My previous attempt to nerf logistic bots was pretty bad. It did next to nothing to lower the effectiveness or no-thoughtness of bots but made them more of a hassle to set up and all but removed the ability for bots to resupply the player or spiders. So we're trying again.

This mod makes the following changes:

• Inserters cannot interact with storage and buffer chests. Only players and bots can insert or remove items.
• For all small logistics chests (less than 4 tiles wide), the inventory is limited to 1 slot per tile the chest takes up. This does not apply to storage chests.
• For chests 4 tiles wide or larger, or for logistic chest types that normally are unlocked with yellow science, their crafting recipes will cost blue circuits instead of red.
• All items with a stack size over 100 have their stack size reduced to 100

These changes should be dynamically applied to all items/entities including those added by mods, hence the special rules for large logistic chests which don't exist in vanilla.

What? Why?

The greatly reduced capacity of logistics chests means throughput of the logistic system drops off with distance - even if you request 1000 items to a chest, if only 100 fit, only enough robots will be dispatched for there to be 100 items in transit at once, and the items may all be consumed before the next wave of bots is dispatched. This means bots are fine for low-throughput over long distances, or high-throughput over short distances, but not arbitrarily-scalable-throughput over all distances. Bulk transfer of basic resources and intermediates is better done with belts or rails. Buffer chests can mitigate this so I'm considering just disabling them entirely.

Furthermore, to supply a crafting machine directly with bots, you will need one (vanilla) chest per input or output. This puts a slight constraint on designs to prevent bots from being the "I don't have to engage with the spatial puzzle aspect of the game" button, without making you spam a bunch of ugly red squares everywhere.

You should still be able to do a bot mall but I'm personally prejudiced against full-bot malls so it will be more obnoxious. Sorry. The desired outcome is mostly belt-fed malls with bot support for uncommon ingredients.

I've left big warehouse style logistic chests alone for the capacity nerf because from what I've seen they are borderline mandatory for mods like space exploration and also they have a pretty obvious downside with their difficulty to fit into intricate setups.

Caveats

Due to the chest size and stack size nerf, you will potentially lose a bunch of items if you add this mod to an existing save.

I made this mod in like an hour while half asleep so it is probably broken in multiple ways. I have done basic "make sure it does not explode" testing and little more.