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The original was posted on /r/factorio by /u/ParanoikCZ on 2025-05-30 13:37:06+00:00.
I was always using “less” robots (5K in my biggest base) and enjoyed how factory slowly grows while I was working on other planets/ships/designs. More robots are usually useful for some spike in base building, but I’ve assumed that as a bad planning. It also requires great supply chain or crazy buffers for everything. And eventually energy peaks (even when this shouldn’t be an issue at a certain point, it still might be considered).
Since a lot of (not even) megabases use a LOT of robots, I was wondering where is a good ratio since more robots means more recharging, more blocked roboports, more travel time and eventually more wasted time. And where is the line when more robots actually slows building things.
For my research, I’ve used my megabase with 50x50 legendary roboport grid, prepared blob with 100K buildings at ~4500 (±200)m from where robots are parked. I’ve always reloaded when finished, so every test had the same conditions. I’ve placed tested (also legendary) robots to starting location and then used BP at the exact same location. There were no other building or logistic requests during any of the tests and was always enough energy so no blackouts. Robot speed was on level 19.
For measurement, I’ve used tick counter, but incrementing by amount of unavailable robots (T-Z) - which results in output variable meaning robot*tick of all robots combined aka total fly time. I’ve also gathered total building time (basically ticks when T!=Z) and peak energy consumption (without idle) which looks like this:
I’ve expected to do this in 1K increments, but initial run was pretty slow and also differences wasn’t so big, so I’ve changed it to 2,5K steps and still removed first result since it was not showing anything interesting but rather breaking charts readability.
What you can clearly see is that adding more robots don’t linearly shorten building time and at a certain point, it even makes things worse. So, deploy your robots carefully.
What surprised me is that total fly time is almost linear, but it has a reason. Recharging queue isn’t very well optimized, since the robot travels to the least occupied roboport in 250m range when need to recharge, even if it’s overloaded and there are empty ones behind this range. Since all robots during the test starts from the same area, they also need to recharge at the same area, leading into a situation when ~50 roboports need to recharge thousands of robots. That causes issue where some robots already performs their third route while other ones are still waiting for their first recharging. This causes very similar total build times for 30K+ robots, as the rest of the blob is finished before actually part of the first robots batch arrives for the first time. I guess, for more accurate numbers, I would need to build a million buildings blob but … I think it proves the point. However, this problem also helps to cap the energy consumption.
What I’ve observed is that unloading robots from ports are pretty slow (rate is 3 robots per tick) which means 10K robots are released during ~1min.
Since recharge clogging was main issue, I’ve got another idea to check. Since legendary roboports offers 2,5x greater charging speed than normal but legendary robots have 6 times bigger energy capacity, what would happen if there will be shorter recharging interval? So, I’ve tried to repeat the same test with 20K normal robots. And … while it surprised me, it surprised me more that I’ve expected.
Total fly time and build time are ~2/3 of values as for legendary robots! Since robots recharge more often but shorter time, they spread to a lot more roboports and decrease waiting times. Price of this is increased energy consumption - 3,2 GW compared to 2,3 GW for legendary bots.
So, not sure what you have to take from this, but for me, it’s to:
- Never use legendary robots for base building
- Keep my robot numbers at the sane levels
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