monster spawners seem broken

[BLuehasia]

hi there

me and my friend are using spacebook to play in factorio

we also used a lua command to clear a second starting location clear of mobs in a radios that included spawners.


in space books we did swap it to peaceful then back to aggressive, but we are now 4 hours into the game and no mob bases are popping up around us

how can we force mobs to spawn again?

[MalcolmCooks]

biter nests don't appear randomly, a group of biters from one nest will actually choose a place to spawn a nest, go there, and then die, which causes a nest to spawn. my guess is that you cleared out a region large enough that there are no nests on the map to spawn new ones, since anything in unexplored regions doesn't exist yet. Or the nests are too far away that they won't spawn any new nests close enough to care about you.

You can check where new nests can spawn if you press f4 to open the debug options, and look for show_enemy_expansion_candidate_chunks, then the chunks which biters may choose to spawn a nest in will show up on the minimap and the main map screen as circles. green is more likely they will choose that chunk, red is less likely. for example:

[BLuehasia]

Thanks for the helpful reply!

I did what you asked and it shows a lot of spawn regions are far away.

my base is where you see my name, bluehasia. and my friends is to the west.
http://prnt.sc/dfeuti

the part of the map i circled is a base that i ran to when we did play earlier today to attack monsters and i killed one spawner to make them mad.

it sounds like what you said we killed them to far off when we were trying to set up a map that had competition mode with 2 starting bases

[BLuehasia]

now be awesome if we can change the frequency, size and richness during game or spawn in spawners to counter this goof we did.

we got a really easy start, so if there is a command to make their frequency go up in mid game be great!

[Frightning]

now be awesome if we can change the frequency, size and richness during game or spawn in spawners to counter this goof we did.

we got a really easy start, so if there is a command to make their frequency go up in mid game be great!

In the future, the best way to control how soon you have to start dealing with biters is the Starting Area size setting in the mapgen, if you want plenty of time to get set up first, set it to Very large, if you want them to be a problem almost from the start, go with Very small. (Something in between? You get the idea...)