It is impossible to insert blue circuits into rocket silo as cargo

[Uränus Explorer]

This is just insane. Space exploration allows to insert rocket parts as cargo with no problem. Just either add a checkbox to the silo or make blue circuits to be added by default and force players to use logic to limit amount of them added to prevent it from going to cargo when they don't want it to. AFAIK, currently it is impossible to prefill the rocket with blue circuits to make sent within a sensible amount of time after a platform with a request arrives. This is literally the most ♥♥♥♥ blocking, unreasonable and meaningless logistics problem currently in the game. Do you really expect me producing them anywhere outside of vulk or something?

[Fel]

The rocket silo is now a requester chest when it comes to logistics network stuff, it will request the items needed by the platforms, one at a time and only a full rocket worth (unless you check the "custom payload" for that request).

You are not really supposed to fill the rocket with inserters anymore.

[RiO]

Originally posted by Fel:

You are not really supposed to fill the rocket with inserters anymore.

It works for anything except for the parts used to construct the rocket, because those are fed only to the construction slots for rockets. Kind of leads to bad expectations on parts of the players.

[Fel]

Yeah, but it also makes sense that inserters can't fill the rocket with the ingredients for rocket parts because it would always put those items in right away unless you specifically make a circuit network setup to prevent inserters from working when a rocket is ready.

[RiO]

Originally posted by Fel:

Yeah, but it also makes sense that inserters can't fill the rocket with the ingredients for rocket parts because it would always put those items in right away unless you specifically make a circuit network setup to prevent inserters from working when a rocket is ready.

Could be solved elegantly if the rocket silo would either take pre-constructed rocket parts from elsewhere; or there would be specific 'delivery zones' to a silo where inserters drop of construction parts and shipping parts.

But yeah- definitely less a bug; and more a feature request to see this one resolved.

[Uränus Explorer]

Originally posted by RiO:

But yeah- definitely less a bug; and more a feature request to see this one resolved.

Item literally not being insertable into rocket silo is a bug in my book.

Originally posted by Fel:

Yeah, but it also makes sense that inserters can't fill the rocket with the ingredients for rocket parts because it would always put those items in right away unless you specifically make a circuit network setup to prevent inserters from working when a rocket is ready.

So, just add a checkbox or three to the rocket silo maybe? Why would I want to load circuits by drones, when each silo can just stand next to several asses or a conveyor? Having pre-constructed parts is also fine by me.

[Fel]

The pre-constructed rocket parts wouldn't really work unless you similarly filtered them out of what can be put into the rocket with inserters.
And you might want to send those up for the same reason you would want to send the ingredients of rocket parts up currently (of course you might want to send them up for other uses as well currently).

The delivery zones might make sense but it would kind of go against how everything else in the game works.

I would argue that it would make more sense to disable inserters from filling the rocket entirely, but forcing people to use logistics robots isn't something the game usually does in other places either.

Not sure if there really is a good, clean solution.

[Uränus Explorer]

Being able to manually add drone requests to the silo would make it at least somewhat manageable, but not being able to preload a silo is just nuts. Besides, the whole system turns into garbage due to some arsehole platform coming for some buildings or whatever in the auto-requests, using silo near blue circuits and circuits flying like 1k tiles to a free silo instead of one next to their box. Also it is nuts to have 10k drones active for 30 seconds loading circuits, then tanking my energy production and just doing nothing useful for 10 minutes, when I could have zero of that problems if game wouldn't have a single arbitrary unintuitive limitation.

[Uränus Explorer]

Originally posted by Fel:

I would argue that it would make more sense to disable inserters from filling the rocket entirely, but forcing people to use logistics robots isn't something the game usually does in other places either.

Not sure if there really is a good, clean solution.

It is a horrible solution because drones currently just can't pre-load the rocket and your platform just hangs around not doing anything useful until the rocket is loaded

[Uränus Explorer]

To be fair, I just brute forced it and spammed 2x needed amount of rocket silos near blue circuits crafting with red chests next to each silo
It is still dumb that I need a chest between silo and the conveyor and the result would still be unstable

[Fel]

Nothing prevents you from having a small network just for the rocket with a stack of logistics drones, feeding the logistics chests with everything that could be needed ahead of times.
If the distances are short, robots can fill the rocket in a very short time, way shorter than the launch animation.
A compact area for your silos within just a few roboports worth of area in that kind of setup will be able to launch non-stop (if you can feed the ingredients to make rockets fast enough).

Of course, that would require bringing all of the required items to that small roboport network rather than just have them somewhere in your factory in a logistics chest.

If you feel that it has to be changed so strongly, you could go to the official forums to propose a change, but you might want to also include a reasoning when problems like "but it would automatically fill one of the three ingredients to the rocket's slot every time, how would you prevent that from happening?" come up.

[Chindraba]

Short brainstorm, and quite incomplete idea here.

The system could be changed so that anything inserted into the silo is placed in an inventory, like in any other requester chest. Then the silo, when building a rocket pulls from that inventory as needed. When the rocket gets to the phase where it can load the cargo, that too is pulled from the inventory. When a platform arrives which would trigger requests, those get added to the requests as a logistic group. If the chest is preloaded with enough to fill that request the bots would have nothing to do.

As said, incomplete, just the germ of an idea for others to think about when trying to make a better, in their view, setup.

[Uränus Explorer]

Originally posted by Fel:

Nothing prevents you from having a small network just for the rocket with a stack of logistics drones, feeding the logistics chests with everything that could be needed ahead of times.
If the distances are short, robots can fill the rocket in a very short time, way shorter than the launch animation.
A compact area for your silos within just a few roboports worth of area in that kind of setup will be able to launch non-stop (if you can feed the ingredients to make rockets fast enough).

Of course, that would require bringing all of the required items to that small roboport network rather than just have them somewhere in your factory in a logistics chest.

If you feel that it has to be changed so strongly, you could go to the official forums to propose a change, but you might want to also include a reasoning when problems like "but it would automatically fill one of the three ingredients to the rocket's slot every time, how would you prevent that from happening?" come up.

that is close enough to what i did, but is still a dirty hack
it is still insane I am forced to have like 50 roboports instead + ks of drones instead of couple dozen inserters and have worse UPS + platform movement delay.
It still gives one zero guarantee that no other auto-silo would be used by this platform if I have circuits in their circuit networks. Which I do. It would be idiotic to load rocket components not from logistic network in

Originally posted by Fel:

will be able to launch non-stop

that is useless for me, I don't want to make 50 tiny platforms for legendary module farming, I want just one. I currently have enough (~x5) auto-silos to send the circuits in one go. While platform goes to the next planet silos should get loaded. I do not want the platform to stay anywhere for longer than cargo launch + fly + drop animations.

Originally posted by Fel:

"but it would automatically fill one of the three ingredients to the rocket's slot every time, how would you prevent that from happening?" come up.

I do not see how it would happen with like half of the solutions I have proposed.

Even the worst one: just being able to manually set logistic requests on a silo like in a blue chest. With this solution my platform arrives -> rockets are instantly launched -> platform instantly goes on. No previous build is affected in any way.

Having checkboxes that allow loading craft components would solve this for inserters. No previous build is affected, more robust + cheaper solution is achieved.

Both can be implemented to allow using either.

[RiO]

I've given this some thought in my down time and I think I have actually, a rock-solid and dirty simple solution for the entire problem. It's so simple, in fact, you might all collectively face-palm that the developers haven't thought of it.

The humble storage chest already has it. Has had it for ages.
I'm talking about a logistics filter.

You can leave it unset, and the rocket silo retains its existing behavior, where it can stock itself with rocket part ingredients, and loads anything via bot requests. Only change: you cannot load the silo shipping inventory with inserters any more. Like at all.

That is to force you to choose between the simple all-purpose low-throughput mode, and a new alternate operating mode for high-throughput of a single dedicated product, which is enabled when you do set the logistics filter.

At that point, the shipping inventory will only fulfill requests for the item you configure for it. And it will also allow inserters to stuff the shipping inventory with that item.

With the caveat that if the item configured is one of the rocket part ingredients, the assembly inventory will be satisfied first -- to the point that the assembly progress bar starts running. This has precedent in burner assembler buildings, where the fuel inventory is prioritized over the assembly inventory.

Because the shipping inventory is filtered, it means you also cannot accidentally overfill it with materials that were meant only as rocket part ingredients.



Cherry on top:
This also resolves an exploit.

You see- you can actually use inserters to put items into the shipping inventory, but also to take items out of the shipping inventory. A silo is a 9 tiles wide, 4 cardinal directions, 36 (!!) positions capable, buffer chest -- that can be used to trivially bypass belt delivery of items to complex recipe chains.
And people have been using it to trivialize some of the biochemistry recipes on Gleba, running everything through a silo serving as an interchange and achieving stupid high (legendary quality) production rates at zero effort. Completely breaking the intended puzzle aspect of the game for achieving such high output.

Disabling inserter-insertion into the silo inventory in the default operating mode; and allowing only a single item (without circuit control; i.e. manual reconfiguration only) to be inserter-inserted in the alternate mode would defeat that exploit.