Beginner faq: startup settings and mod recommendations

[safan]

1. Modpack

Pyanodon Industry
Pyanodon Raw Ores + Graphics
Pyanodon Coal Processing + Graphics
Pyanodon Petroleum handling + Graphics.
Pyanodon Fusion Energy + Graphics
Pyanodon HighTech + Graphics
Pyanodon AlienLife + Graphics

HT and AL are optional, but recommended for the full experience

2. Strongly recommended mods:

- Early bots for clearing trees and blueprints: Py Quick Start, Construction Drones, Nanobots ...
- Train management system: LTN, TSM, or the vanilla system since 1.1
- Recipe explorer: What is it used for?, recipe book or FNEI
- Planner: Factory planner, Helmod or the external program YAFC
- RSO: also see startup settings.

3. Recommended
- Any QOL you like; alien biomes, sqeak trough, lighted poles, etc.
- Bob's Inserters: lets you program all inserters, so you can have long filter inserters etc.
- Bulk Train loader: Let you load and unload trains faster, but only bulk goods like coal, sand or ores.
- Stone Water Well and Electric boilers: Pyanodon needs a lot of water and steam everywhere
- mod that provides Loaders : f.e. Deadlock's Stacking Beltboxes & Compact Loaders
- if you want to play with biters, you will need pypollution to have some balance.

4. Start Up Settings.
- RSO does a better job than the vanilla resource generator, both in making fewer bigger patches and also placing the resources after water is placed on map.

- In "settings / mod settings / map" you should change starting richness multiplyer to 3 - 5 (With 3 i was loading my first coal train while my last starting coal was used, only researching techs i needed) and global richness multiplyer to 2. Other settings as you want.

- In map generation:
Lower frenquency of all reserves and rocks exept Salt, Quartz and Bioreserve
Pyanodon is not balanced for biters
You need quite a lot of wood before you can build the treefarms.
Cliff explosives are a long way off, and the buildings are big, so you may want to play without cliffs.

5. Mechanics

Pyanodon includes some new interesting mechanics that might be confusing at the start.

- Circuits: automating circuits takes a long while. I handcrafted about 6k circuits before i managed to set up the entire chain.

- Glassworks: One of the first buldings you can build is the glassworks. This building is not powered by electricity but by fluid fuel. You can find fuel values pushing the PY button, but at the start you only have tar and coal gas as fuels. Later on you'll have more choices. It is pretty normal that this is your bottleneck for a while. Also note you can't store gas in a tailing pond, you need a few red techs before you can store gas.

- AlienLife: AlienLife buildings use fauna and flora as modules. The more moss, trees or animals in them the faster they work. The first specimens (moss, seaweed) you can find on the map. Sap trees need to be produced from sap and sap seeds (also found in nature).
Then you'll continue with the fastwood tree farm, that uniquely can work without trees. (But faster if you put the produced trees in)

After that you need to genetically manipulate the first speciemens of the species. Vrauk is the only one you can make without cDNA, and you need vrauk eggs for the cDNA. Once you have cDNA you start creating the new species you want (probably ralesia, auogs, and fawogae)

- Bitumen seeps: Instead of oil patches Pyanodon uses seeps. You place a building of your choice (oil derrick or tar extractor) on them, provide some mining fluid and after a while you get a finite amount of oil or tar. The better the quality of the building and the mining fluid, the bigger the ammount you'll find.

[pyanodon]

Great!! Thanks for that info for the new players. I will just mention that we have water pumps that can extract water anywhere. Theres a recipe in the pumpjacks that allows that.

[esso23]

Pyanodon is not balanced for biters

You can add our mod (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/pypollution) to the list of optional/recommended mods which deals with this - adding pollution values for all buildings and map presets to play with biters.

[ecuzzillo]

Can I recommend that pypollution be added to the default list of pymods? It's quite unfortunate to have to restart twice because biters are impossible, only to google and find that everybody says "yup, biters are impossible, better restart"

[safan]

done, thanks for suggestions