Logistics Guide: Transport & Belt Setups
Logistics in ASTRONEER is the art of moving power, resources, equipment, and finished products efficiently between your base, vehicles, and automation. Good logistics keeps your production lines supplied, your storage organized, and your exploration runs productive.
Core logistics tools
Auto Arm
The Auto Arm is a Tier 2 automation item that automatically moves small items from its input range to its output range. It consumes 1U/s while active.
It can interact with most Tier 1 items and storage spaces, making it one of the most useful tools for base sorting and item transfer. It can also place items into the player’s Backpack and Terrain Tool, and it can pull items from many containers and modules to feed printers, storage, and production lines.
Notable limitations:
- It does not take items from the Astroneer’s Backpack.
- It does not take items directly from other arms or from another arm’s filter slot.
- It cannot place items into another arm’s filter slot.
- It cannot place items directly into printer slots.
- It can reach upward to higher slots, but the range is limited.
- Some Tier 1 items cannot be filtered.
Beacon
A Beacon is a simple but important logistics marker. If your Large Rover is full, carrying Quartz lets you quickly make a Beacon to mark where resources, debris, or collected items were left for later pickup.
Storage
Convertible storage units with activatable slots can be used to build organized logistics systems. Their slots can be activated through repeaters, making them useful for lightboard setups and other custom automation or sorting tricks.
Vehicle storage and hauling
Buggy
A Buggy has one Tier-2 slot and two Tier-1 attachment slots. However, a seat is required to drive it, and a power generator is required for long-term driving, leaving one free slot for Tier-1 storage.
Large Rover trains
Large Rovers can be connected together to form trains, just like Medium Rovers. These trains are a major logistics option for hauling materials over long distances.
Train size is limited by the number of vehicles and how full they are. The more vehicles and cargo a train carries, the slower it becomes, eventually to the point where it can no longer climb small hills or even move at all.
A Large Rover can pull:
- 3 loaded Large Rovers
- 3 loaded Medium Rovers
Using an RTG on a Large Rover makes the rover generate power at 400% of the rate it consumes, allowing it to keep moving without waiting for solar panels or wind turbines to recharge it.
A seat can also be attached to the front or back of a Large Rover even when the top slots are full, allowing it to remain drivable.
A Medium Soil/Fluid Canister on a rover allows soil collection while drilling, which is very useful for field logistics and excavation runs.
Automated resource transport
Trains and routed outputs
This is commonly used to mass-produce and store large quantities of gas canisters efficiently.
Production line logistics
Automation-friendly production
Some production chains are especially well suited to logistics planning because the input and output flow is easy to batch or transport.
Power and logistics throughput
High-demand machines
Logistics systems often need to account for the power draw of the machines they feed. Several common devices consume fixed power while operating, including the Auto Arm and many printers and processors.
A few key examples:
- Backpack Battery has the highest priority among consumers and overrides other power requests.
- Printer and smelting equipment consume power while running, with consumption tied to their operating workload.
- Research and terrain-processing equipment can create steady load on a base’s power network.
Planning a logistics layout around stable power delivery prevents interruptions in automation, hauling, and sorting.