Is peaceful mode interesting? What is your aim then?

[Gazelle]

I played the demo and bought the game yesterday. However, I like the building aspect more than the fighting aspect. I did not notice before, but after seeing some youtube video's it seems that the fighting aspect is kind of important. I see there is a peaceful mode, but is it still interesting to play in peaceful mode? What is the goal then? I mean, there is no reason to build military when no one attacks you? So what should you build then? What is your goal? Where should I aim for?

[Drury]

The ultimate goal of the game is building and launching a space rocket.

You don't need biters to do that, so good luck and have fun.

[666JTK666]

I love peace mode what has me so hooked is the building of the factory and all the complexity of automating the creation of production chains and all that.
the whole thing with TD and biters is that it's just a pita that get's in the way of what is actually the fun part of the game for me.
get an alien ore mod and your good to go.

[Gazelle]

Is such "alien ore mod" necessary when playing peaceful?

Also, I do not really understand how peaceful mode works. If I attack a biter, will then ALL biters on the map become active and start attacking me at some point? Or is it only the biter that I attack, that will attack back?

As I only have this game recently I do not really like to install mods already. I want to see what it is without mods. So if it is not necessary than I preferably do not install a mod yet.

Maybe a lot off topic, but it is not worth a new topic... how do people know how many hours they totally spent in Factorio? I don't see this statistic, I only see the time spent per game, but not over all the games played.

[Drury]

You just add those hours up. Most people spend tens of hours on a single map so this is barely ever an issue.

Biters attack only in self-defense on the peaceful setting. I.e. no it won't turn all of them hostile, there are no long-term effects to attacking them.

Alien artifacts are only used for some high-tier tech, I believe mostly military? Power armor is semi-military I guess. Other than that, it's only used for upgrades for existing tech that doesn't require alien artifacts to research, so you're good without it.

[Xterminator]

On peaceful mode, attacking a group of aliens will only aggro the ones in range, it won't turn all of them hostile. So you could attack a group and spawner, kill them and then walk to another one somewhere else and they will still be peaceful until you fire on them, so on and so forth.
You don't need that mod even if you are peaceful. The enemies still exist so you can still collect the Artifacts that you need.

As for hours played, yeah you just add up all hours from your different saves. Most people, unless they are doing a speedrun or something usually spend like 20 hours on the low end, and up to hundreds just on one playthrough.

[Gazelle]

Thanks! It is clear now how it works.