Logistics Insights

When playing Factorio, have you ever wondered what all of your logistics bots are up to? Whether you have too many, or too few? Whether you have enough storage? Particularly in the mid game where everything is scaling up, I've found that the answers sometimes are quite surprising.

Logistics Insights can help:

• Provides actionable insights on what to do to improve your network, based on how it's performing
• Undersupply: Shows a list of the top things where demand consistently outstrips supply
• Multi-network: Helps you keep an eye on your key networks and easily navigate between them
• Multi-player: When you work together on a base, you can keep track of and help each other
• Real-time: Shows what's happening in your networks real time
• Interactive: Most things are clickable so you can easily get to the root of whatever the issue is

Quick info available

In the top left corner of the screen, you'll see two icons:

• The lightbulb shows how many Suggestions you have across all of the networks being analyzed. Click this button to open/close the Networks window where you can see more detail.
• The logistics bot shows how many logistics bots are idle in your current network. If this gets to 0, you most likely don't have enough. Click this button to open the Logistics Insights window to see much more detail about the network.

The two main windows

The main Logistics Insights window focuses on showing everything you need to know about a single bot network at a time, whether it's the one where you are or one you're looking at via the map view.

The Logistics Networks window shows all of the networks you've visited, with a few key highlights like number of bots, number of active suggestions and how many things are in short supply. You can also easily navigate between networks from here. Clicking the gear icon opens the Logistics Insights window with the settings pane below.

The main window supports the *Pipette action* ("Q" by default), which allows you to pick up a ghost of an entity shown. This is useful if you need to build or search for that item, for example using Factory Search.

When the settings pane is open (you can also open it with the settings icon next to the Network row), you can see and edit the settings that apply to the current network:

How to use Undersupply information

In the Undersupply row, you can see items that have more demand than can be supplied in the network. This is useful to identify hard-to-spot bottlenecks.

If you click on an item, LI will highlight every place that requests the item, and if you right-click, it will also zoom in and focus the map view on one of them. You can repeatedly right-click to get a sense for where the problems are.

If an item is shown in undersupply but you don't want to track it, you can Shift-click on the icon to ignore that item type in the current network. I find this useful when I have requests for "accidental" items that I want to capture somewhere, but where there is no real shortage.

How to use Suggestions

There are several types of suggestions, depending on what is happening in your network:

• Build more roboports. A common problem is that a lot of your bots are waiting to charge, which means that fewer bots are free to do useful work. Building more bots doesn't help though! Instead, build more roboports so the bots can quickly find a place to charge, without having to wait. LI will show this as a High priority suggestion if you need more than 100 additional roboports.

• Build more storage. If your storage is close to full, your network will work less efficiently as bots need to go further to find available storage. This suggestion shows up when your storage is 70% full, and becomes High priority when it's 90% full. Note that "fullness" of storage is measured by stacks, so you may have more storage available than LI suggests as it only looks for empty stacks.
• Build more unfiltered storage. Filtered storage is great, but you may be running out of storage that isn't filtered. LI uses same thresholds as for total storage here.

• Filtered storage mismatch. If your filtered storage has items that don't match the filter, LI suggests you fix it. You can click/right-click on the suggestion to see which chests show the problem, which is otherwise hard to find. If a mismatch doesn't matter to you, you can Shift-click on the cell to ignore the chests in question from flagging a mismatch.

• Too few bots. Sometimes, you just don't have enough bots to do everything, and you might get this suggestion.

• Too many bots. If more than half your bots are idle, but you are still adding more new bots, LI will suggest that you stop adding more bots.

How to keep an eye on things

Before a base reaches megabase level, keep the Networks window open to keep an eye on whether there are a lot of things in