Factorio Forums

So I’ve played a few 9.0 games to well into the oil refining stages and each time I have not had a lot of bitter attacks. So I decided to make a more challenging setup. I put the biters to max. Enemy Bases: Freq – Very High, Size: Very Big and Richness – Very Good. (Not sure what richness does)

The only other settings I changed was to make stone fields small and Iron a little richer, since you use so much of it. See screenshot of starting settings.

What happens on the world creation, I get all desert…as far as the eye can see. Hardly any trees…
That’s when my brother, we’re playing the same save, showed me this great starting setup to mine coal.
And it worked great. I don’t think any other start would have worked here.
You build 4 drills, two coal inserters and one wooden box. (that box uses a lot of wood to create, when there is no tries…) You have two of the drills insert into the other and the last to into the box and then the inserters back to the original two drills. See screenshot. This works great. All you have to do is feed the two inserters every now and then and you have endless coal.

If anyone would like to try this challenging start, I’ve attached the save of the very start. It’s really a lot of fun.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s8b68i1qxvh4qk3/9.1_Start.zip

Well, the 2nd drill (the one feeding the box) will eventually have a full internal storage, so the 1st drill (the one fed by the inserter) will stop working. So unless you do a lot of maintenance you only get 50% efficiency.

Well I guess enemy Richness sets how good enemies are gonna be. Higher you go, more big biters and worms are there.

PS: one tree, two TREES.

If you don't mind picking up coal from multiple containers, try this:

I just throw 2-3 burner miners ontop of a common crate. It's just not worth it to do anything elaborate with burner tech.

Burner miner into chest, or burner miner into furnaces.

Funny thing, I had a burner miner through almost an entire game chugging out rocks for a lack of any interest in replacing it.

Well burner tech is something i replace ten minutes into a game so...