This is a noob question, hope you don’t mind.
Should construction bots from roboport buildings use items in my inventory to build? They’re not, but maybe I am doing something wrong?
I’m wearing a powered personal roboport and am standing inside the orange area of the roboport building, yet only my 10 personal bots are working. As soon as I put some of my inventory into a yellow chest, the “outside” bots start using items from the chest to help.
Constructing big blueprints kind of takes ages this way, having to switch my inventory over fixes it but is annoying. I thought all bots should consider me part of the network, so they should use my inventory.
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Don’t worry, we were all noobs at some point. And factorio has a pretty noob friendly community.
But yes, that’s how it works. Your personal bots and the base bots don’t share the same logistics inventory.
Sticking build items that aren’t available to your base bots into storage or provider chests is basically the hot fix for when you want your base bots to build something. Otherwise you’re gonna have to run down there so your pocket bots can do it instead.
Tips:
- Personal roboports stack. The more you have, the more pockets bots can work at the same time, and the longer reach they will have. (I usually use three roboports if my armor allows it)
- Everything your base builds should have a small portion go into passive provider chests for robots to use.
- In line with the tip above, automate everything, even chemical plants. Your bots will thank you for it. This is extra important if you’re playing with the Space Age DLC as you might find yourself on a distant planet in need of supplies.
- You might want to build a requester chest for every produced item that has priority feeding into the production line BEFORE the provider chest. Otherwise you run the risk of “leftover” items filling up your storage, such as yellow belts after upgrading to red, buildings that your bots have deconstructed, etc. You need logistics bots to ferry these items around, though.
- Bots are slooooow at first. But once you put some research in speed and carrying capacity you’ll notice a huge improvement.
Fun fact:
Construction robots in the roboport area youre standing in can use items in your logistics trash slots in your inventory to build things since your logistics trash slots effectivley act as an active provider chest within the logistics network you’re standing in.(But your personal construction robots cannot use items in your logistics trash slots since theyre considered not part of your inventory)
No, Robots from a roboport won’t use your inventory.
Only robots from your own inventory while wearing a personal roboport will use your inventory items to build. But they will only do so in range of your personal roboport.
This is the answer.
I would like to add that you can have multiple personal roboports in your armor to increase the bot limit.
Your personal roboport is entirely separate from the logistic network roboports’ construction bots.
When you have a personal roboport equipped, bots in your inventory will use your inventory to build in your personal range.
Construction bots inside roboports will build anything in the connected logistic network (roboports in each other’s green range) construction range (orange range… If I’m remembering colours right).
You can speed up personal construction by equipping more or better roboports, and logistic network construction by adding more bots/roboports for charging and closer materials. Research also makes a big difference. To some extent early game construction is just a bit slow.
What I like to do is have my mall store everything in passive provider or filtered storage chests so it’s all available for construction and personal logistics. Then I just accept that my early network is a bit slow, and do other things while waiting on them for large projects. Things I’m actively building my personal bots help with from my own inventory.
Edit: one thing to keep in mind is bots reserve ghosts when they start a build job, so if you have a large logistic network they can take a lot longer to fly over than something closer would have to finish it. For this reason some people prefer smaller, separate networks and constructing from personal or spidertron inventories.
No, your inventory and personal roboport is completely separate from the main network for construction. They’re mostly for different purposes though. Personal roboport is for small to medium blueprints way outside of your base, like rail system or mining grid. Main construction bots are for scaling up or scaling out your base once you’ve automated production of buildings.
That’s working as intended. For faster blueprint construction I like to put more personal roboports in my armor and use more bots that way. Putting the required resources in a yellow chest works as well.
Just to add to what everyone else says, you can also put your items in your trash slots (Ctrl+Click an item in your inventory when you’re not accessing a chest). The base’s bots will be able to build from your trash slots.
This only works up until you get logistic bots, because the logistic bots will “steal” from there and put the items into storage chests (which, tbf, is the intended behaviour of trash slots).
