Factorio Forums

I took about a 6 month break from Factorio, then carried on with my save about a week ago. I run the Steam stable version so it updated by something like 40 patch versions to 2.0.60.

Since you cannot set minimum payload sizes for cargo drops (from platform to planet) (gosh, I wish they would implement this already, it'd fix this whole issue), I use the workaround of a circuit network that calculates what is required for one item type and pulses a full 10 slots worth of that item (e.g. 500 copper ore) for one tick into the cargo bay requests, then waits half a second, checks the next item and so on, looping back round to the first item when it's done. So my cargo bay requests are usually empty, and just occasionally have (stack size x 10) of one item, for one tick.

I ran this setup for ages before my break and it worked fine, now it doesn't seem to be working. I tested connecting a constant combinator with 1 of every relevant item to the cargo bay and it immediately requested 1 of every item but then weirdly after disconnecting that again it then requested the correct number as I'd expect...

Is this a bug? Do I need to request for more than one tick now? Or what?

Any help would be appreciated.

There is now a cooldown between drops from orbit, so you will have to adjust your logic to account for that. But because of this perhaps you don't need that logic anymore and can just set the total number of items you want dropped instead.

Does that explain why single-tick requests are, intermittently, outright ignored though?

I understand that there's a cooldown, but sometimes I can watch the platform/landing pad for several minutes and nothing drops at all, despite requests being pulsed with no items in the landing pad.

I would assume a request would get ignored if it goes away before your landing pad is ready to accept a delivery.

However, it's not a several-minutes thing: each delivery slot has something like a 63 second cooldown. So if you get 3 deliveries at once, you won't get any more until 63 seconds later.

Note that each cargo bays adds one additional delivery slot. So you can add those if you need the throughput.

FWIW I haven't seen this problem again since the update to 2.0.66, so I assume it was either a bug that was subsequently fixed without being mentioned in release notes (perhaps without the devs even noticing at all), or just one of those weird extremely rare edge cases.

If it happens again I'll revive this thread.