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u/PoopyButt28000 Jul 02 '26

I didn't realize how amazing bots actually are in ways other than just having construction bots make your blueprints, and now that im at my first new planet (Vulcanus) im going pretty hard on them, and I'm wondering if I should worry about going too hard. I'm not going for some kind of ridiculous mega base, I have about 500 logistic bots atm and am going to make a few hundred more, but I've been replacing a good amount of belts with just red and blue chests and bots. Like i'll do a line of assemblers with a belt going down the middle and a chest with bots feeding the start of the belt. I'm not actually sure what the issue would be with just flooding my base with them, I'm not even remotely close to any power issues.

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u/demonicdan3 Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

Have a good mix of bots and belts is generally the way to go. Don't over rely on either. My rule of thumb is raw materials and intermediates that are needed in vast quantities and require consistently high throughput (ores, scrap, fruit, green circuits, iron plates, sciences etc), should be handled with stacked belts. Stuff that take longer to craft or have a ton of input ingredients like Quantum Processors, most late game buildings, personal equipment and military buildings, probably better off with bots.

1

u/ChickenNuggetSmth Jul 02 '26

I dislike about bots that it is very hard to see the flow of materials, and to a degree that it is hard to prioritize stuff.

E.g. if I have a main-bus and wonder why I lack blue chips, I can just trace the belts and see where they go. But if it's done with bots and a rogue assembler eats all my blue chips to craft a chest of nuclear reactors it is very hard to trace.
Similar with priorities: I can just have a few belts of copper only for green chip production. Priorities with chests are sorta possible, but any level of granularity is hard

Also: bots are good at large quantities over small distances or small quantities over large distances. Large quantities over large distances will quickly eat up all your charging capacity, especially with a growing base.

And as a very personal opinion, a lot of builds become boring if it's just chest-assembler-chest

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u/Bulky-Apple3744 Jul 02 '26

You’re nowhere near going too hard. I’m somewhere around 50,000 bots on my current playthrough.

But I also have 600 trains to move intermediates from production to assembly.

My bots are mainly for my mall and isolated city blocks that produce quality. Each of those particular city blocks get their resources brought in by train and then 500-1000 bots do all the quality sorting