Factorio Forums

I play a multiplayer game with one other person, We have more or less completed one play through, however it was to easy, as in there was too much ore within a close area we didn't need to set up smaller bases and use trains to move ore around. one large base was all we needed.

So we wont to start a new world that will be harder, less ore and needing to explore more. I was thinking of using the below settings, So my question is? Is this enough or too much.

As far as i understand this will mean more enemy bases which will be larger and give less alien artifacts.
Ore will be less often, smaller fields and not as much ore per block but would this setting make it so low it wouldnt be fun?

What setting do you use for a harder game play?

Oil can seriously become a pain on lower resource levels in the beginning of the game. Eventually of course, it becomes infinite, but only in the theoretical sense. But other than that "low" is really just normal for an experienced player. You can even go down to very low across the board if you want, although then coal suddenly goes from abundant to "holy crap"

Thanks for the input, might go very low then, i do want it to be a challenge after all.
Am i right about the higher on freq and size for enemy bases but lower for richness?

IIRC, higher frequency isn't going to change the total ores and enemies, size defintely does, though. It's just how spread out they are (high = averaged out, low = clumped), and richness is the alient artifact rate for enemies, right.

As for whether to go very low or low, I'd say if you want a challenge low + high enemies is quite difficult, very low with normal enemies is another option. Very high enemies with normal resources is also an interetsing challenges, although you probably won't get big enough to use trains, it's a very compact factory setting

Just keep in mind they're multipliers, ( ore amount ~ size x richness). Very low size and richness is much much more difficult than low size low richness. Having done a very low/very low once, you'll find you're picking up mines as fast as you're placing them down which can get boring, so I would advise going very low size, low richness, if you're going for resource starving

That's what i wanted to avoid, picking up mines as fast as you place them, while i do want to have to go looking for ore just not every 5mins, so to speak.
Leaning closer to very low freq so they are less close to each other but low on size and richness,
maybe even very low size but low richness for iron and cooper ore.

I'm pretty sure that richness does absolutely nothing for the enemies, and if it does it's under the threshold for "human eye" detection, or in other words if I set richness to very low and destroy a bunch of nests, the number of artifacts dropped looks exactly the same as when richness is set to very good. If there is a difference it'd only be detectable by doing something like destroying 1000 spawners and counting exactly how many artifacts spawn, but I'd put my money on there just being no difference at all because if there was a difference it'd logically be more in scale with the other spawn types in which case it's pretty obvious at a glance whether richness is very low or very good.

Have a look at viewtopic.php?f=79&t=13783
"Name: Resource Spawner Overhaul
Description: Overhaul of resource generation."