Factorio Forums

So, as you may know, alien artifacts are necessary for the science pack 4, which is necessary for researching later technologies. The planetary defense costs an insane 1000 artifacts worth of science pack 4s (as well as 1000 of the other packs, but I'll let you figure out how to produce those yourselves). The problem is, from what I have seen, the alien artifacts are only obtainable from defeating "creeper spawners", which are the mob-producing buildings that look a bit like castles. They come with defenses, with the variants being gun turrets and missile launchers (and of course the mobs). I will state it bluntly: if it happens to be missile launchers, find another base to take down.
Anyway, back to my point; the point is that the number of alien artifacts seems to never exceed (and rarely approach) 16 artifacts per creeper spawner, which makes obtaining massive quantities of alien artifacts difficult. The solution lies in the fact that, as you move further in any direction from your starting point, the size of the bases increases (tested on infinite map, but it seems to hold true on finite map types as well. Simply gear up, head out, and take a long trek in one direction in the wilderness, and eventually you will be finding larger bases, which will cut down the need to search far and wide for enough little ones. The picture is taken from an infinite map, with the distance from the center being extremely large (I set out some 3.5k spaces, and the largest base complex I found was 9 bases).

Haha, my small little laptop computer will die if i try this !

I suppose you could start a rail line, hop on the train, and plop down straight tiles as you go. I've done that and it works fine, you can't get lost like with a car.
The disadvantage of course is that you'll have to construct turns too, and these take more time. Another solution is to just skip lakes and start building a new rail on the other side. (Hey devs, make bridges! )
Eventually you could reach this place, but it would still probably take hours.

Well Xinvoker i think the developers probably want it to take hours because if things didn't take hours of intense watching the screen it would not be fun

This is really interesting to see!
I just wanted to test if the larger base logic really works ..
I'm glad that the game doesn't crash for some reason under these conditions

kovarex wrote:I'm glad that the game doesn't crash for some reason under these conditions

All I have to say to this is LOL

Xinvoker wrote:I suppose you could start a rail line, hop on the train, and plop down straight tiles as you go. I've done that and it works fine, you can't get lost like with a car.
The disadvantage of course is that you'll have to construct turns too, and these take more time. Another solution is to just skip lakes and start building a new rail on the other side. (Hey devs, make bridges! )
Eventually you could reach this place, but it would still probably take hours.

I used a stock of 512 electric poles, just placing them in a line and only deviating for lakes. This also fit in with my strategy to use the large range and firepower of the laser turrets to decimate the bases

Cars also make great bulldozers that easily plow over aliens and their bases

Yup, cars are pretty OP for now ^^.