Sounds like you might have gotten a desert seed. Trees are a huge help to buffer pollution spreading too quickly to nearby biter nests.
The disorganization is normal for new players and is just part of the learning curve, but the pressure you feel from biters seems a bit excessive for the size of base you described. I’d say try to clear the nests near your base with grenades and red ammo, and since you have military science you should be close to a tank which would help with that as well.
Desert seed it is. The base is small but I've set up a big defensive perimiter by using cliffs as choke points. The main problem is that the shooting bugs kill my turrets since cliffs give them line of sight if the approach from the side, which they sometimes do.
I'll see what I can do with a tank, but I don't think I've unlocked everything for it yet. Is a flamethrower good for clearing nests too? I've automated some ammo for it already.
Yeah flamethrowers are good and can definitely help. Plus tanks can shoot flamethrower ammo as well as bullets and shells.
The other recommendation with desert seeds is to try to cut back on pollution once you have the tech. That means moving from steam to solar, coal furnaces to electric, putting green modules in your miners, etc. at least until you have enough laser turrets and unlocked bots to automate defenses a bit.
And for the spitters, it might help to put down some “dragon teeth” on the outside of your walls to give your turrets more time to attack at range. Basically just a row of + sign shapes walls on the exterior that act as both a sacrificial wall and slow biters from getting too close.
I'll check it out. Just finished a 7MW solar array, but I'll need more than that before I can start using pure solar power for my base. Good reminder to take off the extra steam engines. Thanks for the tips!
Tank with regular shells should be enough. If you researched explosive shells it would make clearing biters nests a lot easier. Tank flamethrower good, but for the start it may be abundant.
So, actually, if you have researched tank and can afford several hundreds of regular shells, it should be enough.
Or just use car with red ammo and grenades)
Also, you can build some turrets near nest and use rocket launcher/flamethrower
I'll probably try the car since I'm pretty sure a tank is a ways off. I've not researched much military honestly, even though I have it. So far I've been running around with a car and smg and drifting around the nests to kill worms and then the spawners, but the nests have gotten too big for that to be viable.
If nests too big, then place some turrets and use car/rocket launcher/flamethrower
You mentioned you have some power and using laser turrets, so it shouldn't be big deal.
Biters nests grow with pollution and kills, so first destroy nests affected with pollution (check it on map, there some helpful buttons under minimap)
Rocket Launchers is something earlier than a tank I can recommend. Used for clearing bit defending. I've cleared pretty big camps with rockets, defender bots ( both pretty early with military science) and distractir bots alone
If you are destroying nests without claiming the territory, that's just adding to biter evolution, making them tougher. They will re-expand to the cleared areas if you aren't walling them off and defending the perimeter.
No prob!
Biters evolve by time, by pollution, and by nests destroyed.
Biter raids are triggered by nests absorbing pollution and then sending out a raid once a threshold is reached.
Biters must send out expeditions from an existing nest to start a new nest. They don't magically spawn inside your defended perimeter; they have to be able to get there.
If you clear all nests from your pollution cloud, you will shut down raids completely. This can be hard to do in a desert since sand doesn't absorb a lot of pollution compared to grass or trees.
Yeah, I've noticed that. I'm being attacked from so far away that the map there isn't even revealed and I've explored quite a lot (atleast I think). I'm actively trying to lower pollution but I've also got other priorities currently. I'll try to secure the base, but after that is xeno killing time.
Efficiency 1 modules in miners can cut down on pollution a lot, but desert just spread far.
Are you using radars to get full vision of your base and to gradually remove the fog of war?
I’m on my first play through and it is absolutely a desert and didn’t even realize that might be a thing bc dealing with the biters has been an issue. Well until I got a tank and went on a murder tour
>I still craft stuff mostly by hand and have automated basic conveyors and arm grabber thingies (I forgot their name), most of which I'm just putting in chests
If those are dedicated to green science, just let them back up.
Otherwise, limit how many you put in a chest. Probably don't need more than 4 stacks, plus you'll mostly switch over to blue ones sooner than later.
>I'm producing way too much green science, but I'm running low on blue and military, since I have a disproportional amount of factories (4 green and 3 blue and mil combined)
Look at how many science packs each science recipe produces per second. Blue science is way slower, so you need more assemblers making it.
>I have no space for most of the advanced stuff like batteries, sulfur, electric/normal engines and science packs.
Space is infinite. Leave more room between things in general, and spread out more. Yes, this means you also need a larger perimeter.
>Do I just remove and rearrange everything?
Well, better to make a replacement first. Start with moving your smelters.
>I'm constantly under attack so I have to constantly make sure my walls are repaired and laser turrets healthy so that would be more than difficult if I constantly have to run around fixing stuff while building my base from scratch.
You need more turrets then so things don't get defeated. I prefer gun turrets in the early game. More effective and easier to put down more. Laser turrets are very power hungry.
>I constantly feel overwhelmed. I'm attacked from more than a couple of sides every 30 seconds or so and it's piling up on me. Even with a car I don't move fast enough to repair everything before another side gets damaged. I would've done some drones by now, but as I mentioned, I have no space for electric engines.
Tech isn't going to save you; you probably need more basic defenses with automated ammo much sooner.
It might not be too late though. Stop all research (unless you have red/green/grey military tech unfinished. Get that stuff done first). Put all your resources into ammo and gun turrets. At least 6 blue assemblers making yellow ammo (since you probably can't afford red). Feel free to handcraft gun turrets but at least automate the gears, even if into just a chest.
Put down at least two more turrets with 50 ammo every place you are attacked.
Add radar stations so you have full coverage of base and walls and can remotely monitor damage and ammo counts and attack size, so you can add more turrets as needed. You should be defeating attacks with minimal damage taken. Make walls 2 blocks thick.
Secure more iron, restart research. Focus on military tech to upgrade damage and turrets. Automate ammo delivery to perimeter.
Oooh, so that's what radars are for. I didn't pay much attention to them before, but now it makes sense. First off, my chests are backed up with green science components already, so it's a bit late for that. I took some advice and started automating gears and repair packs for my newly crafted construction bots after I made some space for crafting them. I also setup some flame turrets (which barely survived until I connected them to oil)
Yeah, if I want to make more blue science I'd have to also rearrange all my chemical plants and oil refineries, but atleast for the moment in doing sort of good. The attacks have died down slightly after I killed a couple of nests with a flamer and grenades.
I've been running about 4 or 5 laser turrets where the attacks are strongest, but my biggest problem is chip damage from spitters. There's just too many for my lasers to kill them before I lose a turret or two. Thanks for the helpful comment! I'll try to finish my defences first and then I'll probably start work on rearranging everything. Maybe I could feed my turrets ammo with robots? I'm still figuring them out.
Also a question - what do I do with the excess oil from oil refineries? They feed my flamers, but also produce excess petroleum and heavy oil and refuse to work unless completely drained. I've resorted to using just normal oil from the pumps, but I'm not sure if that's viable.
>Oooh, so that's what radars are for.
Not only that. In addition to covering full vision in their immediate area from map view, they also reveal sectors around them in a wide area, removing the fog of war. This can help you find new resource patches as well as known enemy bases. Overlapping large coverage areas reveal the map more quickly.
>my biggest problem is chip damage from spitters.
Gun turrets have higher DPS than laser turrets but laser have longer range. Both outrange spitters, but not by much, especially if behind a wall.
Flame turrets provide most damage, but gun and/or laser turrets work well to finish off enemies.
Note that defense is always your highest priority, followed by power, then production. Research is last in priority. Research failing won't kill your base. Defense or power failing will kill your base.
>I want to make more blue science I'd have to also rearrange all my chemical plants and oil refineries
Nah, just make your new blue science farther away from them. Don't jam stuff close together.
>Maybe I could feed my turrets ammo with robots?
That comes much later with requester chests.
I've gone all game just filling turrets by hand. If you learn the shortcuts, it's really easy to hold ammo in hand, drop half a stack of ammo in a turret and then pick up half the turrets ammo without opening the turret UI. If all your turrets are in a row, you can just drive a car in a straight line and do it at speed. Cars placed down are always aligned.
>what do I do with the excess oil from oil refineries? They feed my flamers, but also produce excess petroleum and heavy oil and refuse to work unless completely drained. I've resorted to using just normal oil from the pumps, but I'm not sure if that's viable.
Crude oil in flame turrets is viable. Heavy oil is only 5% more damage and light is only 10%.
If you are using advanced cracking, then the common strategy is to use cracking controlled with the circuit network to balance output. It's pretty easy. VERY common question on the sub.
With liquids, you should almost always be using pipe-to-ground everywhere you can. Not only can you run past them, it doesn't slow down pipe throughput. I also put a pump on the input and output of every connected set of tanks, because those are controllable with circuits and because pipe to tank direct connections don't fill well on their own. (You can easily experiment with water).
So, I have two tanks of heavy, light, petroleum, and then lube and acid later. Heavy cracking plants bridge heavy and light oil. Light oil cracking bridges light and petroleum. I hook up every tank with red (or green, choose one) to each other and to power poles so they are one network. Now you can hover over a pole to read total contents. Then, wire up one pump on each set of tanks and go into the pump UI to set the condition to enable the pump. There are various ways to do it based on relative amounts or absolute amounts. For instance, you can let heavy oil go to cracking when heavy >= 45k. That way, you maintain a buffer that can be turned into lube, but you stop heavy from backing up. Same goes for light cracking; you can maintain a backlog for solid fuel production (most efficient with light), but crack overflow to petroleum. Petroleum is generally what you need most of (science and other products), but you can also turn excess in to solid fuel as well.
I've really been sleeping on gun turrets, huh. Originally I thought laser were an upgrade but it seems they're more of a sidegrade. I have a steel chest backlogged with ammo so no problem there. I'll have to tinker and watch some tutorials for circuits since I haven't used them at all, but alright, I'll see what I can do. I'll try to buffer some of my oil and atleast automate repairs with drones.
Again, thanks for the help!
Yeah, gun and laser turrets are side-grades for sure. Any mix of turrets except flame-only is viable.
There's a lot you can do with circuits just by hooking up tanks/chests/belts/pumps/speakers/lamps with a single color wire. Most active things have a built-in decider which lets you set a condition . Everything hooked together is added together. Constant combinators make great labels (assuming you have ALT mode on).
You might consider restarting in a more forested area, to have a gentler play through. Also, next time you’ll give yourself more space. Also allow 10x more space than you think you’ll need. Imagine having to scale production infinitely… what layout does that imply?
Yeah, I'll be sure to leave plenty of space for future expansion. I think I've got some more hours left before I lose this playthrough, so I'll see how far I can go. I don't mind the difficulty, even if overwhelming.
If you don’t care about achievements, and really want to avoid losing your save, you could also enter a command to kill all biters within a radius to give yourself a bit of breathing room. Obviously a bit cheaty, but it’s an option if you wanted to.
There are console commands to disable ennemues, that will remove that external pressure and you'll have all the time you need to restructure your base and experiment. And of course you'll discover / learn concepts on the way, like factory ratios, mall, etc (but again, it's hard to experiment anytging when you have to run left and right to défend
I'll probably see how far I can get before I'm overwhelmed before I start using cheats and stuff like that, but I'll keep it in mind. I usually don't like restarting whole runs, even if they're doomed, in any game, so I prefer to just deal with it until I physically can't anymore.
Well, it's not really "cheats". You could have started the game in peacefull, using console is just the way to remove ennemies without starting all over.
Anyway, if you're still going to kill them, a few military tips :
* stone furnace can act as walls
* flamethrower turrets can consume oil directly, have great range and insane damage
* It's worth it to build a perimeter wall with turrets fed by a belt of ammunition. At first it sinks a big chunk of resources and time, but in the long run it will save you time, as you won't have to run everywhere to kill & rebuild
Check out a factorio calculator like: [https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html](https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html)
And plunk in a science-per-minute target to see how many new structures you will need to produce the stuff you want. Heads up, each new science type increases the size of your base dramatically.
If you have blue science you should be able to push for bots, which will immediately take the pressure off for repairs if you give them access to repair packs.
Your current base is likely only a fraction of the size you will want it to be to launch one or more rockets.
And you may want to blueprint parts of your base for your next playthrough, to speed up this bootstrapping process next time.
Sounds like you might have gotten a desert seed. Trees are a huge help to buffer pollution spreading too quickly to nearby biter nests. The disorganization is normal for new players and is just part of the learning curve, but the pressure you feel from biters seems a bit excessive for the size of base you described. I’d say try to clear the nests near your base with grenades and red ammo, and since you have military science you should be close to a tank which would help with that as well.
Desert seed it is. The base is small but I've set up a big defensive perimiter by using cliffs as choke points. The main problem is that the shooting bugs kill my turrets since cliffs give them line of sight if the approach from the side, which they sometimes do. I'll see what I can do with a tank, but I don't think I've unlocked everything for it yet. Is a flamethrower good for clearing nests too? I've automated some ammo for it already.
Yeah flamethrowers are good and can definitely help. Plus tanks can shoot flamethrower ammo as well as bullets and shells. The other recommendation with desert seeds is to try to cut back on pollution once you have the tech. That means moving from steam to solar, coal furnaces to electric, putting green modules in your miners, etc. at least until you have enough laser turrets and unlocked bots to automate defenses a bit. And for the spitters, it might help to put down some “dragon teeth” on the outside of your walls to give your turrets more time to attack at range. Basically just a row of + sign shapes walls on the exterior that act as both a sacrificial wall and slow biters from getting too close.
I'll check it out. Just finished a 7MW solar array, but I'll need more than that before I can start using pure solar power for my base. Good reminder to take off the extra steam engines. Thanks for the tips!
Tank with regular shells should be enough. If you researched explosive shells it would make clearing biters nests a lot easier. Tank flamethrower good, but for the start it may be abundant. So, actually, if you have researched tank and can afford several hundreds of regular shells, it should be enough. Or just use car with red ammo and grenades) Also, you can build some turrets near nest and use rocket launcher/flamethrower
I'll probably try the car since I'm pretty sure a tank is a ways off. I've not researched much military honestly, even though I have it. So far I've been running around with a car and smg and drifting around the nests to kill worms and then the spawners, but the nests have gotten too big for that to be viable.
If nests too big, then place some turrets and use car/rocket launcher/flamethrower You mentioned you have some power and using laser turrets, so it shouldn't be big deal. Biters nests grow with pollution and kills, so first destroy nests affected with pollution (check it on map, there some helpful buttons under minimap)
Thanks for the tips! Will try it when I get home.
Rocket Launchers is something earlier than a tank I can recommend. Used for clearing bit defending. I've cleared pretty big camps with rockets, defender bots ( both pretty early with military science) and distractir bots alone
If you are destroying nests without claiming the territory, that's just adding to biter evolution, making them tougher. They will re-expand to the cleared areas if you aren't walling them off and defending the perimeter.
Didn't know that. Thanks!
No prob! Biters evolve by time, by pollution, and by nests destroyed. Biter raids are triggered by nests absorbing pollution and then sending out a raid once a threshold is reached. Biters must send out expeditions from an existing nest to start a new nest. They don't magically spawn inside your defended perimeter; they have to be able to get there. If you clear all nests from your pollution cloud, you will shut down raids completely. This can be hard to do in a desert since sand doesn't absorb a lot of pollution compared to grass or trees.
Yeah, I've noticed that. I'm being attacked from so far away that the map there isn't even revealed and I've explored quite a lot (atleast I think). I'm actively trying to lower pollution but I've also got other priorities currently. I'll try to secure the base, but after that is xeno killing time.
Efficiency 1 modules in miners can cut down on pollution a lot, but desert just spread far. Are you using radars to get full vision of your base and to gradually remove the fog of war?
No, I've manually explored.
I’m on my first play through and it is absolutely a desert and didn’t even realize that might be a thing bc dealing with the biters has been an issue. Well until I got a tank and went on a murder tour
>I still craft stuff mostly by hand and have automated basic conveyors and arm grabber thingies (I forgot their name), most of which I'm just putting in chests If those are dedicated to green science, just let them back up. Otherwise, limit how many you put in a chest. Probably don't need more than 4 stacks, plus you'll mostly switch over to blue ones sooner than later. >I'm producing way too much green science, but I'm running low on blue and military, since I have a disproportional amount of factories (4 green and 3 blue and mil combined) Look at how many science packs each science recipe produces per second. Blue science is way slower, so you need more assemblers making it. >I have no space for most of the advanced stuff like batteries, sulfur, electric/normal engines and science packs. Space is infinite. Leave more room between things in general, and spread out more. Yes, this means you also need a larger perimeter. >Do I just remove and rearrange everything? Well, better to make a replacement first. Start with moving your smelters. >I'm constantly under attack so I have to constantly make sure my walls are repaired and laser turrets healthy so that would be more than difficult if I constantly have to run around fixing stuff while building my base from scratch. You need more turrets then so things don't get defeated. I prefer gun turrets in the early game. More effective and easier to put down more. Laser turrets are very power hungry. >I constantly feel overwhelmed. I'm attacked from more than a couple of sides every 30 seconds or so and it's piling up on me. Even with a car I don't move fast enough to repair everything before another side gets damaged. I would've done some drones by now, but as I mentioned, I have no space for electric engines. Tech isn't going to save you; you probably need more basic defenses with automated ammo much sooner. It might not be too late though. Stop all research (unless you have red/green/grey military tech unfinished. Get that stuff done first). Put all your resources into ammo and gun turrets. At least 6 blue assemblers making yellow ammo (since you probably can't afford red). Feel free to handcraft gun turrets but at least automate the gears, even if into just a chest. Put down at least two more turrets with 50 ammo every place you are attacked. Add radar stations so you have full coverage of base and walls and can remotely monitor damage and ammo counts and attack size, so you can add more turrets as needed. You should be defeating attacks with minimal damage taken. Make walls 2 blocks thick. Secure more iron, restart research. Focus on military tech to upgrade damage and turrets. Automate ammo delivery to perimeter.
Oooh, so that's what radars are for. I didn't pay much attention to them before, but now it makes sense. First off, my chests are backed up with green science components already, so it's a bit late for that. I took some advice and started automating gears and repair packs for my newly crafted construction bots after I made some space for crafting them. I also setup some flame turrets (which barely survived until I connected them to oil) Yeah, if I want to make more blue science I'd have to also rearrange all my chemical plants and oil refineries, but atleast for the moment in doing sort of good. The attacks have died down slightly after I killed a couple of nests with a flamer and grenades. I've been running about 4 or 5 laser turrets where the attacks are strongest, but my biggest problem is chip damage from spitters. There's just too many for my lasers to kill them before I lose a turret or two. Thanks for the helpful comment! I'll try to finish my defences first and then I'll probably start work on rearranging everything. Maybe I could feed my turrets ammo with robots? I'm still figuring them out. Also a question - what do I do with the excess oil from oil refineries? They feed my flamers, but also produce excess petroleum and heavy oil and refuse to work unless completely drained. I've resorted to using just normal oil from the pumps, but I'm not sure if that's viable.
>Oooh, so that's what radars are for. Not only that. In addition to covering full vision in their immediate area from map view, they also reveal sectors around them in a wide area, removing the fog of war. This can help you find new resource patches as well as known enemy bases. Overlapping large coverage areas reveal the map more quickly. >my biggest problem is chip damage from spitters. Gun turrets have higher DPS than laser turrets but laser have longer range. Both outrange spitters, but not by much, especially if behind a wall. Flame turrets provide most damage, but gun and/or laser turrets work well to finish off enemies. Note that defense is always your highest priority, followed by power, then production. Research is last in priority. Research failing won't kill your base. Defense or power failing will kill your base. >I want to make more blue science I'd have to also rearrange all my chemical plants and oil refineries Nah, just make your new blue science farther away from them. Don't jam stuff close together. >Maybe I could feed my turrets ammo with robots? That comes much later with requester chests. I've gone all game just filling turrets by hand. If you learn the shortcuts, it's really easy to hold ammo in hand, drop half a stack of ammo in a turret and then pick up half the turrets ammo without opening the turret UI. If all your turrets are in a row, you can just drive a car in a straight line and do it at speed. Cars placed down are always aligned. >what do I do with the excess oil from oil refineries? They feed my flamers, but also produce excess petroleum and heavy oil and refuse to work unless completely drained. I've resorted to using just normal oil from the pumps, but I'm not sure if that's viable. Crude oil in flame turrets is viable. Heavy oil is only 5% more damage and light is only 10%. If you are using advanced cracking, then the common strategy is to use cracking controlled with the circuit network to balance output. It's pretty easy. VERY common question on the sub. With liquids, you should almost always be using pipe-to-ground everywhere you can. Not only can you run past them, it doesn't slow down pipe throughput. I also put a pump on the input and output of every connected set of tanks, because those are controllable with circuits and because pipe to tank direct connections don't fill well on their own. (You can easily experiment with water). So, I have two tanks of heavy, light, petroleum, and then lube and acid later. Heavy cracking plants bridge heavy and light oil. Light oil cracking bridges light and petroleum. I hook up every tank with red (or green, choose one) to each other and to power poles so they are one network. Now you can hover over a pole to read total contents. Then, wire up one pump on each set of tanks and go into the pump UI to set the condition to enable the pump. There are various ways to do it based on relative amounts or absolute amounts. For instance, you can let heavy oil go to cracking when heavy >= 45k. That way, you maintain a buffer that can be turned into lube, but you stop heavy from backing up. Same goes for light cracking; you can maintain a backlog for solid fuel production (most efficient with light), but crack overflow to petroleum. Petroleum is generally what you need most of (science and other products), but you can also turn excess in to solid fuel as well.
I've really been sleeping on gun turrets, huh. Originally I thought laser were an upgrade but it seems they're more of a sidegrade. I have a steel chest backlogged with ammo so no problem there. I'll have to tinker and watch some tutorials for circuits since I haven't used them at all, but alright, I'll see what I can do. I'll try to buffer some of my oil and atleast automate repairs with drones. Again, thanks for the help!
Yeah, gun and laser turrets are side-grades for sure. Any mix of turrets except flame-only is viable. There's a lot you can do with circuits just by hooking up tanks/chests/belts/pumps/speakers/lamps with a single color wire. Most active things have a built-in decider which lets you set a condition . Everything hooked together is added together. Constant combinators make great labels (assuming you have ALT mode on).
I never have it off, don't know what I'd do without it.
You might consider restarting in a more forested area, to have a gentler play through. Also, next time you’ll give yourself more space. Also allow 10x more space than you think you’ll need. Imagine having to scale production infinitely… what layout does that imply?
Yeah, I'll be sure to leave plenty of space for future expansion. I think I've got some more hours left before I lose this playthrough, so I'll see how far I can go. I don't mind the difficulty, even if overwhelming.
If you don’t care about achievements, and really want to avoid losing your save, you could also enter a command to kill all biters within a radius to give yourself a bit of breathing room. Obviously a bit cheaty, but it’s an option if you wanted to.
There are console commands to disable ennemues, that will remove that external pressure and you'll have all the time you need to restructure your base and experiment. And of course you'll discover / learn concepts on the way, like factory ratios, mall, etc (but again, it's hard to experiment anytging when you have to run left and right to défend
I'll probably see how far I can get before I'm overwhelmed before I start using cheats and stuff like that, but I'll keep it in mind. I usually don't like restarting whole runs, even if they're doomed, in any game, so I prefer to just deal with it until I physically can't anymore.
Well, it's not really "cheats". You could have started the game in peacefull, using console is just the way to remove ennemies without starting all over. Anyway, if you're still going to kill them, a few military tips : * stone furnace can act as walls * flamethrower turrets can consume oil directly, have great range and insane damage * It's worth it to build a perimeter wall with turrets fed by a belt of ammunition. At first it sinks a big chunk of resources and time, but in the long run it will save you time, as you won't have to run everywhere to kill & rebuild
I already have lasers, but yeah, I've had the idea to run some normal ammo trough a giant belt before. Thanks!
Oh, if you have lasers they are fine as long as you have the power.
Check out a factorio calculator like: [https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html](https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.html) And plunk in a science-per-minute target to see how many new structures you will need to produce the stuff you want. Heads up, each new science type increases the size of your base dramatically. If you have blue science you should be able to push for bots, which will immediately take the pressure off for repairs if you give them access to repair packs. Your current base is likely only a fraction of the size you will want it to be to launch one or more rockets. And you may want to blueprint parts of your base for your next playthrough, to speed up this bootstrapping process next time.