I just added, but not yet released a mod to keep bots from randomly exploding. I'm still testing this, but so far the results look good. This was happening in my game after a couple hours - after getting red chips, and pushing additional roboports outside main. When I got about seven roboports away, and had bots building a long defensive barrier, about 40 bots spontaneously exploded. This IMHO is NOT part of how the bots should work, especially in a mod that relies exclusively on bots to continue playing. So making them explosion resistant is pretty important. Losing them from spitters, fire or physical contact with biters is still something that will lose you bots. Ideally you use lasers to reach out and touch spitters from a distance. Learn how to path bots to fight without flying over the spitters. But spontaneous combustion because you are working furiously - is not tolerable in a mod like this. Stay tuned for more updates.

Recent testing shows bots still exploding, with my improving Explosion Resistance, so I may add a feature to recover some quantity of lost bots.

Also planned is to align the four yellow chests in the center of main, with yellow inserters to push bots back into a roboport. It's important that this be done, even if you are unaware that removing a roboport will push all bots that are in that roboport into a yellow chest.

I also plan on continuing to trigger off settings made when you run the game from a Steam start. It's mostly setup to be configured for a dedicated server, but right now this works just fine hosting it from Steam, but some things are over-ridden, expecting only changes from the dedi configuration files. I'll make it more configurable from both the steam pre-game settings, and the mod settings. What does work is to increase resources from a steam start, but the distance of bots from main is hard coded.

I've been testing, testing, testing changes for explosion resistant bots. Many changes, many runs, and still some of the little guys blow up. From what I read this is due to them running out of power, although there is a setting to set the speed of the bots when they run out of power, so I really don't know what triggers the explosion. It seems when they are very busy. I upgraded their power from 1.5 MJ to 4 MJ, and their use of power much lower, but still occasionally groups of them explode. So until I find a better solution I am making the starting bots INDESTRUCTIBLE. I've also slowed down the fast bots, and may edit how they look, so they stand out from the game bots. I also think when the game bots are finally built, they should be the same speed, or faster (depending on whether you start with slow bots or fast bots). I won't make the new bots explosion proof.

So far all my tests have been from a steam game, and this is very playable, and a heck of alot of fun.
Expect an update by this weekend.

Expect a new release today with indestructible bots.
note look over the config.lua file for changes to the default game. Also when hosting from Windows, use the resource richness/frequency to improve change to get to oil/iron/copper ... Currently the distance and difficulty of biters near main is fixed, but will eventually be linked to Starting area size. One cool thing our buddy OARC has done is to remove any attacking biter parties when you are offline. I may use this feature as a buff for starting bases to give them a configurable number of minutes where they won't be attacked. You should see those hordes just disappear as they get within a certain distance of your base. Should be cool. But for now - robustness is my key concern, and all looks good so far. Drop a note if you find otherwise.

Expect a new release today with indestructible bots.
note look over the config.lua file for changes to the default game. Also when hosting from Windows, use the resource richness/frequency to improve change to get to oil/iron/copper ... Currently the distance and difficulty of biters near main is fixed, but will eventually be linked to Starting area size. One cool thing our buddy OARC has done is to remove any attacking biter parties when you are offline. I may use this feature as a buff for starting bases to give them a configurable number of minutes where they won't be attacked. You should see those hordes just disappear as they get within a certain distance of your base. Should be cool. But for now - robustness is my key concern, and all looks good so far. Drop a note if you find otherwise.

Found the cause of exploding bots, this is fixed in 4.1.4 release. It had nothing to do with power. I did leave the resistance of the bots to acid, fire, explosion, and physical damage on, so as they group in front of a huge group of biters, all attacking the bots - they will not die. This does not gaurantee you to have those bots the whole game, a roboport blowing up and some other situations may kill them. The bots dropping out of the sky in groups was a different situation and fixed in the code. I may make indestructible bots a setting, instead of how it is in 4.1.4. I plan on adding more mod settings: Fast bots is already there, I'll add Moat Bridge and indestructible - possible four choices to enable you to choose one or all four resistances.