Factorio Forums

Let me know if there's already a discussion going on for this.

TL;DR Stone patches should increase in size exponentially as you travel away from the starting area until they yield the same amount of stone as an iron field would iron.

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Something I've seen in two games since updating to 0.13.x is that I can go through a MASSIVE amount of stone in order to produce landfill.
In the first game I used something like 10 million stone (which was higher than any other item consumed). I had started in 0.12, without landfill, on an island, so I was glad I didn't need to use a mod to get to the mainland.
The second game isn't very complete, but I've been through half a million stone already.

Reasons I'm frustrated with this:
◘ Most stone patches are too small to be worth an entire train station
◘ Stone is "rare" (relatively), despite it being the most consumed resource in the game (assuming you're covering large water bodies)
◘ The amount of time dedicated to mining stone for landfill can become greater than time spent on defenses, building, and expanding combined.

What I'd like to propose are two balances to Landfill:
1.) Reduce the stone per landfill requirement, reducing the need to collect stone from patches that last less than an hour or two (in a normal setting game)
OR
2.) Have stone deposits get larger the farther out you go, exponentially.
• Start with the small stone patches
• Grow in size faster than the other ore patches
• At some point, grow in size at he same pace the rest of the ore patches do

I liked the way stone was mined in banished; You would build a quarry, which could be built anywhere flat, and you sent people to it to dig down and mine stone, until it was depleted. Then you're left with a big hole which acts like an obstacle.

I think the issue here is that you are trying to fill entire lakes with landfill. The problem isn't the cost, but that you feel the need to do this. Huge lakes is a problem to deal with. The correct solution is ships and ports.

Why you do not just create the stone if you have such a specific need? I think that game is not intended to that. But I think that if you maximize all stone sliders and minimize water you get quite good results. I increased richness and size and decreased frequency with one step and have hundreds of thousands per deposit.

First thing you should do before seriously starting on your factory is drop a radar. They're cheap and will immediately scan a good distance so you can plan your layout.

Landfill then becomes useful if you need to squeeze in a few extra advanced circuit assemblers or something but you don't need to fill in a lake. In fact lakes are quite useful as a giant, uncrossable, unassailable wall. If you don't like them lower the water settings when you generate a map.

Deadly-Bagel wrote:First thing you should do before seriously starting on your factory is drop a radar. They're cheap and will immediately scan a good distance so you can plan your layout.

Landfill then becomes useful if you need to squeeze in a few extra advanced circuit assemblers or something but you don't need to fill in a lake. In fact lakes are quite useful as a giant, uncrossable, unassailable wall. If you don't like them lower the water settings when you generate a map.

All of this.

Also, seems like your not playing with max stone settings, if you did, you would be swimming in more stone then you could think of using, even with landfill (which was MUCH needed for crossing large lakes for trains).


Only reason i can think hes using so much stone is he is building his base in the middle of a lake, with a single entrance making it easy to defend, plus when trains run into biters...well you get squished biters