Biofluid Homelessness Crisis

[AFranticTypist]

Mod source

Factorio Mod Portal

Operating system

=Windows 10

What kind of issue is this?

• Compatibility
• Locale (names, descriptions, unknown keys)
• Graphical
• Crash
• Progression
• Balance
• Pypostprocessing failure
• Other

What is the problem?

Biofluid bots become "homeless" when they do not know where to go, or they're unable to go there. This is a legitimate state that can be reached through a number of normal pathways. Over hundreds of hours a busy biofluid network can accumulate dozens of homeless bots. The problem is that, once homeless, a biofluid bot mills about until the player manually corrects the issue. This is un-Factorio.

Steps to reproduce

No response

Additional context

No response

Log file

No response

[protocol-1903]

Please explain steps to reproduce homelessness, if not all of the ways you know of

[AFranticTypist]

Homelessness is a valid state. If you have bots flying around remove their bioport, they become homeless. If you overstuff the bioport, the ones who can't land become homeless. There's currently some interaction where bots can return to a single bioport, oversaturate it, and then become homeless through bad luck.

I have a patch which fixes the issue and has been beta-tested with me and two other players, but right now I'm wrestling with Git trying to make the pull request.

[protocol-1903]

Thank you.

If you can't or dont want to figure out git, copy/pasting the code is a valid option though we'd prefer a PR if possible

Also dont worry about the changelog we fix that in post

[AFranticTypist]

I have committed a batch of changes encapsulated in this pull request:

pyanodon/pyalienlife#515

Since homelessness is a valid state we can't simply ban it, so the best we can do is try to recover from it. The system now performs two lazy scans for homeless critters every Biofluid action (currently every 143 ticks). The first scan targets a random 2x2 set of chunks. The second scan investigates a 2x2 chunk area around a biopyanoport. Biopyanoports are scanned a rotation, so they will all get equal attention.

Tests on my and other bases show that this quickly encourages homeless biofluid critters to find a valid place to be, and in my tests they seem to always succeed unless the network really is jammed full. The scans does not seem to noticiably impact UPS. I've been running with this change for a few weeks, and have not received any complaints from my beta testers. It seems good to merge in now.