Do biters take range of pollution into account?

[BrickVoidFCT]

I played a game on the 0.12.1 patch that came out a few days ago, and I got conveyor belts attacked in what I thought was my starting location, far away from the biter nests which turned out to be several screens away.

Is it normal behavior for biters to go and randomly attack pollution generating sources far away? Is there some limit they will wait before attacking for the very first time? I started in a desert, and there were very few trees around so maybe the pollution could have drifted to the aliens, however, I had not yet revealed the alien base on my map until I visited it, resulting in my death from too many biters swarming me. I'm not worried about the death part, but I thought the aliens never attacked anything in the starting location, or did that change with a patch?

Factorio is good most of the time, but sometimes if the starting resources are very far apart, I find myself needing more time just to get a base set up, which eats into the time before some aliens get annoyed at pollution drifting their way, so I'm wondering is there any way to speed up the start of Factorio? Even if I build multiple burner mining drills, it is still very slow going sometimes, especially if I have a considerable distance to travel from one resource to the others.

Finally, on the starting location, if it is actually a thing that the aliens don't attack me in that part of the map, is there a way I can see where the safe area actually is on the map?

Cheers ...

BrickVoid

[DaveMcW]

Aliens never build in the starting location. But they will chase a pollution cloud there! The only way to be absolutely safe is limit the size of your pollution cloud.

[vampiricdust]

I've played a number of hours with pathing on and the biters actually tend to beeline for the center of the chunk with the highest pollution level. They do periodic checks for targets & obstacles that can cause them to just go nuts. It doesn't seem like range matters all, but rather their ability to path there. I've seen nests in the pollution around the other side of a lake never attack because the pathing was too far out of the way.

It's really interesting if you hit F4(windows), click the always tab at the top left, and find show_paths option. If you enable that, you will see the paths the biters are following. They'll tend to target the same chunk most of the time.