Wait, I can explain. The factory must grow
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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Well you should not have chewed up my power plant when I got here and I would have built my rocket and been on my way. It was your choice to run into my wall and get roasted by the flame thrower turret.
Yeah, the giant cloud of pollution choking your people is entirely a coincidence what the fuck guys
If the pollution bothered them so much, why do they building nests in it? That sounds like their problem ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They don't build nests in pollution. The are forced out of the ground because of the pollution and try to make the source stop polluting any further.
They can move into pollution free zones. Not my fault that the bugs are lazy and can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I've got an industry to run!
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I mean, the aliens in Factorio aren't sapient afaik. They're just aggressive predators. 🤷♂️
I don't even feel bad about polluting their planet. Fuck those bugs.
sapient
This is some human supremacist language
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Look I'm not proud of it but I did what I had to survive. I swear I switched to clean energy, stuffed green productivity chips in everything, and stopped my territory expansion after the continent was secured. That's more consideration than they deserve if I'm honest they're a bunch of savage bugs that probably don't even have a hive mind let alone sentience.
Not played Space Age and ground up their eggs into prod modules then I take it?
That's a neat mechanic, needing to use the alien life for production. It kinda reminds me of the old days when you had to gather alien artifacts from destroyed nests as a resource.
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Stellaris
Currently playing the Star Trek total conversion mod (which is excellent btw). Last night, as the Romulans, I took about half of the Federation's territory in a war including Earth and genocided about 50 billion people. Everyone except for my cousin species the Vulcans. They get to be slaves.
Everyone is a temporarily inconvenienced genocidal dictator in waiting.
Oh yes, the game where I say "This time I will build tall and focus on diplomacy and alliance building", before it inevitably devolves into science rush into a military buildup to carry out a century-long xenophopic extermination campaign to rid the galaxy of the alien race who wronged me.
Let's be xenophobic, it's really in this year
That's the great thing about the latest update, you can genuinely stay in your corner and be peaceful and when that criminal syndicate on the other side of the galaxy wrongs you, you can just infiltrate the governments of the empires with the strongest militaries to goad them into a proxy war against that criminal syndicate.
Though as someone chronically bad at being evil in stellaris I usually end up just using it to make everyone focuse the crisis aspirants before they can snowball.
The bugs always attack first in my worlds and they never stop. They virtually force me to send them into extension as a matter of self preservation.
They attack first because you are polluting their home though.
TheFactorymademedoit
I am polluting their home to produce more weapons to exterminate them
That's pretty much how the game is designed.
With that said, I always thought it would be a bit interesting in Factorio if the bugs were at first neutral towards the player and only got hostile after the player started polluting too much or chopped down too many trees.
Aside from chopping too many trees, that's already how the game works. I don't remember where exactly it is but there's a button somewhere around the minimap or map UI to toggle whether you see a bunch of things on the map like robots, player names, your power lines, trains, and of course pollution.
The pollution toggle is pretty helpful for figuring out where alien bases are beyond the reach of your radars because they absorb pollution and organize attacks after they go above a certain threshold. Since they absorb it, if you see a gap or dip in the pollution for a particular area, there's likely a base there.
You could theoretically make the chopping trees prompting attacks part work too by making a mod where each tree cut down produces a small burst of pollution, assuming of course that a mod like that doesn't already exist.
Edit: when you set up a new save in the world settings you can adjust some of these thresholds and values. You can make the aliens more or less likely to attack, the terrain absorb more or less pollution naturally, the pollution spread more quickly or more slowly, etc.
Edit 2: just remembered that you can check every machine and they'll tell you how much pollution it produces as well. There's even a few mods that include machines with negative pollution production. I used those mods at one point in a previous save to make a fairly large base that didn't have any turrets despite a significant alien presence on all sides of my base. I simply made sure that no pollution ever could spread beyond my metaphoric wall and had several hundred hours of play without a single attack.
Don't the trees already help by absorbing some amount of pollution? If tree is gone, it stops absorbing, thus pollution rises.
They do indeed, that being said in a roundabout way and assuming normal gameplay. Technically speaking if you weren't producing any pollution then you could destroy every tree on the map and wouldn't prompt the aliens to attack until you got to the trees close to their bases. Destroying trees in the base game simply allows for less pollution to be absorbed before it slowly creeps towards alien bases.
The amount they absorb is already small enough that it can easily be overcome hence why pollution can escape forests and why you can receive attacks from aliens in the forests, but it's still larger than the terrain pollution generation and those small amounts add up as spreads farther.
My suggestion was more about creating a more direct response from the aliens. Instead of allowing a little more pollution to spread potentially towards them, it would create more pollution thus bring able to directly prompt an attack if too many trees are destroyed.
The only thing I'm not certain about is I believe pollution has data about where it came from and I believe aliens target the biggest source of the pollution that prompted their attack. If this is how they work and you then added destroying trees to this list of potential sources of pollution then the aliens would be prompted to attack a clearing a trees with nothing in it. Presumably assuming normal gameplay the player would be destroying these trees so they could make way for something they'd be building there, so those buildings could be attacked, but still it would then be theoretically possible to have them scramble to attack nothing. And you could also prompt these attacks remotely with artillery.
No single lifeform loves peace. Expansionists are favored, unless beaten down vigorously.
So like, Ive been wondering, how the hell do you make it to space while still having enough settings enabled for achievements?
At some point, biters almost always overwhelm my defenses
Edit: guess I have another 800 hours (minimum?) to sink into factorio again
Automate wall, ammo, and turret production early. Rush to lasers, nucelar power, and bots once you build up a little bit. Use double layers or thicker, and belts to feed ammo. Covers early but scales poorly.
Late game, once you scaled up, make copy pastable wall segments with flame, laser turrets, pipeing, and a robot port. Paste your walls and let the robots build them.
Once you have enough bots and materials you base can rebuild itself and repair the defences.
What works for me:
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Have radar coverage to keep an eye on biter expansion
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Keep an eye on your pollution cloud, and reduce production (at least initially) if it's expanding too fast.
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Build up military tech alongside your other tech
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Pending 3, take out biter nests that expand too close to the edge of your pollution cloud.
If you can do 1-4, biters should never actually get to your base.
Then by the time you're ready to go off world, make sure you have a perimeter lined with turrets (and some walls to help protect the turrets), repair bots and repair kits, automated ammo production, and supply lines (belts or trains) to automatically get that ammo to your perimeter turrets.
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Flame turrets are stupidly strong behind walls. You can spread them out along the wall with no overlap needed.
Using efficiency modules cuts down pollution by -30%. It makes a massive difference.
There's a complicated solution and there's an easy solution.
The easy solution is fire.
Unless you're playing in some hardcore difficulty settings, you have two main choices. Either you destroy every nest before they reach the pollution cloud (which requires artillery and an easy to expand robot or train network). Or you build walls with turrets. I usually go for full solar panel energy and laser turrets as I'm scared to death to "waste" resources. But to be honest, any type of turret can do for most of the game, you just have to decide what resources you want to spend on combat.
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I clearly haven't played long enough because I have no idea what the comments are referring to.
I only ran into hostile alien life while gallivanting around and it was usually pretty easy to zap or run away from.
That, or I'm confusing Factorio with Satisfactory which is extremely common.
Definitely thinking of Satisfactory. The monsters in that don't really attack you unless you go to them and fhe weapons you get really kinda suck. In Factorio, they are triggered to come harass your constructions because of the pollution you cause. They're also very StarCraft Zerg like with how they create nests and spam you with overwhelming forces. But you have typical shooter weapons from pistols to rocket launchers as well as tanks and turrets.
I wish Satisfsctory was essentially just 1st person Factorio but the need for combat is so lacking in it that it gets super boring once you have a decently automated factory going.
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As your factory grows, it produces pollution, which makes the aliens stronger. They become pretty dangerous, while you develop better ways to fight them, like the buggy, artillery, or spider mech.
Pollution also prompts them to attack.
Terrain can naturally absorb some of it and trees can absorb even more but will eventually die from it, so they're just a temporary stopgap. Eventually when it reaches the aliens, they too will absorb it until they reach their limit then they'll organize attacks.
That being said, I can't remember if it's specifically pollution they absorb that causes them to evolve into stronger forms or if it's any pollution you produce that does it.
Seems to be the latter:
The evolution factor is increased by three kinds of events:
The passage of time very slightly increases the evolution factor.
The global pollution production increases the evolution factor.
Destroying nests significantly increases the evolution factor.
I've never understood how destroying nests logically accelerates evolution if none of them survive
This other nests pickup on pheromones that tell them what the others died from.
That or its a hive mind so they learn from each encounter.
I think it was mainly a design decision about wanting the game to get harder as you progressed instead of easier. Which I have mixed feelings about because divide and conquer where it starts hard but gets eaaier as you clean up can be very satisfying, but factory games can scale in ways that would make it more trivially boring.
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Everyone knows that all bugs are fascists.
wait there are bugs too i gotta wishlist this
Is that the book of dubious “anti-woke” comments the developer has made?
I would have guessed this is the book of "there were trees so obviously I cut them down and started minin' but there were a bunch of ugly locals that tried to stop me it was kind of a mess - long story short I shot them then I went to their homes and shot their families"
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