Factorio Forums

I don't know if it's about too much pollution or a too big factory but for some reason, bitters and spitters don't attack anymore.
they have attacked for the first 10 hours or so, now its past 50 and not a single attack since. Mobs just pack up indefinitely and die, none ever attack.
(note : it's not a standard map)

I don't know what's causing the problem. My guess is that i produce so much pollution that bitters just pack up and never reach the "let's attack" count (that would mean pack size is related to pollution but i don't know how it works actually) and end up dying because of a too long life time (i don't know if such check is in place) or inability to pathfind.

Anyway, check the samegame. You can see within the electric graph that laser turret haven't spiked since... many hours

If you reduce the model scaling and collision_box of big/behemoth biters/spitters in enemies.lua they are attacking about 1 minute after loading the savefile. Maybe is caused by some rendezvous point pathfinding clusterfuck.

Somehow I feel like there is so much path calculation going on that it never reaches the end of the list and crashes the enemy-attack function. Maybe it's because of the amount of pollution you have made, maybe it's just because you factory is so big.

I've experienced the same issue. I have so much pollution that it is solid red across the entire revealed area of the map. There are ludicrous numbers of top-tier biters and spitters rallying outside my base, and there are even larger numbers of biter and spitter corpses all around them. It's as if they are waiting for the rally point to have enough troops for an enormous attack, but they wait long enough that they simply die of old age.

The problem here is that there's way too many biters all trying to go somewhere and asking the path finder to find them a path – the pathfinder becomes completely overwhelemed and it takes it a long time to satisfy individual requests. When a group finally gets together, it tells the pathfinder that it wants to go to some source of pollution and then it waits and waits and waits and the pathfinder never gets back to it, and eventually it times out.

We're still looking into it.

The problem here is that there's way too many biters all trying to go somewhere and asking the path finder to find them a path – the pathfinder becomes completely overwhelemed and it takes it a long time to satisfy individual requests. When a group finally gets together, it tells the pathfinder that it wants to go to some source of pollution and then it waits and waits and waits and the pathfinder never gets back to it, and eventually it times out.

Quite similar to my guess but expressed in different terms

Somehow I feel like there is so much path calculation going on that it never reaches the end of the list and crashes the enemy-attack function

Yes, and there's no crash, just timeout.

Well, this was certainly an interesting bug to work with. Turns out, certain biters kept hogging the pathfinder by always asking for a path and then discarding the found path immediately and asking again. This should be fixed in 0.12.6.

Oh yeah

Next bug i'll report will be even more tedious to solve :p