Factorio - a factory building game - now with Space Age expansion

[Andnjord]

Work on the Real Base (tm) has started in earnest, ended up settling on a mixed main bus for stuff like plates, glass and green chips and trains for the esoteric or low volume stuff like big engines, blue chips or rocket control units. Also went for 1-1-1 trains for that stuff since I can squeeze them in a lot of funny places like in the following concrete production area.

The right part of the bus is currently empty as I plan to set up some large scale off-planet iron, copper and steel production that I'll bring in by rocket to the bottom right part of the Real Base (tm)

Yeah, I don't like city blocks designs, so I went for organised chaos in some areas.

Spoiler

Yes, I know that for our resident Demographic slav this is cleaner than Switzerland and leaner than a South Korean car factory, but not everyone grew up on Soviet Kommunalka.

 

[Demo.Graph]

not everyone grew up on Soviet Kommunalka.

Some people have Russian genes embedded in them for millenia, monsieur.

this is cleaner

Of course this is not clean!
Why, god, why did you make 30-tile grid, you monster?! Only Poles make pole-sized grids!
You could've made chunk-aligned city in accordance with the glorious dirigisme principles of comrade De Gaulle. A city where the boulevards run longitudally and ladies stretch latitudally.
You really, really should consider upgrading into a proper autist paradise. At once.

Spoiler

 

[Andnjord]

That's a nice bot-mall you got there, would be a shame if someone was to turn it on all at once...

Sorry bots.

 

[Andnjord]

Finally the Real Base (tm) is operational!

It will be really easy to scale it up when I will need it and with it I was able to set up a Vulcanite colony:

(Sorry for the missing concrete, I kept bringing insufficient quantities so it will have to wait until I send another load of nuclear cells).
Condenser turbines are a life saver, this and a 2x2 nuclear reactor can be supplied by a single delivery cannon until I will be able to send the more efficient water ice.

It's only supplying the glass production on Nauvis for now, but I needed it before I could go ahead and set up the next step of my plan:
Meet the planet Zombie.

The plan is to do all the copper, iron and steel smelting on site before shipping it back to Nauvis in ingot form, aiming for 8 blue belts of copper and iron and two of steel. It's a copper planet, so it has essentially infinite copper and enough iron to support 20 hours of continuous production of iron and steel, almost double once you factor in the vulcanite and productivity bonuses. Should be enough for the rest of the playthrough, worst case I guess I'll have the blueprints ready. The plan is to make rocket fuel onsite (there is plenty of oil) and to ship in the rocket parts. One rocket can carry enough parts for 23 (including capsules), so I feel like it's a good enough trade off, even though there is everything needed to produce the rocket parts on site my sanity refuses to do this.

 

[Demo.Graph]

You've almost made me start a run of it myself, but

my sanity refuses to do this.

 

[Jaedar]

One rocket can carry enough parts for 23 (including capsules), so I feel like it's a good enough trade off, even though there is everything needed to produce the rocket parts on site my sanity refuses to do this.

Shipping rocket parts one way and ingots the other seems very efficient. Especially when you get some decent rocket reusability and rocket safety techs.

 

[Haba]

I am really glad that this game is never on a proper discount.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

Are those curved walls?
nice very nice

 

[Andnjord]

Are those curved walls?
nice very nice

Of course! Grid aligned to please Demo.Graph and with complementary miss-placed wall to block the pipe connection between the two halves that I only discovered after laying down dozens of them!

 

[Andnjord]

The beast is alive...

Base now updated! I might get rid of the old furnace stacks, but I feel more comfortable knowing I have it as a back-up in case the logistics break down too hard.

And a shot of the iron and copper planet:

This base can send 250 000 plates of iron, copper or steel anywhere I put down a landing pad requesting it, all completely automated. It uses 1.4GW of power when running on all cilinders, hence why I had to just double up on my the nuclear reactor. I might create a tileable design later on, but in the meanwhile I've made an automated delivery cannon system that I can just copy and paste anywhere to make the nuclear cells on the spot.


Let me tell you though, sending these quantities of stuff all at once makes you reconsider what is a "sufficient" buffer. And that's just for one third of the furnace stacks. Glad I built a new base before embarking on this adventure, otherwise the waiting time to build all this stuff in the old base would have killed me.

Spoiler

Also, the presence of biter meteors on that planet made me decide on the following vulgar display productive of power that I'll be stamping down on all colonies:

Spoiler

That's right, I'll be sending in 10 000 anti meteor ammo at a time, fully automated in its supply so that I can just stamp this down and completely forget about it in the future!

Next up, at scale cryonite!

 

[Jaedar]

That's right, I'll be sending in 10 000 anti meteor ammo at a time, fully automated in its supply so that I can just stamp this down and completely forget about it in the future!

6 cannons is not enough.

 

[Andnjord]

That's right, I'll be sending in 10 000 anti meteor ammo at a time, fully automated in its supply so that I can just stamp this down and completely forget about it in the future!

6 cannons is not enough.

Oh well, now that I got past the mental block of “I’m not sending 10000 ammo at once” it will be trivial to just stamp down more cannons fed by bots.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Tried out the Warptorio mod. Basically you start with a tiny platform that warps to a new planet with everything on it (including you) periodically. The platform also generates insane amounts of pollution so you've got carte blanche to make the dirtiest mining operation ever on each new world, stirp what you can, then pick it back up and escape to your platform to warp out before the bugs eat you.


This shit is fucking impossible without some insane luck, I think. Or maybe just a ton of savescumming. Half the planets you warp to have biter nests within your initial cleared fog of war, meaning they'll be swarming you to the tune of hundreds of iron per minute worth of ammo within 5 minutes. Half the planets don't have iron or coal anywhere near your base, meaning you likely risk losing everything if you go out to gather it. In my best run so far, the game decided 'lol no fuck you' and made me go on a wild goose chase to retrieve a vital part, on a tundra world, while my base was attacked in the first five minutes, and the part ended up being inaccessible on a fucking island anyways.

It's a damned shame, because the premise is really fucking cool. But my god the balance is completely fucking retarded.

 

[Andnjord]

And boom, cryonite at scale! Finally I can make lvl3 effiency modules and not make massive nuclear reactors everywhere!
Also, I apparently really needed to set up a concrete rocket, at least it allowed me to test circuit controlled filter inserters.

And no, I refuse to turn it into glass and rocket that back to Nauvis.

The observant among you might have noticed that I, in fact, caved in and decided to turn the sand into glass and ship it to Nauvis. Mostly because there aren't ways to improve stone brick production (none that I can see at least) and I'd rather not have to constantly expand to new stone mines or god forbid set up a whole planet to stone production. I'll upgrade the Vulcanite planet to turn its stone and sand byproduct into bricks and glass too, it'll only send a rocket once in a blue moon (unlike cryonite that produces a ton of sand), but that'll be that much stone saved and I'll never have to worry about the landfill buffers filling up ever.

Spoiler

And yes, I am aware that the cryonite stacks are miss-aligned by one tile. Even my autism has limits and will not fly back there, stop production and wait 15 minutes for the bots to clean the belts and move the whole thing over.

 

[Andnjord]

Half the planets you warp to have biter nests within your initial cleared fog of war, meaning they'll be swarming you to the tune of hundreds of iron per minute worth of ammo within 5 minutes.

Why not set up your temporary bases and mines outside the initial pollution cloud? Or do the bitters attack the platform?

 

[Demo.Graph]

Half the planets you warp to have biter nests within your initial cleared fog of war, meaning they'll be swarming you to the tune of hundreds of iron per minute worth of ammo within 5 minutes.

Why not set up your temporary bases and mines outside the initial pollution cloud? Or do the bitters attack the platform?

Because you're on timer. After ~40 minutes (it changes with time) platform teleports away, leaving you, and everything that is not on a platform, behind. And you can't stay for too long because evo is amplified and medium biters appear at about 30-40 minutes in each world.

Also

there's a balance trick with ammo spending. At about 15-20 minutes in, zerg rush becomes frequent and large enough that biter slaying consumes all iron that you can feasibly mine. If you overstay in the world, you'll lose resources.

Platform constantly spawns a lot of pollution and triggers enlarged attacks.
It's still manageable, because you can either:
- warp manually, when zerg waves become too large.
- hide in the basement. Platform has a teleporter in the middle that ports you to your base on separate map(s). It's pretty small and has no resources, but can be expanded with research. It's assumed that all your permabuilding goes to this basement.
The trick is, there're no resources (including water initially, you can make several ponds later), so you'd better to have some tanks and barrels to spend your time with.

The mod is very manageable, Damned Registrations should git gud.
Or rather git back to piratez REEEEE.

Here's me, about 8h in the game. Spoilered for ppl who might want to discover mod mechanics by themselves.

Spoiler

Somewhat expanded central platform. As you can see, I went the way it was meant to be played - protecting the platform, without trying to perma-hide or build a base in the farlands (in Minecraft sense).
Top-left is current world info.
You can expand much quicker. I spent half the time was meditating and remaking the base for the sake of beauty.

You get those pseudo-labs that teleport you between platform and temporary resource expansions. They also teleport resources to your basement via that arrow-marked loader.

Somewhat expanded basement "factory floor". You have 3 or 4 floors (can't remember, since I've last played it about half a year ago). IIRC, this one should be the largest. It's not its final form, I still was at red-green tech level.

That's the lowest floor. I think, it's the smallest one, though, again, it will expand considerably with science.

Also, Nilaus had a video series, in which he abused the mechanics in a way that completely destroyed the spirit of Warptorio (he's an autist after all).

Spoiler

 

[Damned Registrations]

I think the version I'm playing is a bit newer and removed some of the cheesier things you can do. I don't start with a basement to hide in. If I could reach that point it'd be much, much easier. You also don't start with the ability to make labs, you have to repair a building that starts on the platform and costs ~500 iron ~200 copper and a fuckton of crafting time.

You could, in theory, walk out into the boonies (would take about 3 minutes just to leave the cloud depending on terrain) and set something up out there... but set up what? Best case scenario you find a large iron patch and brought hundreds of coal with you, and you end that level with an inventory of plates and belts instead of coal. Or you find water and gather nothing, just crafting/researching a bunch of stuff. But you could also spend 10 minutes, find nothing but copper and stone you don't need, then have to walk back empty handed. And this all becomes less practical as time goes on and stuff you want needs hundreds of plates instead of dozens.

Or rather git back to piratez REEEEE.

I really should. I'm dreading installing the new patch and trying to figure out that and what I had going already at the same time as relearning the controls and enemy stats.

 

[Damned Registrations]

This is a typical world. Thankfully, the AI seems a bit tweaked so they don't immediately fuck you up unless you've built something near them, not that you have much control over that. At least one the first world. Later that seems to fly out the window and they'll send dudes to wipe out a single boiler 7 tiles away. Not sure how much the platform generates, but by minute 15 or so the trees nearby were consuming 10k/m. And that was on a desert planet.

3 minutes after that last screenshot I'd reclaimed my mining operation and was sitting by the platform with nothing built, just crafting and mining rocks. Biters still came to swarm my ass. Also, the autowarp is only 20 minutes long to start.

Warping away early is an option, but the biter aggressiveness and dickishness of the worlds and random events seems to increase with time. By world ten you can have the warp button explode and fly off 4 minutes away in some random direction and need to go retreive it, assuming it's not on a god damned island. By that point you're clearly meant to have spent over an hour building up so you have a car and stacks of ammo and grenades. But if you get several bad warps in a row you fall behind and start needing to leave planets by the 5 minute mark.

Also, just realized I need to relearn how to fucking upload/post images. Whatever method I used before was clearly more efficient than what I just did.

Edit:
Just lost that run for basically exactly the reasons I described. The next 3 planets all had extremely near and aggressive biters and were attacking me at 3 minutes in in waves of 5+. Never even unlocked military 1 before it reached the point I had 20 on screen at once destroying my chest and spawn camping my body on the platform. I didn't even try mining on planet 4, that was just one boiler running a few labs and automators. Even if I had turrets at that point they'd be burning through over a hundred iron per minute I'm sure.

 

[Demo.Graph]

I think the version I'm playing is a bit newer and removed some of the cheesier things you can do. I don't start with a basement to hide in.

You never did.
Here're some screenies from my old saves in case you want some help and spoilers.

Spoiler

The start is typical.

20 minutes later. Biters had eaten my wreck!

This's my inventory at the 00:20 mark. No techs are researched, everything is handcrafted.
I think that I was running in circles around burner miners and encircled them with stone furnaces for impro walls. Picked everything up before warp.

World 2, 11 minutes in. I've researched automation, gun turrets, military, in process of researching warp mining 1.
No basement yet.
It's still 8 minutes until autowarp, I've warped manually, because zerg became too large to handle.

World 3, 18 minutes in, just before autowarp. I've researched warp mining 2, in process of warp mining 3.
Still no basement. I don't remember why I haven't warped manually, because those biters were seriously eating into my iron stocks. I think that I've tried to save jumps, because autowarp time increases after each jump.
I was still mining with burner miners only, and removed them all at the time of the screenshot, because it was impossible to protect them.

World 6, 11 minutes in. Finished warp mining 3 and warp platform upgrade (extension), in process of researching warp factory floor (first basement).
I've no idea what I've been doing in worlds 4-5. Probably stockpiled resources for warp platform extension and played with various turret-assembler designs.
Also note that I store steam in pipes. Cute! Cute!

World 7, 28 minutes in. I think it was a random world without biters and resources, so I've spent half an hour researching stuff using stockpiled resources.
Got warp factory floor (first basement), heavy armor, warp reactor 1, steel, steel axe.
Here's my first basement.

The subsequent warps were more or less stable. You warp in, rush to resources and place turrets, then gather everything back and warp out.

But yeah, there was no need to repair stuff before. You only had to research the basement.

Edit. I've checked and you're probably playing with warptorio expansion. This one does add repairable platform thingie, missions, etc.

 

[Perkel]

I recommend everyone to try pyanodon full set. Frankly speaking even bob's angels combo still operate withing factorio default mode where hand making stuff can still get you somewhere. Pyanodon outright rejects that approach and without scale you will not get anywhere. Even basic circuits feels like actual challenge.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I managed to unlock the basement yesterday. It required running out into the wilderness to chase a signal (3 times, the first 2 were blocked by massive bodies of water) for a few minutes, finding a broken thing to repair, returning to base to hurriedly craft the stuff (I need 160 repair kits... it basically wiped out my resource stockpile) then running back out there to feed it, then defending it from attacks for 2 minutes before making my way back. Honestly surprised I managed it. It's an immense help having a safe spot to store resources and have science and automators working but... I still feel like I'm in a death spiral. Enemies are just so insanely aggressive at this point, I actually completely ran out of ammo at one point trying to defend the platform. I've managed to get a bit of ammo going again, but I really need a proper ~15 minute stay on some iron and coal patches to get a stockpile to work with again. I've noticed that even in these later zones though, you sometimes get fairly peaceful ones. Must be down to random placement of hives. The basement tech unlocks a host of other useful stuff as well, so if I can get research going I might get momentum in my favour.

 

[Demo.Graph]

I still feel like I'm in a death spiral. Enemies are just so insanely aggressive at this point, I actually completely ran out of ammo at one point trying to defend the platform. ... I've noticed that even in these later zones though, you sometimes get fairly peaceful ones. Must be down to random placement of hives.

Probably yes. I've ran a test game of warp3+exp (that you're probably playing).
First run, all was well at Nauvis. Only 12-15 small biters came during the first 20 minutes. I've managed to get 1 second late to the warp, literally 1 second, because of some dumb tree, reloaded 15 min autosave... And after a couple of minutes got about 20 exploding biters out of nowhere.
I've reloaded several more times and the results were very random. Sometimes there were waves of gimmicks, sometimes nothing.

I'd say that the Warp3 isn't difficult per se, but rather badly balanced.
I also don't dig the change of tone. Warp2 was more like eurogame, warp3 is ameritrash (more aggro, more gimmicks). I think that Myst, etc. should be more euro in style. Or maybe I'm already too old for this shit.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Run has continued struggling along. I like the extra missions required to unlock tech in this, they make things interesting. If all I had to do was eat resources and move along it'd get tedious, I think. I do think it could stand to tone down the aggression. Explosive biters in particular are pretty horseshit to be dealing with before you even unlock walls.

I unlocked the teleporter and warp logistics and wasted quite a few warps before figuring out how they all work and how to best use them. On warp ~30 now and just had to escape the last planet by hiding in the basement while all my surface stuff died due to lack of ammo. I'm feeling optimistic though; I've got ~2k iron ore stashed in the basement smelting right now, and ~2k copper plates too. I should be able to reach fluid storage tanks with that, which will be a massive game changer as far as I'm concerned, since it'll let me stockpile power to use on barren worlds or even just during the remaining ~10 minutes after the surface is totally fucked. Which in turn means I can focus entirely on resource mining and exploration at the start of each area. I got a mission for the warp harvester tech on the last planet too, all I had to do was drive a car back to base. It's slow and can't reverse but there were no biters on the way and it was pretty close. This is where the car spawned:

Mother. Fucker.

If the run dies I think I'll try again. Trying harder to get the technologies faster seems like it would help a ton, the teleporter and warp logistics were total gamechangers, I can't imagine what having a reactor, boiler, turrets, harvesters or even just some extra god damned space would do for me.

Edit: Run died. I tried to recover a part and forgot the zone had doubles evolution rate. Tier 2 enemies showed up and tore me apart, and since I wasn't even trying to defend my main base I died instantlly on respawn, no way to retrieve the corpse. RIP. Mostly my fault for forgetting about the extra evolution but I was also clearly way behind the curve at that point. Shame, I had just finished fluid handling and would have been able to easily hunker down in my basement and do research/manufacturing until the forced warp in each area. Hopefully I can get another run off the ground quickly as well and this one wasn't a total fluke.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Tried several more runs, I can get to zone ~15 pretty consistently if I try (and I scum for a good first zone) but not a single attempt where I managed to complete a mission and unlock a warp tech. Problems include:

The mission I did to get the factory floor unlock before now required 213 steel, instead of 153 repair kits. Not having invested 1000+ iron in useless steel, I couldn't get it.

The mission to power the reactor now requires 8 steam engines running full blast for 100 seconds, instead of like, 1 for 50. Despite massively overpreparing for what I expected the challenge to be, I ran out of ammo at about 80% charge.

Runs where every 3rd level was either ocean or barren, preventing me from gathering any fucking resources.

Magical fucking biter swarms of 50+ out of nowhere after total radio silence or packs of 2 at a time for 10 minutes, utterly overwhelming my defenses. Got to watch them despawn in front of my eyes after killing me. That's GOT to be some scripted horseshit.

Respawning to get spawn camped by my own fucking turret, now under enemy control apparently. Sure, that seems fair why not.

Having the warp start itself with a 1 minute countdown when I'm 3 minutes away from the base looking for a mission site.



The concept is so fucking compelling, finding critical random technology unlocks by doing challenging missions on random worlds. But you just constantly get dickpunched when you do anything except farm iron to replace ammo for like 4 minutes and then move on. It takes like 2-3 zones to amass enough resources to attempt a mission and then if it fails you're back to square one with nothing saved up except now the enemies are scaling faster. And now that I've got a handle on the early game it feels really fucking tedious to keep doing it after a run is ruined. When played properly basically nothing interesting happens for the first hour or so.

 

[Hellraiser]

Seems you will now be able to perform Biter abortions on an industrial scale (embedding doesn't work):

https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-431-biter-eggs.mp4

Biter captivity​

Bioflux is a combination of processed Yumako and Jellynut. It's crafted on Gleba and it can be used to capture biter spawners on Nauvis.

A capture robot loaded with doses of Bioflux solution and is shot from a rocket launcher. The capture robot latches onto a spawner and soon enough the spawner is rendered harmless and docile.

Once captured, the spawner no longer hatches biters, and biter eggs can be collected with inserters for further processing or disposal.

As long as you keep feeding it Bioflux in frequent intervals, the spawner will remain that way. Otherwise it 'goes rogue' and returns back to its natural form, spawning hostile biters again.

Biter eggs can be immediately used for improvements to agriculture, crafting Productivity module 3, or because we felt like the Gleba unlocks aren't motivating us enough...

Combined with some other items, the egg can be grown and hatched into a mutated laboratory.

The Biolab can be used only on Nauvis as the organism inside would die on other planets, but in turn it only consumes half the amount of science packs for any given research. It can process all science packs just like the normal lab. It also has 4 slots for modules.

This means it's a powerful unlock and obtaining it early on should feel quite rewarding. Whether we finally broke the imbalance of Vulcanus and Fulgora being clearly superior to Gleba, we will see - but at least the difference is much, much less stark now.

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-431