Bionic dupes - keeping microchips?

[SailaNamai]

I built a second base with 8 bionic dupes in it. Obviously there are some generators, which are tuned-up. Issue is that the microchips my bionics generate during defrag are used for the tune-up and thus are not available for building the skill boosters.

Is there something I'm overlooking or do I have to collect them on production and store them somewhere inaccessible until I want to build boosters? This seems like an oversight to me.

[MrButtermancer]

Couldn't you build a container with reduced storage filtered to just microchips with a priority higher than the generators being tuned?

[SailaNamai]

Tried and didn't work.

[Genryu_Strike]

You can turn off Tinker on generators

[Gob]

I think this is something that needs fixing/changing.

There really should be two different items, one for tuning power plants and one for making upgrades for dupes. It makes no sense for them both to use the same item.

The issue does kinda go away later on in the game when you have several dupes as they produce so many microchips that you can turn off the metal for the power control stations and the dupes will supply enough for the plants.

Its worth checking how long you have your bionic dupes regenerating as the default schedule is about one time block too short for the dupes to produce a microchip. This can be crucial very early on when you really want one upgrade.

[SailaNamai]

What somewhat works is setting the crafting stations to higher priority than the generators and queue the boosters you want to craft. After defrag they get distributed and eventually turned into boosters. Doing so I ran into another issue - when there are microchips in stock, even if inaccessible, dupes will not craft more, so crafting boosters might mean a generator going without tune-up for some time.

But yeah, this system is broken as of now and needs changing/fixing.

[SailaNamai]

Originally posted by Gob:

The issue does kinda go away later on in the game when you have several dupes as they produce so many microchips that you can turn off the metal for the power control stations and the dupes will supply enough for the plants.

For me it is the other way around. In the beginning I'll have enough dupes to overproduce microchips. But once I get going the number of generators will outgrow the dupe count. Adding another bionic at that point makes crafting the boosters annoying.