I found that resource patches aren't really a big concern. I did set up core drills to get an infinite supply early on though :D Perhaps the biggest way to speed things up from the way my play though has gone so far would be to be more wasteful of human life, and explore more aggressively. :D More c...

When they first appeared, stepping over walls, puddles and acid pools was my primary use case for spidertrons. It did require a pretty high APM to run a disco laser dance party with a squad of spiders and not lose any, but they had a decent expected lifetime regardless. That's no longer possible, si...

It seems to me that scaling down steam engine output would be easy to do with a smart flywheel system of some sort, at least in the context of the Factorio setting's automation difficulty scale. In practice, the steam engines shouldn't be *slowing down* as the graphical animation indicates, but runn...

Nuclear waste? Is that space ex mod? he means used fuel cells, at least I believe so Yes, this. Stock depleted fuel cells. There are four safety interlock requirements that need to be met for my Mk2 reactor to start another fuel cycle - One fresh fuel cell at every reactor input bin. - Zero deplete...

Health. Player HP in particular, but robot, turret, vehicle, wall HP would be nice as well. Your suit of armor has all those fancy damage resistance and mitigation stats, but shields seem to dominate everything. (alternatively reduce the remaining armor leakage by ~5% per level for an infinite path ...

Re: Radar I like to put Radar+small power pole+solar panel as a standalone unit. As long as the power is non-zero you can get vision around the radar, and it slowly explores during the day. Night is a problem but the pitch black is pretty short, and the pollution is zero. I used barrels for all my o...

I suppose the biters may have just always preferred to colonize my big territory behind the defense wall rather than the thin worm-packed buffer zone I'd left. Perhaps you could lay out a grid of wall segments (or floor tile?) that don't block movement or attract fire, but also don't leave room for ...

Clearing nuclear waste is a good stock use. I also use some in my cargo spaceships for SpaceEx, in situations where buffer chests don't work because the items need to be dumped on the same surface as they're produced. For example, I have combinator logic to shift empty (ex-acid) barrels from a reque...

I'm sure there was a mod back in the day that caused items to spill onto the ground if they reached the end of a belt. I can't find it now, but I can't imagine it was all that popular. Interesting idea, but quite unfun for most people I expect. All the frustration of accidentally deequipping your ar...

I'm not playing on DW, but I have a strategy of using rockets or artillery to pick the spawners out from between the worms. The worms don't absorb pollution and send attacks, but they also prevent recolonization there. The ideal situation then becomes that colonization waves step into the guns and d...

TLDR: Not sabotaging your own fun is an important point to keep in mind. However, the difference between throwing down assemblers vs sub-factory blueprints doesn't matter so much as the creativity and fun you have doing it. It is only a different scale. Just make sure that you're not automating away...

I've noticed that if you wire into a speed signal into your ship console that is less than 5, your ship just coasts along at ~5. Zero isn't a signal, but the console output uses -1 for stop and -2 for anchored. Feature request: It would be nice to have an input signal of -1 mean stop the ship like t...

The delivery cannon doesn't seem to deliver. I'm running Factorio 1.0.0, Space Exploration 0.3.109. The cannon visibly fires, its count of products delivered increments, but nothing shows up on the space station in Nauvis orbit (according to the uplink view). The cannon's target is Nauvis orbit, an...

Pipes don't rotate, they simply have alternate graphics so they look nicer when adjacent to other pipes. Much like wall segments, actually. The only reasons I can think of to place a rail signal down without a railway next to it (so far) are: - to use like a power pole for stringing logic wire. - so...

Personally, I use more shield generators to stop trains in many cases. However, there are also plenty of designs in the show your creations area for railway safety crossings, which use gates to both sense the player's presence and turn signals red, as well as locking the gates closed if a train is a...

My old, efficient 14-lamp 7-segment display was getting hard to read in the new graphics, so I improved it. Chonky Font for Boomer Eyes digital display. 7-segment rules, but with the corner lights set to be suppressed when both segments are on to make rounded corners and pointy verticals (Eg: "...

Awesome.
In the meantime I've rejiggered things to use 64x64 with an alternative wider rail gauge, and spacing based on large power poles with gaps in the power coverage that look somewhat intentional.

I want to make a 40x40 blueprint aligned to grid in order to combine power lines and railway blocks in one blueprint. However, I can't get the centerpoint to be in the middle of the blueprint; it is always off by one, so that rotations break the alignment of the rail lines (and power too). I can of ...

I see the tornadoes/dust devils all the time, but their damage is negligible unless I'm polluting heavily with Nauvis Day cranking up the numbers even more.

I'm surprised it took until page 7 for the idea that inserters should lead their targets instead of chasing them. Teleport-grabbing items off the belt is not the answer for exact timing math and eking out UPS: loaders are. As to alt-view, the only time I don't have it turned on is when I'm alt-tabbi...