Played long enough to put together the science for cargo drops and the rocket to get off planet. Moving Uranium to another planet made me change up how I setup Navis which I like; however, Arig shows up to late to ask the player to completely forgo robots. Getting a decent supply chain together takes a lot of tedious setup, and the mod basically asks you to either setup yellow science on Arig or piece together a rocket to ship science off planet: Both options are basically the same setup wise (blue circuits, red motors, etc.) Asking the player to revert back to manual construction AND to build that much base manually is both frustrating and tedious.

I ended up F11 cheating in a stack of personal robots so that I could at least copy and paste things.

My suggestions:
(1) Add robots to the loot table on randomly found drop pods. This would let you have personal robots available and better reward searching the planet.
(2) Add a technology to unlock robotoports on the planet. This would essentially make you still have to master the planets logistics without them, but then allow you to refactor the base for later game production.

edit - While typing this I hit update for the mod list and now see that some major changes have happened. I can't say which version I was on previously as I installed the mod, then went to vulcanus, Fulgora, and Moshine(mod) before coming to Arig. The science packs no longer require uranium to craft and I no longer get uranium from basic sand sifting.

There is a chance you were using the Atomic Arig mod, it adds uranium to the progression of Arig but it's not mine. In the new update you can drop construction bots from orbit.

Even if you can drop construction bots now, roboports are still blocked due to ambient dust even after cargo drops are unlocked. I'm curious what the intent was behind blocking roboports specifically? If you just wanted to prevent logistics bot bases you could have blocked construction of request/buffer chests instead.

It's really frustrating not being able to remotely interact with the planet, I can't build remotely, I can't fix issues or unblock production. I can't build at scale without running back and forth everywhere. I deployed a half dozen (mini-)spidertrons but I can't reasonably supply them without logistics bots. (You can sorta do it with deconstruction orders but A) you can't really control which spidertron gets the items, B) getting items out of the spidertron when it fills up is even more of a hassle.)

I can understand wanting to prevent logistics bot bases, especially since a major challenge of Arig is sorting the random output, but blocking all non-personal bots isn't really viable with how critical remote view is to not needing to hop on a rocket to fix every little problem.

Thank you for your time.

(In case it matters, I'm not using Atomic Arig, mainly Enable All Planets Lite.)

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll make unlock roboports tech in the next update it is really hard to expand without them (Right now I'm finishing the second planet for the mod)

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll make unlock roboports tech in the next update it is really hard to expand without them (Right now I'm finishing the second planet for the mod)

I think allowing supplies to be dropped from orbit fixes a lot of the issues with early setup. I acutely don't recommend allowing robotports as an upgrade. Arig's unique challenge is not being able to auto sort and auto supply rockets off planet, and also having to come back to the planet if anything goes wrong. Basically set up a belt only system that can run indefinitely without robots to sole issues for you.

It also presents a balance issue, which might sound weird. Arig presents a relatively easy way to create infinite resources, Iron, Copper, Coal, etc. Gleba is the only other planet that does this and it is a major logistical challenge to do so. Vulcanus and Navis have ore patches that will run out, but once Arig is setup it will produce forever. The only thing preventing me from setting up Arig to be the only resource hub that I need is needing to belt feed a collection of rockets for every single item that I might want in orbit.

I acutely don't recommend allowing robotports as an upgrade.

If the goal is to prevent bot bases and logistic sorting then requester/buffer/active provider chests can be banned instead of roboports.

Having to come back to the planet if anything goes wrong is frankly not tenable in Space Age because travel is expensive (time is a cost too) and a huge interruption to what you were doing since you don't just need to travel to Arig but back to where you were if the other planet isn't fully up and running yet. Wube went through a lot of trouble to make sure remote view was extremely smooth to use and the player could work even without the engineer's presence. You can't even use spidertrons in place of the player on Arig because they can't be reasonably supplied on Arig without manual intervention.

This gets to be an even worse if you have several planet mods or push planets further apart. Frankly if I HAVE to come back to Arig if literally anything goes wrong (because something will go wrong, the player is only human and WILL make mistakes in their design.) then I would honestly cut Arig from my future playthroughs, and I don't want to do that because Arig is cool.

Banning roboports when remote view is such a critical part of the game is not an acceptable solution to me. If even rocket silo requests are too much then see if it's possible to make a custom silo without requests (Like Lignumis's emergency escape rocket, which needs to be manually loaded.)

TLDR: Unban roboports, ban requester type chests.

Also Re: Vulcanus, non-oil resources use so little calcite for lava processing that with large drills and mining prod it is effectively infinite. My starter patch of 554k calcite has a functional value of 4.4 million and my 40 foundries consume 10/s which means I have unlimited iron and copper products for 5 full days (assuming I play for 24 hours) of playtime. If I grab one of the many 10+million patches it will last for 2400 hours (or 100 days) of continuous running.
Resources on vulcanus are infinite. Having another planet with infinite resources has 0 impact on balance unless you are doing the bare-minimum on each planet and leaving it to run for months without any intervention.

(I don't have a problem with needing to unlock Roboports on Arig, so long as I can drop personal bots beforehand since that should now be fixed.)

Hi, in the next update has dust resistant roboports for Arig and a lot of balancing

Looking forward to it, thank you you for listening.