Logistics Bots are a very interesting part of the game, with a lot of really nice benefits.

• They allow you to resupply yourself easily from provider chests without needing to manually take items from chests
• They allow you to construct or modify your factory without needing to be present
• They allow you to rearm your Tank in order to defend your factory or attack biter nests using remote driving

These are great, and aid progression by allowing you to automate tedious and annoying building and resupply tasks, and make expanding the factory much more efficient and scalable. They also make visiting other planets viable.

However, they also allow you to circumvent belt logistics in a number of ways. Many interesting belt puzzles can be mitigated entirely. Many mods add complex production chains for various items, which would usually require complex belt spaghetti to work, but can be bypassed completely by slapping down a few requester chests. While it's a lot less efficient than belts and requires a lot more power, the convenience, compactness, and overall factory neatness is worth the trade off in my opinion. It's also a lot more scalable than belts, since it's generally easier to place down more factories with requester chests rather than needing to reroute belts when ramping up production, especially if space is limited (eg Aquilo, Fulgora, etc). Belts are mostly relegated to high throughput applications, like resource stations and the main bus, while most malls become bot malls.

This mod aims to maintain the fun problem solving aspect of belt-based production chains, while keeping logistic and construction bots useful. The primary goal is to ensure that bots still feel like a worthy addition to the factory and provide an invaluable service, without removing or undermining belt routing and management gameplay.

To facilitate this, the logistics network is now essentially a "closed" system. Once items are added to the network, they can generally only be removed by bots or the player.

To accomplish this, the mod completely rebalances logistics:

• The Tier 2 Logistic System Research has been removed entirely, since it's no longer particularly useful as a lot of it's benefits have been removed. Instead, most of what it unlocks is available with the Tier 1 research (including active provider and buffer chests, as well as vehicle logistics).
• Requester chests are no longer available at all.
• The Car now has access to logistics alongside the Tank (this is mostly a QoL change, it can be disabled in the options).
• Inserters can no longer remove items from storage chests, buffer chests or vehicles affected by vehicle logistics (this prevents "ghetto" requester chests, such as delivering items to a Tank and then using inserters to transfer those items to an assembling machine). Inserters can still add items to them freely. This unfortunately invalidates inserter-based refueling for Cars and Tanks, but from my experience it's always quicker and easier to use bots to refuel them anyway.
• Logistics involving space platforms is unchanged. Items can be added and removed from rocket silos and Cargo Landing Pads as normal with inserters. This may be changed eventually.

This mod can be added and removed on existing savegames. In this case, the research will be hidden from the research screen, and requester chests will no longer be craftable. Existing chests won't be affected, and any assemblers previously set up to create the advanced requester chests will continue to function normally until their recipe is changed.

Changelog:

Version 1.03 allows Logistics on vehicles (the tank and the car) without needing the disabled research. As a consequence, inserters can no longer remove items from cars or tanks, to prevent them from becoming "DIY requester chests". Vehicle logistics can be disabled in the Startup settings.

Version 1.04 prevents inserters from removing items from Storage chests, because you could tell robots to "remove from" passive provider chests, and they would move items to (filtered) storage chests, allowing you to make a sort of DIY robot logistics system. This can be disabled in the Startup Settings.

Version 1.05 allows using Active Provider chests.

Version 1.06 allows using Buffer chests, they can't be accessed with Inserters either, similar to Storage chests.

--

The mod icon is adapted from the in-game Logistics research icon, available from the Factorio Wiki, and also uses the Wikimedia Commons "No" symbol, which is available under the public domain.