This would probably not help much overall, but maybe you could spread out the arty-aggro'd biter pathing across multiple updates in a wave? The cost of checking whether each biter is within the appropriate range may still be significant, but it's probably less than the cost of actually doing the ...

Well, I played the test release to—near as I can tell—completion.
It's a solid game. Despite the fact that my machine's CPU is rated at half the Passmark score when compared to the listed minimum specs, performance was playable. Not smooth , mind, but certainly not terrible, considering the hardware ...

I am thoroughly in favor of double-encoding, in logi chests, inserters, game elements in general, and elsewhere.
I'm deuteranomalous, which means I sometimes have difficulty distinguishing reds from greens, subtle red or green colors lose saturation, and I'm not entirely certain that purple isn't an ...

Genuinely amazed nobody's done this yet.

I also like the idea of modpacks which are nothing more than Lua configuration files with dependencies. One "installs" that, and then the game automagically downloads everything in the pack, and it doesn't violate any no-distribution terms because it doesn't distribute mods, simply calls them from ...

In regards to the "quick reminder for the player who didn't pay attention in the tutorial," why not a few simple overlays to point out the functions of various UI elements? Fuel bars, the crafting queue, the equipment array, and so on. Just short snippets of text and arrows/boxen/highlights.

Over the course of this thread, I plan to construct a mod from the extremely abstract to the nitty-gritty. I'll be using pseudocode so that, should I be successful, it should be a relatively trivial matter to "port" it to game-ready real code.

The first step in this process is the most abstract ...