Options for drone-less logistics?

[Vlad, Doing Snek Things]

So, I've been enjoying the game a ton, but I find the drones to be a bit... clunky.
I will say this, I come from Factorio, and I understand this is not factorio.

Now. What are my options for not using Drones for logistics?
At first I assumed having a simple requester warehouse (8 slot) set to take raw resources, equipped with an internal teleport module, and then connected to multiple factory buildings via a lane of just warehouses with an internal teleport, would simulate a sort of 'belt' logic. A building needs iron ore to make iron bars, so it just asks, and the warehouses that have internal teleport modules would just allow the iron ore to hop to the building it is needed.
But that does not seem to be the case.

Am I missing something, or do I need to start using more behavioral chips and programming some sort of logic to chain requests?

[Quait]

The internal transporter can only "hop" items from one building to itself and then to another, any logic like you wanted is beyond them, they cant detect the need of buildings outside their own range and act. You can setup behaviours that could do that with the help of signals, scanners etc, but its not really efficient.

Instead of delivering 4-5 items at a time by auto requesting I setup twinbots that fill their complete inventories with one material at storages and drops them at warehouses at factories. Haulers bring the raw mined resources to central storages where other haulers grab them and move them to their designated factories. Kinda like trains only in factorio.

no logistic bots in actual productions, they are only for a factorio style mall and for construction of buildings, they wait 90% of the time, only haulers move.

There are drones later in the techtree, they are simple "go grab that, bring it here" style flying bots with one slot, but with only 5-6 max range. They need an S slot for their hangar on the building that needs the material.

[Blueberry Muffins!]

I'd say the (many kinds of) drones are Desynced's belts, bots and trains, with some of the inserters' jobs in there too. The command center logistics net takes over a lot of what you'd do with combinators, behaviors cover the more custom rigging.

[sacroimper]

If you really want to simulate a belt sistem, you can chain the storages with the 'store' register for 1 way belts and you will only need to use behaviors for the intersections.

With this setup, any production building right next to a "belt" will auto request their ingredients once the "belt" is saturated. You can lock empty spaces on the storages so that the "belt" saturates faster.

[LOG3]

Currently I am also looking into this, it kinda works with the "Portable Transporter".
I made an input storage (iron ore) then to the right I build a line of fabricator buildings and finished it off with another storage for the products (metal bars).

First I fix the slots in the fabricator building so that I have always at least 1 slot reserved for every resource type needed and 1 for the finished product.

Then, I give every building the portable transporter INCLUDING the storages.
Next I tell the input storage to store the iron ore in the 1st fabricator building, then on this building I set it to store into the next building etc. until the chain finishes with the last one storing into the output storage.

Don't forget to set all the fabricator buildings to "Only Item Transporters" in the logistics setting.

Now, you have an ALMOST working chain. The only problem occurs when you set the production to infinite (like you want to, with metal bars or any other material production).
The building will reserve a full slot, 20 iron ore, for its own production and so it will never pass on the iron ore the next building because it is reserved for itself.

ALTHOUGH in reality it passes some iron ore along just when a metal bar is finished. It takes a few ticks until it reserves 20 ore again, so at that moment it has 18 ore reserved and 1 or 2 iron ore will get passed along from the storage to the next building.

As a SOLUTION I tried to fiddle with behaviors and program something that will continuously set the fabricator to produce only 1 piece so it will always try to fabricate 1 metal bar over and over thus having the same effect of "infinite" production but with the effect of reserving only what is needed for 1 metal bar at a time.

At the moment this is pretty easy, just program a new behavior, add the "Set to Component" after program start and set the "Value" to the product you want to produce and set the quantity to 1. Then set the "Component/Index" to the production component, i.e. fabricator.

This works fine, unless you want to produce something that takes a whole slot (20) of a resource for 1 product, but even then you can hopefully increase the number of slots and fix one more slot to the resource to make it work.

FINALLY the only problem I still have is that I can't figure out how to talk to the second fabricator in the behavior program. So it only works with buildings that only have 1 fabricator or other production component.
I am trying to figure out how to talk to all components in the building but no luck so far.

EDIT: I think its a known issue and will be made simpler to address every fabricator beside the 1st one. but there is a WORKAROUND:
You have to use a Parameter or better yet, instead of a behavior you can simply use radio transmitter/receivers.

Just plug a radio receiver in every production building and drag the "received signal" slot to every input of your fabricators.
Then set the radio transmitters value to the desired product (1x metal bar for example) and choose the same band for transmitter/receiver and it will work.

[Nate]

LOG3,
Don't use Portable Transporters to push ingredients into a manufacturer building. The manufacture will automatically grab needed ingredients from buildings in range. You do need to have the manufacturer to store into an output storage block.

Just chain from one input ingredient storage block to the next.

This avoids the need to lock slots. Or other complicated things. Like messing with more network, right-click options.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3023649372

[TheOrigin]

Originally posted by Nate:

LOG3,
Don't use Portable Transporters to push ingredients into a manufacturer building. The manufacture will automatically grab needed ingredients from buildings in range. You do need to have the manufacturer to store into an output storage block.

Just chain from one input ingredient storage block to the next.

This avoids the need to lock slots. Or other complicated things. Like messing with more network, right-click options.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3023649372

That doesnt work all the time.. if you have everything on network layer 1 all your bots will bug out especially with buildings which are not "reachable".

Also: without locking slots, it happens that buildings completely lock up with ressource overflow..