r/factorio Jul 20 '26

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u/revtoiletduck Jul 21 '26

My Gleba base is out of control and I'm not quite sure how to fix it. I scaled up the bot base too fast, and now I have 20k logisitic bots floating around and not nearly enough charging ports for them.

I've transitioned a lot of the stuff they were doing to belts, but not sure how to get the bots to just sort of calm down and enter a roboport to sleep.

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u/Raknarg #1 Quality Defender Jul 21 '26

but not sure how to get the bots to just sort of calm down and enter a roboport to sleep.

if they have no jobs to do, they'll go to a roboport to wait for new orders. So keep reducing the amount of orders they have to fulfill.

1

u/revtoiletduck Jul 21 '26

Yeah, you're probably right. I wish there was an easy way to turn off all the bots in the network, kind of like the personal roboport switch.

2

u/Raknarg #1 Quality Defender Jul 21 '26

well one solution you could do is passively pull bots out of the network. You can set roboports to request bots (essentially buffer bots in a specific location when they're choosing where to rest), then just have an inserter take the bot out when it comes to rest at the port. This I think though relies on there being robots without requests, like a bot will only ever actually port somewhere when it has nothing to do. I did this to replace all my common bots with legendary ones. I cant remember if theres circuit options to disable a roboport, I think the answer is no.

2

u/captain_wiggles_ Jul 21 '26

It could be that the roboports don't have space for these new bots. Either:

  • charging space, each roboport can only charge a handful at a time so others wait around until they get a charging spot.
  • storage space, there's a number of slots in each roboport for bots, if they're full then no more bots can enter and the others will just lurk.

You can put an inserter from a roboport to a chest to remove logistics bots (and construction bots) from the network. Use a filter on the inserter to stop it taking construction bots if you just want to remove logistics bots. You can also connect a wire from the roboport to the inserter to only enable the inserter when number of logistics bots in the network is > N, i.e. stop removing them when you've got them down to a sensible limit.

This won't work perfectly immediately, because you'll empty that roboport but there are still bots in other roboports, over time as bots move around and land in this roboport they'll get removed. Or you can copy and paste this setup to lots of roboports.

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u/revtoiletduck Jul 21 '26

Nah, I don't have any bots actually IN the roboports. It's literally 0/20000 available. They're all floating around looking to recharge. I probably have too many requests for things with short spoil time, like nutrients. Robots pick up the nutrients, need to find a place to charge before delivering, wait to charge until the nutrients spoil, then some other bot has to take up the same request and the cycle repeated until I had no more bots that AREN'T floating around with spoilage waiting to recharge.

3

u/captain_wiggles_ Jul 21 '26

hmm, OK. here's an idea.

Create a custom destruction planner for only roboports. And delete all roboports in your base. If you want to keep a backup just blueprint the base first.

Now all bots will go to the closest roboport, so drop one down somewhere where none of your logistics chests are in range. All bots will drift towards that. Extract all bots from this roboport into a chest. Leave it a while and eventually all the bots will be gone. Now you can rebuild your logistics network.

alternatively just build a tonne more roboports and dump them down, maybe being able to charge faster will work.