If you need to take bots out of a system try this /

[Z0MBE]

place a buffer chest that pushes contents to another chest, preferably active provider, using inserters or otherwise, then just hold right mouse button to pick up every logistic robot that comes to take contents or place contents. I got 100 out of a big system pretty fast.

[Jupiter3927]

My strategy is to find a roboport near a recently built section of my factory and take bots out of that.
I think you can get up to 350 bots out of it with no effort.

When I absolutely need bots, I keep a passive provider chest with a few hundred at my robot assemblers.
They get delivered automatically by logistics bots after I donate them to satellite networks when I return to the main network.

If it's to actually reduce the amount of bots in your network, just place limiters on the inserters adding bots in.
Some circuit network saying 'add bots if available bots < 1,000' or something.
I've never had my robot network overloaded with this strategy.

[Warlord]

It'd be nice to find out how to get construction robots out of a large solar/accumulator/roboport blueprint I have. Once the robots place the last thing, They aren't useful in there any more.

I usually end up leaving them. by later on, 1000 robots are cheap.

[Fel]

For logistics robots you can do a similar thing with a "loop" that will request a lot of them towards that area.
An active provider chest filled with an item that nothing requests in your current network and a requester chest asking for that item in large quantity, in a network unconnected to your main and an extra roboport in your inventory is all you need.
When you connect the networks with the roboport in your inventory, a whole lot of idle logistics robots will fly off towards your chest to unload it into the requester chest, after a few seconds you can remove the connecting roboport and the robots will continue to fly towards the chest, unload it and then sit in the now unconnected roboport for you to grab (after they recharge).
If you have an extreme amount of robots to remove you will need a stack inserter removing robots from the roboport, and probably multiple sets of active provider and requester chests.
Obviously items with large stack size like plates would work very well but only if you don't already use the logistics network to carry them around, so just pick whatever item you can get in large amounts and that isn't requested in your network.

For construction robots it's similar except you need to use chests that are probably not logistics chests (or are requester chests) for the ones having the items at the start, and it is less necessary to make the whole unconnected network to trap them if you do that when they don't have a job to do.
When you order the deconstruction of the filled chests, the construction robots will fly in large amounts towards the chests to empty them into the nearby requester chests that request those items (still preferably items not handled by your network or even in your storage chests for obvious reasons).

The funny part is that with fast-replace to swap the chests in the case of logistics and just copy/paste for the construction robots it is very easy to "reset" it after use if you need to grab even more.


There are probably other ways but those worked quite well for mass-recall.
The only downside is that the one for logistics robots only removes idle robots because you really have to cut the network off before they finish their task or they might go back to your network.
There is a way to have a "loop" for logistics robots but it takes a lot more chests and stack inserters to unly keep about 5-6 logistics robot busy per stack inserter (so even with a + with the requester chest in the middle feeding 4 ative provider chests with stack inserters you keep between 20 and 25 logistics robots busy), not exactly great if you want to empty thousands of robots from your network.

[astrosha]

I try not to put too many bots into a network. But, I have no idea how to determine how many is enough, and how many is too much.

I eventually build a separate facility that makes both construction and logistics bots, and have a bot delivery train that takes 50-150 of each type of bot around. The bot drop off stations insert bots when I've less than some specified number of bots in the network, and the stations turn on when I've less than 50 bots in the chest feeding the network.

Once a bot is put into that network, I don't usually remove it (except in my current game where I started to make modded bots that do not require a recharge, removed the ones that did). My solar BP has so many entities (400 solar panels, 384 accumulators, 16 substations, 2 roboports) that I'd want at least that many construction bots in it, but not really more.

[Jupiter3927]

You generally can't have enough too many bots.
Idle bots will just sit in your roboports doing nothing.

You can have too little bots though.
Having 0 available bots means not enough.

Mining outposts generally won't need more than 50 construction bots ever and won't need any logistics bots.
Bigger higher polluting outposts might need 150 to account for some being shot down.

Construction bots stuck in solar panel field will come out if you give your network a large enough job.

[astrosha]

Publicado originalmente por Jupiter3927:

You generally can't have enough too many bots.
Idle bots will just sit in your roboports doing nothing.

You can have too little bots though.
Having 0 available bots means not enough.

Mining outposts generally won't need more than 50 construction bots ever and won't need any logistics bots.
Bigger higher polluting outposts might need 150 to account for some being shot down.

Construction bots stuck in solar panel field will come out if you give your network a large enough job.

I tend to put my solar fields as an outpost rather than tying main base bots to it.

As far as "cannot have too many" sure you can. One game recently I had not set a limit, and I had some 50,000 bots running around one outpost. The problem was, they were almost ALL recharging. There was little work being done, and my 200+ reactors was insufficient to handle the power demand.

Too many is a function of both the work being done, and the number of roboports available to recharge the things. But how exactly to determine that number .. that I don't know.

My current game, the blue circuit factory has 17414 logibots running around. How many roboports are required to keep that many charged, if I wasn't using this mod? Bear in mind - there are 0 waiting in reserve, so the factory wants more.