Factorio Forums

The environment in Factorio is kind of bland. Trees and your occasional lake. But what if it rained. Rain would fill finite lakes, calm biters, and reduce pollution. But thunder would spook biters, and when it doesn't rain for a while, lakes recede and the ground dries up, killing trees. When it rains too much, it floods, disabling machinery and making it hard to walk around. Put walls around your lake to act as a barrier. Collect rain in Rain Collectors as an alternate to getting water from lakes that are too far away. In a bad storm, lightening strikes, and if it hits a power pole, it zaps your system full of power.
Maybe a well could be crafted, pulling water from the aquifer to fulfill your water needs. Also, a well might strike an underground petroleum well, and then you get oil from it.

Main problem with such massive-scale world altering things is it takes a LOT of calculation power to do. If it really was implemented it would probably be awesome but I think there are other ways to use "leftover" computing power to make the game more enjoyable

I'd like to add weather info to this.
Flooding and water calculations are hard to do but there are easier ways to have fun with weather.
Snow makes water temperature drops - more heat required, when it's cold for too long you'll need boiler to heat water to at least 1C so it will not freeze and not flow in pipes also low temperatures can make miners a bit slower.
Windy weather spread pollution faster.
Rain makes you/biters slower/ no solar power.

TL;DR

Adding weather in the game to add some variety to gameplay while being UPS friendly.

What ?

Every day, have a 1 in 20 chance of getting a 'weather event' which could be one of:

• Rainy Day, solar panel output is halved and the screen is a bit darker
• Blood Moon, a wave of biters spawn and attacks that night
• Blue Moon, all biters are in hibernation for a full day and night, will not attack when shot
• Fog, player visibility reduced

Why ?

It gives players some variety to the game and encourages some better planning, making the game overall a little more interesting without costing too much performance.

• IE: It's easy to build a wall of laser turrets late game, but with a rainy day, you might have to mix in some gun turrets, or have a nuclear power plant ready and standing by, or have parts of your factory automaticly shut off when at low power.
• IE: Early game, a single day a player could freely explore the map to secure an ore patch they need or find something to fight towards could make the early game more enjoyable (or at least more forgiving)

I agree. Weather would give totally new and extremely interesting dimension in this game. But that would lead to very interesting combinator systems to control different parts of factory according to environment conditions. However, I would not expect such a huge new feature set at this point of developing process. The game content is practically ready and they are polishing and balancing it for final publication.

I do not expect even DLC:s with weather effects. I think that far majority of players would disagree complex varying conditions which affects to how production or logistics works. Most of the players feels the game complex enough (they say that only few build ever oil refinery) already and most of advanced players are mathematically thinking who have obsession to build mathematically perfect factories where ratios are perfect and every entity works at 100 % load. Automation of clever responding to varying conditions would need very different and more realistic engineering thinking.

[Koub] Merged into older suggestion about weather.
Also relevant : viewtopic.php?f=80&t=342