inside the source network's coverage area.
3. The game could now implement something to automatically split any roboport network into convex components which would be calculated whenever a roboport is placed/removed (there could be allowances for diagonal "steps" to be treated as convex to avoid splitting it into a zillion components unnecessarily). Then it could automatically insert network links between each convex component. This would effectively result in being able to have a large network of any shape, where bots will not leave the coverage area and will "appear" to pathfind round the whole thing, but they're not actually doing any pathfinding at all: each component is simply letting bots "flow" to the adjacent component with fewer available bots, much like how heat pipes let heat flow; and within each component, bots are flying "as the crow flies" to their destination.

If giving the user direct control over 1 and 2 isn't deemed necessary then the whole thing could just be implemented as one self-contained improvement, with the splitting and linking happening internally and never actually showed to the user (except maybe in a debug visualisation). The available bot statistics etc could just be totaled up from the component networks.

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