Factorio Forums

I am playing the game solo on marathon/deathworld with a very small starting position in the desert. Needless to say I am looking for a challenge and I finally got one.

However, I am getting attacked frequently from spawner bases that are popping up nearby but that do not show up on radar. When I explore to see where these attacks are coming from, I suddenly see the enemy bases when I get into visual range. I have 6 radar arrays running, so how is it that these bases are spawning so close without the radar letting me know they are there?

I like a challenge but I should not have to manually run around my entire area every so often to detect spawners that should be picked up on radar easily. Is this working properly?

The biters naturally expand into new areas. These new bases will show up when the area is re-scanned by a radar. More radars will speed this up, and turrets can keep your base safe from biter attacks.

With a total number of 797 chunks (29×29 − 7×7), it takes one radar 7 hours 20 minutes

Any radar always scans the oldest chunk outside the active view.
So you can update the 6 oldest chunks at the same time, every 33s another six.
Which means the oldest chunk could be more than one hour old.

Best not to rely on the radar scanning. Place radars around your base so the always active are covers all your pollution cloud and then some. Place gun turrets at the edge of your pollution cloud to so any alien wandering in gets killed before spawning new nests.

I have over 500 hours in game. It is amazing how little I understood about this game until I set the difficulty at maximum. At lower difficulty it never seemed to matter.

It is too bad that the radar doesn't have a scan close option so you can set up a couple to scan for enemy bases and let the others uncover the farther reaches of the map.

If you put multiple radars in the same chunk the scanning speed multiplies because they share the job.

Drakken wrote:I have over 500 hours in game. It is amazing how little I understood about this game until I set the difficulty at maximum. At lower difficulty it never seemed to matter.

Indeed. I'm at over 1000 hours and constantly find myself learning new things on the forums or in game.

Drakken wrote: It is too bad that the radar doesn't have a scan close option so you can set up a couple to scan for enemy bases and let the others uncover the farther reaches of the map.

Sounds like a good use-case for a mod. Same active range, 1/2 the sector scanning range.

xfir01 wrote:

Drakken wrote:I have over 500 hours in game. It is amazing how little I understood about this game until I set the difficulty at maximum. At lower difficulty it never seemed to matter.

Indeed. I'm at over 1000 hours and constantly find myself learning new things on the forums or in game.

Drakken wrote: It is too bad that the radar doesn't have a scan close option so you can set up a couple to scan for enemy bases and let the others uncover the farther reaches of the map.

Sounds like a good use-case for a mod. Same active range, 1/2 the sector scanning range.

How about a radar that internally has 4 (or 9) radars. Power draw per radar and sector scanning speed adjusted so accumulated it's the same as a vanilla radar. But each internal radar has a different range. That way you would have 4 (9) rings around the radar that is scanned with different frequency.

I'm not a modder, so I'm not sure if that's doable with a single entity or not.

This might also be something you'd be interested in: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ScanningRadar