OC by @Artisian@lemmy.world

I've been playing space age with 0 evolution increase over time (killing bases still increments it). So I've been eager to work around biter bases and pentapods.

Biter spawners can all be blocked by a pattern like the image; surrounding them with walls or solar panels or pipes prevents spawning. (This is intended behavior.) What is not mentioned anywhere afaik is that this also seems to prevent biter expansion from that base.

The same is only partially true for pentapods! Small egg rafts only spawn wrigglers (at low evolution?), and it seems you can block them off as in the image above. I have yet to see one try to expand from a surrounded small spawner.

In both cases, surrounded spawners seem to absorb a small amount of pollution/spores, be unable to spawn anything, and sit passively. No attack triggered.

But (regular) egg rafts are different. They spawn stompers and strafers which can spawn and stand directly on top of the raft. I tried and failed to prevent this spawning by packing the space with spider-trons. Also, given enough time a surrounded egg raft will eventually expand (afaik, it seems to spawn a wriggler in a crevice which then attacks its way out. I've never seen it just spawn a wriggler).

Relatedly: Stompers and strafers can stand between tiled solar panels, but not walls. Stompers only damage buildings with each step if they are aggresive.

Most of them can be solved with various applications of patience, so the trickiest one was the Express Delivery - winning Space Age in less than 40 hours.

Some tips for others who want to try it:

You can not reduce biter base sizes without invalidating the achievement, but you can turn down pollution, biter evolution and biter expansion. Turning the starting area size up to max means you can get all the way to Aquilo without seeing a single biter.

Resource patches can be turned up high and cliffs can be turned down low.

The scale needed is absurd and the main strategy should be on being able to scale hard and fast. My Nauvis base had 20 rocket silos going constantly, two 4-reactor nuclear plants, and it still felt a bit underscaled when I got to Aquilo.

Nauvis was the easiest to get to bigscale in this timeframe, as it already had a head start by the time the other planets were operational. Don't bother setting up blue chips on Vulcanus. Copy-paste the blue chip production on Nauvis and just ship them over with rockets.

What worked for me to scale:

• BOTS BOTS BOTS thousands of bots immediately and forever on all planets.
• Make sure to produce at least 2 per second of any science.
• Nauvis is the backbone. It can just ferry nuclear fuel, blue chips, rocket fuel, and low density structures to all other planets. (Fulgora gets trivially self-sufficient after a while though)
• Make production modular. Not necessary with perfectly symmetrical or cityblock, but enough that you can just zoom out, copy-and-paste "the area that turns iron ore, copper ore, and raw oil into blue chips", and just connect it to some new miners or a new oilfield.
• Inefficiency and waste are better than starved belts or constant tuning problems. Need 20 red chips per minute? Copy the thing that makes 20 red chips per second. Give it a separate set of miners, and don't care if it spends most of the game idling.
• On each planet, establish a bot network and stable power, then GTFO to the next one. Build the rest via remote.

My time was 36 hours, following these rough milestones:

• Logistic system before 10 hours
• Aquilo before 30 hours

So many bugs smashed!

I always set a timer.

Update on https://lemmy.world/post/26605581

Playing on modified Marathon setting: 100x science cost instead of 4x

I think I'm finally over the challenging part of the challenge. Until now it was extremely uncertain whether my base would both survive biter evolution on Nauvis and manage to claim enough resources to get to space and Vulcanus for "unlimited" iron and copper.

At some point the biters evolved past my tech: I can't assault behemoth biter bases with only low damage tech red bullets, effectively making any unclaimed resources unavailable until I could tech up (which would need resources).

I can, however, guard against behemoth biters with walls of red bullet turrets and flamethrowers.

Vulcanus also turned out to not be as straightforward as I hoped. While I do get a lot of resources in the starting area, the initial tugsten patches are guarded by small demolishers. Fortunately, 100 turrets of red ammo and spamming poison capsules proved enough to clear out a significant area and secure enough tungsten to get me far up the tech tree.

I feel like I "won" the challenge now that I can safely tech past any future hurdles, and the remaining tasks are just putting in the hours. Not sure if I'll keep playing past this, but it was a ton of fun. :)

For anyone who wants to see a true maniac attempt what I assumed to be impossible: Michael Hendriks may be able to win with 1000x science cost, exploiting deep knowledge of the biter expansion algorithm, spending tens of hours filling the map with pipes, and meticulous calculation of resource usage through the tech tree carefully adapting or not adapting quality, modules etc.

Some screenshos of the current state:

A small ship I designed. Blueprint

Some random defenses from my vanilla game

So I have been trying to beat shattered planet, trying various things. One thing I've tried is throttling by cutting off engine fuel to engines based on damage taken, on the theory that the slower the platform goes, the fewer asteroids it has to deal with. I have a big, 6 ending platform that runs between a max of around 190, and can throttle down to about half that by shutting down all but two engines.

To my eye, it doesn't seem to make any difference in asteroid density. It just takes longer, with the end effect of using more ammo to go less distance. Coming to a complete stop, of course nearly shuts off the flow.

So now I have it in my head that controlling velocity doesn't affect asteroid speed or volume, which would suck.

I also can't get interrupts to work properly, and nearly stranded my platform before I noticed :-/ But that's a different post.

Anyway, is velocity affecting asteroid density, or not?

Update, 2025-04-22

Thanks to everyone who had suggestions; I used most of them:

• Use foundries. This had the single biggest impact. I always forget about foundries except on Vulcan.
• Use lasers for little asteroids. Foundries are only an option if you have fusion, and if you have fusion lasers start to make sense. I'd given up on them when I tried to build a nuclear + accumulator platform, and was quickly annihilated, but they become useful later.
• Rail for huge, rockets for large, guns for medium, lasers for small. This is the magic formula for me, although I also have some logic that switches rails to include medium if rockets get low; rockets seem to be the bottleneck for me.
• Quality lasers are really effective for small asteroids -- even just quality 2.
• 1 fusion reactor is not enough. I was a little surprised that fusion is so wimpy compared to nuclear, but with lasers and foundries, I was getting into spots where I didn't have enough energy to keep the fusion reactor running.
• I have a bunch of logic controlling speed. This is a critical factor in success.
• I'm processing Promethium on the ship, rather than trying to use it as a cargo. This is much more effective, but requires all that logic.
• I'm not using interrupts. I don't know why I didn't notice before, but the Shattered Planet has "turn around when" logistics instead of the normal planet logistics.

So, now I load up on everything, hitting Nauvis last for one load of eggs. Then I make a speed run (175km/s max) for the shattered planet. As soon as I detect that I have shards, I cut speed to about 60km/s and cruise for shards, processing eggs to Promethium packs. As soon as I'm down to about 50 eggs, I turn around. I still have a couple hundred shards by the time I cycle around to Nauvis again, which gets me a few extra packs. This gives me about 300 packs, per run.

There's a bunch of extra logic to throttle based on damage and/or ammo levels, and where I am in the system -- I run at 50% on my way back to the edge, because otherwise I inevitably take damage running full speed at the turn-around point. With this set-up, it's fully automated, I can make the run with no damage, and I am able to process all of the eggs before any spoil. At this point, I think most of the ammo management -- designed before I converted to foundries -- is unnecessary. I just need to hang out a bit before heading to Nauvis to let missiles stockpile, and I don't think ammo has throttled speed lately.

Egg management is a pain, and there's more logic to make sure there are no unprocessed eggs in the cryo factory or on the belt; I used to toss them overboard, but found it was faster to run them through a recycler until they're gone -- there are never more than 9 left over, anyway, and that's really just in case I get a late batch from Nauvis and a few spoil on the way such that I end up with an odd number at the end.

Going for the speed achievements. I had the great idea that fewer asteroids meant I could race to planets and Solar System Edge with lighter ships.

...turns out it also applies to asteroid chunks. My ships needed a full hour to refuel, and space science took several hours to get the research for getting to Vulcanus.

RESTART

The mod changes the recipes very weirdly.

When my 6 x nuc reactor design finally reaches 530 degrees all at the same time

If this is spam let me know and I'll remove it, or a mod can just delete it for me ^^; Factorio posts welcome here as well!

!automationgames@lemmy.zip

/c/automationgames@lemmy.zip

Intended to replace the dead !automation_games@feddit.de. thanks to its instance dying and its mod not recreating it elsewhere.

Shows how https://www.factorio.com/galaxy grew over time. Also has a tool to show where your star is and find whom you're neighbors with :)

There's a mod I want to make, but I've never made a mod for any game before. What resources are there for starting out?

I know programming well enough so that's not a barrier, this is more about mod structure and testing

These look neat!

My favorites:

Drag building produces one merge undo action per the whole drag, instead of the individual undo actions for every entity built. Space platform "request missing materials for construction" will no longer request items for entity ghosts which can't yet be built

Decided I wanted a run that forced me to scale up instead of just "winging it" because hey after a few research steps I will be able to make it better anyway.

Thought to play "marathon mode", which is vanilla except research cost is multiplied by 4, but ended up going for a multiplier of 100 instead.

To give an example of what this means: Researching solar panels costs 25000 red and green science.

I found this to be an interesting challenge! I not only have to build large and optimized builds with low-tier tech. I also need to be extremely careful with managing biter evolution and pollution. Just red ammo is locked behind several thousand science packs, and I have expanded to 8 ore patches and my perimeter is just tightly packed turrets, because I have not let myself afford researching walls yet.

Do you think assemblers are for suckers? Do you want to pack everything into one assembler because that's just efficient? Well say no more fam I've got your back! The Chesterizer is the all in one solution for all your chest needs. Just set some values conveniently split across multiple locations and away it goes. It's like magic!

By neuroplastic on YouTube.

Here's the reddit post inspiring it: https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1c9glkz/the_antiqualityoflife_mod_list/

And a list, commentary removed. This isn't what's in the video. The video addons are in a follow up comment below. https://lemm.ee/post/55333560/18207221

Maintenance Production Scrap 2, Rampant Maintenance, Bot Servicing , Dirty Barrels , Small Fluids ,

Logistics Belt Overflow, Powered Belts, Limited Logistic Bots , Spilled Items , Undeletable Fluids , Realistic Underground Belts , Smaller Stack Sizes ,

Enemies Armored Biters, Explosive Biters, Frost Biters and Toxic Biters , Will-o'-the-Wisps Updated ,

Fire Power Overload , Wildfire , Explosive Biters , Arson (Optionally, add Water Turret and Fire Extinguisher ),

Environment Alien Biomes , Dirt Path , DivOresity, Wreckage Pollution , Pollution Visuals, Oxygen (Patched) , Nauvis Day , Careful Driver ,

Misc Amnesia , Hardcore Start , Death Curses , Heavy Inventory , Add Mushroom Cloud , Light Overhaul , Clockwork , Realistic Reactors ,

Recommended Settings Increase cliff length/frequency , Increase forest size/density and fear the wildfire more..., ...or alternatively, increase hot/desert biomes and have no tree cover. Now you only fear the explosive biters. Expensive recipes., Expensive technologies., give ore patches max frequency but minimum size and richness.,

Nightmare Mode

Play on a Deathworld with maximum biter settings., Play the game in a language of your choice that you do not know., Change the UI scale to 200%, Obligatory Rampant, and probably Rampant Arsenal , Manual Wire Placement , No Cliff Explsives/Landfill , Placeable-Off-Grid. , Permanence , Barrels O' Fun!, Hostile Trees. , Nightfall combined with an infinite night via Clockwork settings., Don't use Squeak Through, Screaming Bots , Nuclear Strike on-Death , Factorio, Except It Makes That Weird Tim Allen Noise When You Build, Deconstruct, And Research Things You Don't Wanna Die , Eat or Die , Belt Collision , Random Walkspeed, Fragile: The 1 HP Challenge. ,

XPost from https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/21703640