Factorio Forums

Now that the .15.x beta is out (awesome), I'm still surprised there's been no updates to how we have to deal with trees at the onset of the game.

I'm sure this has been mentioned at least a thousand times before... but what if we could construct over the trees - or at least 'place' for construction with some kind of time based penalty... In other words, if you construct over the tree, the structure you've placed will take x*n amount of time to place where x is the amount of time to 'mine' the tree and n is the number of trees the object takes up - and that would SHOULDNt go into the inventory to even things out - only manually mining the trees should generate wood - still making it necessary to chop them for fuel or for power poles.

This way, we don't need to deconstruct entire forests or forest sections just to set up conveyor trains. I'd venture as far as saying that most Factorio players have SOME OCD - this would go a LONG way for quality of life. Factorio at the begining should be less about tree chopping and more about factory building. I love the trees, I don't mind chopping them, but gosh gee golly... cleaning up those trees is an absolute chore.

Case in point? My 5 yr old son loves watching me play and gives me input on ideas on how to place structures so we play together. but before I have a bus set up, he just walks away in boredom as we have to chop trees for 5-10-15 minutes straight to get the designs we want. And yes, I get that doing the clean up is 'extra' but nonetheless - what's the pain in circumventing SOME of the headache of tree chopping (which is tremendously monotonous).

Just our 4 cents.

Opinions?

I would restart the map until your initial base and resources are relatively tree-free. It really just depends on luck whether you spawn in a dense forest or not. Once you got to oil, use flamethrower or bots.

Trees should be added to map gen settings so you have a tradeoff between high pollution spread or being blocked trying to build anything. If not trees then maybe the starting biome? That would be pretty cool, I've only seen patches of desert and there's apparently a tundra?

I also think the mine time of trees needs reducing, it's just tedium at the start of the game so you blow up forests with grenades instead, then later it's irrelevant as bots mine everything instantly. Reducing the mine time by half seems reasonable.

I do not like all those trees too... What I do is use the console command to remove all trees and rocks from the explored areas of the map.

Fastest way I know of early game to deal with trees is by using grenades.

As it happens, grenades are quite effective at removing even dense forests with just a few of them.

Make enough of a base to get grenades and start blowing up the forests. Plus the grenades are useful against biters too, they allow you to do hit and run attacks.

Trees would really make a new formidable enemy if they regrowth.

Grenades got a buff in 0.15 it seems - I didn't need level 1 damage upgrade to guarantee 2-shotting trees. Maybe it was in the changelog but i missed it. In any case, if you throw down a grenade assembler or two at the end of your early iron smelting line (pulling iron plate and coal), then trees will become a non-issue.

That said, I do play reroll simulator if I get starting locations with ore patches that are fully covered as that can be annoying in the very early game.

I am currently playing on a map where I used cheat mode to get all the research (except for the speed, damage, and other late game bonus based research) and I am just loving having grenades early game. The thing is though, early grenades are just a bandage for a bigger problem.

Trees are a resource, just like iron, copper, coal, stone, uranium, and water. It doesn't make sense that we can't control the frequency and density of trees unlike the rest. I'm glad that the map generation settings got an overhaul with the coming of 0.15 but it just seems like a weird thing to lack.

In the spirit of automation we need a very early game coal powered tree harvester that tears down trees marked for deconstruction and a mid level "requester chest" that can only request trees.