AI disclosure: this mod was made with the help of AI (Claude by Anthropic).

Robot Battery Swap

Robots swap their battery pack instead of charging: they land, trade the empty pack for a charged one, and fly off at once. No new buildings.

A big robot network spends a lot of its time waiting at roboports. Here every robot carries a swappable battery pack. When a robot lands on a charging spot, it drops its empty pack into the logistic network, takes a charged one, and leaves. You charge the empty packs in your assembling machines, like any other production line.

Features

• Battery swap at the roboport.
• A robot on a charging spot takes a charged pack from the logistic network and leaves an empty one in a storage chest.
• In tests, a single roboport docked 100 low robots in less than half the time it takes with charging.
• Personal roboports too. A personal roboport in armor, a vehicle or a spidertron swaps packs from its owner's inventory or trunk. It is a big help when your armor's reactor can't keep up with charging.
• Robots are built with a battery pack. The construction and logistic robot recipes take one empty robot battery, which comes with the robot research.
• Charge packs in assembling machines.
• Charging uses about as much energy as the pack holds.
• You can't charge by hand.
• Up to three battery tiers.

Each tier has its own construction and logistic robot. They are just as fast as vanilla robots, only with a bigger battery.
- A research branch of its own.
- Robot battery swap comes after construction robotics and starts the swapping.
- High capacity robot batteries and Supercapacitor robot batteries bring the bigger packs and their robots.
- Research costs follow the research each one builds on, so Krastorio 2 and Space Age packs fit in.
- Move a robot to a bigger pack by hand: the robot and a bigger empty pack give the bigger robot and its old pack back.
- Safe fallback. If there is no charged pack, or no room for the empty one, the robot simply charges as usual.
- Robot battery research counts. A swapped robot is filled up to its full charge, research bonuses included (for example Krastorio 2's robot battery research).

How to use

1. Research Robot battery swap, then craft some empty robot batteries.
2. Charge them in an assembling machine with the Charge Robot battery recipe. Empty batteries carry the game's red no-charge mark in their corner.
3. Put the charged batteries in a storage or passive provider chest in the roboport network.
4. Make sure a storage chest has a free slot for the empty batteries.
5. For personal roboports, keep charged batteries in your main inventory. Personal logistic requests can top them up, and auto-trash can take the empty ones away.

The robots still land on the charging spot, but they take off almost at once. To check that swaps are happening, watch the charged batteries go down and the empty ones go up in your chests.

A simple loop: requester chest (empty batteries) → assembling machine → passive provider chest.

Good to know

• The swap happens on the charging spot. Robots waiting in line can't be refilled (the game doesn't allow it), so the line still forms, it just moves two to three times faster.
• Charged batteries are taken from anywhere in the logistic network, not only from chests next to the roboport.
• A swap happens below 90% charge; whatever was left in the old battery is lost.

Requirements and compatibility

• Required: nothing but the base game.
• Optional:
• Krastorio 2 / Krastorio 2 Spaced Out: lithium-sulfur battery tier, K2 robot stats and research.
• Space Age: supercapacitor tier.
• Factorio versions: 0.17, 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 and 2.1.
• Works with: the vanilla game, Space Age, Krastorio 2 (on Factorio 1.0 and later) and Krastorio 2 Spaced Out, alone or together.
• Robots added by other mods keep charging the vanilla way.

Settings

None.

Languages

• English
• Magyar (Hungarian)

Feedback

Bug reports, balance ideas and mod compatibility requests are very welcome in the Discussion tab.