Factorio Forums

I have walled/turreted an unspeakably large area of land; but somehow along the way, I failed to get rid of all the critters. And the problem is this: they don't show up on the map, so I have no idea where they are. The amount of land is too large to cover with radars, so I thought some sort of "biter roomba" would be nice. Can Spidertrons serve this purpose? Can I make a few hundred of them and unleash them out into the world? And if I do, will they wander and auto-kill baddies?

I think the best you could do with that is orders with the remote, maybe even have them follow a train around or something, but I'm not aware of anything completely automated (in vanilla).

I do know there are mods out there that add completely automated vehicles, though, like AAI, and I can't remember the name of it, but there's a robot army one, too.

The spidertrons aren't autonomous; they won't rove on their own and seek out biters to destroy.

They can be remote controlled, though, so you can send them anywhere on the map. When you see red on the map, you can send a bunch of spidertrons there to tidily mop up the biters without you needing to be on site.

Spidertrons can also contain roboports and inventory. So if you want to make sure you've covered the whole area, you can send spidertrons with roboports up there and blanket the area with radar coverage. You can even use solar power and batteries for the radars so you don't have to run electrical lines; each radar can be self-sustaining.

Not answering your question, but a way to address your issue is by enabling the "show-enemy-expansion-candidate" in the debug menu. It's kind of cheaty in the sense it allows you to see where the biters are likely to expand without lifting the fog of war, which helps find where they are (they can expand neither where they already are, nor where you have built).

An alternative would be to look for them by firing artillery shells. Very costly, but can work if they are within artillery range.