Factorio Forums

Hello everyone.
First of all I would like to thank the developers for the great game that Factorio is. I'm enjoying it immensely ever since I purchased it.

I have a question about the long-term behavior of the Radar - as I understand it, the Radar has a limited range which it scans, going "section by section" until it is all covered. At this point, as I understand it, the Radar does not go on scanning further away, but re-visits the previous sections, updating them as changes occur.
However, this is not the behavior I see in my games - as far as I can tell, after the Radar finished scanning it's maximum range it only provides constant vision in the limited area around it. No matter how long I wait, the Radar does not update it's previously scanned sections with new Biter nests, or even shows sections as "alive" for short moments (as is the case when it first scans an area).

My question is - do I understand the intended behavior correctly? if so - does any one else experience the "faulty" behavior I describe?

Thanks, and keep up the good work! this game is great!

Only the highlighted area is scanned permanently (100 tiles diameter).

https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... itle=Radar
"Radar explores one unexplored chunk when the sector scanning progress finishes up to distance of 14 chunks. It slowly discovers a large area of the map. "

It explores, do not scan permanently. When all is revealed, the radar rescans older chunks (not so sure about that). The more radar, the more often it is rescanned.

Thank you for your answer. It is the rescanning that I'm asking about.
The wiki article says "The radar is used to continually scan sectors", but indeed afterwards the wording is unclear as to whether old chunks get re-scanned.

I would love to see the radar re-scanning old chunks once it finished it's initial scan, but currently it seems this is not the case. If this is the intended behavior - maybe the wiki wording could be improved to make it clear that the radar does not, in fact, "continually scans sectors"?

Radar does explore the already explored sectors when it finishes exploring. Rescaning of such sectors is not visible the same way as is discovering new sectors.
Also do note that this process is quite slow. Take into account how much time radar needed to full discover all sectors within its reach. It will require te same mount of time to rescan its area.
Infact it would seem even longer as when radar is discovering new sectors it skips the already discovered ones. But when it does rescaning it doesent skip any of those.

Given the general size of the 'active' radar area, in combination with the slow explore-rescan process, are both good reasons to deploy multiple radars. Explore faster, and be aware of incoming threats.