Advanced awesomeness

[judos]

Hi there,

Currently we are playing on daniel34's server. Our target is to launch 10 rockets for which we are currently missing the crude oil.
As our map only offers spare ressources we could only find few crude oil spots. And for fun's sake, there's plenty of oil but for us unreachable due to the terrain settings. (We have vanilla factorio 0.12.20 without mods on the server, so now possibility to create new lands).

So here's one example:

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Another one here:

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Now for sure we want to get the Oil anyway! So here is what we came up with:

1. Small trick to cross impassable sea

Let's take a look at this small part of our map. The crossing is only 1 grid diagonal if you take a closer look at the image. However for the character this is of course impossible to traverse. There is now jumping in the game (this is Fatorio and not some RPG, so absolutely fine for me).

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Actually if you focus hard enough you can see this is the part of the map which I marked in the second image as "Close but still impassable spot". Aaaand if you check again you can even see that I'm already on the other side. Do you know how I did that?
Yes right the car is already a big hint.

It's possible to place a car on the other side of the land and then by getting close to it enter the vehicle. And while leaving the vehicle again you will appear on the other side and succesfully completed this first challenge.
In the current case it's possible to place the car on both sides, so you can go back and forth using this trick. However there might be some situations where this is one-way and it's gonna be a not return forever! So take care when you try this. (Can you find an example, would be really nice to know!)

2. Enemies - Fighting on a (partly) new level:

The fighting part is now pretty cool. The same as you would usually do when attacking big bases with laser turrets. Make sure you have enough power support in your system and then keep moving forward step by step. Now this is a little different for our "situation". We can only use blueprints and tell the robots what to build. But give them all the items they need and some repair packs and everything stays still under control. Even when you can't manually build anything, just take more care with the towers and move forward a bit more slowly because the robots take and extra 5-10s to react and build or destroy what you had in mind.

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3. The last step to get the oil (really the last?)

Now comes the nice part. At least we thought so. Since the nearby bases are cleared, we can just place the pumpjacks and launch our rocket shortly afterwards. Nice thoughts, but that didn't work out just yet.
Let's grab the pumpjacks and then check this screenshot to place them on the oil deposits:

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Can you see the oil spots? Me neither. That's because they are actually out of sight. Even when the radar tells you that the area is uncovered.

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So how to build pumpjacks when we can't even see them on our screen?
In that case we could think of two solutions:
- There is a command to modify the player zoom level (even below the usual scrolling factor). So this let's you zoom out far more than possible otherwise. As you can imagine however commands are disabled on the server (makes totally sense). So no cheating here! Not even a tiny little bit.

- If you make a blueprint with two buildings, when placing the mouse will basically mark the middle inbetween where the buildings will be placed. So straight forward this means that if you put your mouse at the border of the screen one building will be built even outside the visible sight.
The main problem is to actually hit the correct place where the pumpjacks should be built. At first I thought that trying will just make this work. But it literally seems impossible to find the correct position. So here is a blueprint pattern to help adjusting the position:

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By placing this in the visible part we could then estimate the amount of fields to move down with the pumpjack pattern and find the right location.

4. Outcome
So did we finish? I'm sorry to mention this but we are not done with the task yet. There was actually the part where we placed laser turrets on top of the oil deposits. And it's some problem to deconstruct them again when you can't mark them outside of the visible range. Even with some remaining biter bases we added miners and furnaces to pollute the area and attract them. Then cutting the powerline to the laser turrets we got them removed again.

But then there was the moment where the pumpjack blueprint needed to be adjusted (it contained one underground pipe right at the pumpjack's fluid exit. And this would have become horribly complicated.. Luckily underground pipes were not in the system yet, so we can wait for these blueprints to time out.)
Then when driving back with the car to the main base I got hit by a train.
Seems like 3x Energy shields mk2 (and 6x Shield mk1) don't protect you in your car when you get hit by a train and don't wear any seat belt. So of course I died. (Is this a bug? Maybe someone can reproduce this..) And with my death at 2am in the morning died, for the time being, unfinished plans to actually get the oil

To be continued, when we have results. (Apart from tricks, plans and screenshots)

[DaveMcW]

Another trick: you can see further north/south if you make your window a square.

[starholme]

If you have a widescreen monitor, you might be better off turning it 90 degrees, to get a better view up/down vs left/right. I do this for coding sometimes.

[Arch666Angel]

Awesome tale!

[Buggi]

You must like a challenge. Landfill mod would be of huge use.