Finding Biters/Radar (0.7.0)

[azoundria]

I am presently having a very successful strategy of using walls and lasers to destroy enemies. I set the likelihood of biters to very low in the map generator, so that I could build a decent factory before discovering biters. (This is expected to be fixed so there's a fighting/running chance in the early game.)

Now that I have, I destroyed their MASSIVE camp, and another small camp they seem to have created near that one. However, there is a third one that I found and also destroyed, but it was out of the explored area, and there's still more attacks coming from that side. And lately, there have been attacks from the opposite side, so I suspect there are now 2 biter colonies.

It's quite different with biters establishing new colonies. The fog of war plays a huge role. I didn't even notice it before, except the odd red dot left from running away from creepers. Right now, I have no idea where biter colonies are, or how to determine that, short of exploring every square inch of the map, which of course accidentally explores more and I want to kill these biters before I discover more of them.

So:
1) I wanted to confirm the basic premise that biters cannot spawn or have colonies on unexplored tiles/chunks of the map. (I mean tiles/chunks I have never looked at, which appear black on the map.)

2) Is there any way to tell my line of sight of all my factory buildings?

3) Is there any building like an outpost that would be able to monitor areas?

4) How do radars work? Do they do anything at the moment or are they still decorations?

[FreeER]

3) Is there any building like an outpost that would be able to monitor areas?
4) How do radars work? Do they do anything at the moment or are they still decorations?

I believe radars are exactly what you asked for in 3 If you have a large enough base the radars will allow the map to show any enemy activity for a decent area around them without the player character being nearby, though they do not sound an alarm, it does allow you to see the enemy when you look. Most useful to see where the alerts from turrets/damage are coming from really. They do seem to be targets though lol

2) Is there any way to tell my line of sight of all my factory buildings?

You mean from the perspective of the biters? You could try using F4 to check show_paths/show_path_cache, and maybe show_enemy_expansion_candidate_chunks in one of the debug views (F5-F7). Though I'm not certain that's what you are looking for. From my understanding the biters will attack whenever the pollution value around their spawners reach 200 (for small-biters, more for the larger ones), and (I think) they go towards the center of where the pollution is coming from (your base). show_pollution_values will allow you to see the pollution values when the pollution is visible on the map (alt) though it's only useful if you open the map (m).

I'm not certain that if 'undiscovered' chunks can be loaded and have spawners/biters in them or not.

[kovarex]

Currently, the radius of generated chunks around player is little bit higher than the charting radius, so black chunks are often already generated.
Also the pollution triggers map generation, so big factory generates some area around it as well.

[Psycho0124]

Yeah, your best bet for preventing attacks is to explore out past your pollution radius a little bit. It helps to explore a little extra area before setting up a new mine so you know what kind of attacks to expect and how much defense to build there.