Factorio Forums

Hey,

playing currently a map where ressources are scarce (i enjoy them), however after roughly 6 hours i still haven't found any new stone, copper or oil fields.
Current radar placement is 6x5 and the biter bases are starting to grow pretty large in the newly explored areas.

it'd be nice to have radar upgrades like sector scanning speed and scanning range to speed up the scanning for ressources and make it more efficient.

I agree with this one.

Like you I love to play on maps with rare resource patches so I have to plan carefully when, how and where to expand and make real use of the railways system. Problem is you are forced to spend a lot of time killing amounts of nests jsut to pass through territory that you won't occupy (and infact is immediately taken over by new biters colonies). It's frustrating because it makes you waste so much resources on a setting where resources are already low.

So I quickly realized how the game lacks exploration options. I've been thinking at some random ideas to achieve that:

1) Radar Mk II: upgraded version with increased range for vision and exploration (there is also a cool mod for that). It improves the quality of life, but it doesn't really fix the problem when you play with true low resource setting.

2) Scanning station: this would be a special kind of directional radar that allows you to analyze far away land. You manually select a type of resource (or nests) and the station automatically starts to scan the black area for them. Patches (nests) are revealed on the minimap, but the terrain and its features is not.

3) Reconnaissance drones: your typical Obama toy. It would require a launching pad building to be launched from and then you would just configure it to fly away and scan areas by its own. It should be able to come back to the pad and recharge when out of juice. Imho it shouldn't become a weapon. But I guess lot of people would see this as the natural evolution of such a tech (since, admittedly, it would allow you to automatically send off terminator drones to kill nests and collect artifact when the logistic network needs them. Ultimate automation!).

3) Scouting kit: A cloak module for the modular armor. It makes you invisible to biters as long as you don't shot at them. You would use this to first person scout without necessarily go through costly and and time consuming nest clearing. It would have a natural effectivity increase through the power armor upgrades: until you're stuck with solar panels and mk1 batteries it will require you to pause frequently. But then late game with reactors, legs and mk2 batteries it would basically allow you free cloak movement.


I'm still brainstorming here, I'm not yet taking into account balance (resource costs, tech requirements, energy consumption, scouting speed and such). But I know that some of these options could coexist and be complementary: for instance scan sensor could just notify you that a certain type of resource is there, not how much. so this would still require to complete the scouting with drones or personal reconnaissance with cloak module for instance.

I like the ideas

Maybe add in an optional "new ressource node found"-info option when a new one has been discovered.