Hide Repair Packs

Hide Repair Packs

Hide Repair Packs is a mod for Factorio.

Problem

If the player has a personal roboport with repair packs in their inventory, then whenever a nearby object takes damage, a robot will go try to repair it. When this happens during combat, as is common, the robot will often be instantly killed by whatever damaged the object. Then, since the object is still damaged (and probably taking more damage), another robot will go and meet the same fate, etc. Repairing while the battle is raging is usually counterproductive.

A common tactic is to disable one's personal roboport during combat, but then robots cannot be used to deploy turrets, clear paths through trees and rocks, etc.

A better tactic is to temporarily put all of one's repair packs into the trash inventory slots, then pull them back out after the battle to safely conduct repairs, since robots will not take repair packs out of the trash. But that is tedious when combat is frequent and easily forgotten when it is not.

Solution

With this mod enabled, anytime the player is near an enemy (by default, that means within 80 squares, but that is configurable), it will automatically move all repair packs (and other items designated as repair tools by their contributing mods) into the trash slots. When the player is no longer near any enemy, the repair packs are moved back into the main inventory so that after-action repairs can be performed.

Indicator of action

When nearby enemies are detected, and hence repair packs hidden in the trash, an icon is shown in the upper left corner so the user understands why their repair packs are moving. This indicator can be disabled, however.

Performance considerations

The mod periodically scans for nearby enemies, by default once per second (60 ticks). Each scan takes about 50us on a medium size map (that is just what I tested; I have not noticed a dependence on map size) with the default range, for an amortized cost of about 1 us per tick.

The inventory check and transfers are only performed if the enemy scan result (as a boolean) is different from the previous scan. Since the scan result changes very infrequently, those costs are negligible.

Uninstallation

To uninstall, just remove the mod. It does not add any entities or other save-game state, so removal is non-destructive.

Possible extensions

It would be desirable to extend this to work with regular roboports too so they could be positioned near walls that frequently come under attack. However, some changes would have to be made to account for the much larger number of places to scan, the lack of a convenient "trash" slot in roboports, and for the fact that robots will potentially take repair kits from anywhere in the logistic network. I am not currently planning on working on such an extension but might try if there is interest.