Some beginner questions

[Maple]

Hello, Factorio Forums! I am a new-ish player with 17 hours game time (most of which spent afking waiting for research to happen) When I got the game, I went in blind without doing the tutorial or anything. I just created a sandbox world and tried to figure things out on my own. I knew this was a dumb decision, but I like playing games this way. I finally gave up trying to learn myself, and read a bit here on the forums. Now begins the questionatinizimicatifying ( sorry, i like extending words :p ) 1. How does pollution affect the enemies? 2. Whats the most efficient way to take out bases early game? 3. holy hell I'm tired I'm gonna write the rest of my questions tomorrow I didn't sleep all night, I hope coffee will help me finish this post. 4. One time, I created a peaceful mode world just to see what enemy bases looked like out of curiosity, I noticed that there are "spitter spawners" but no spitters around any bases I go to, are they not implemented yet? 5. When automating the smelting of items, one thing I noticed is that inserters will only keep about 2 of the ore ore (badum tsss) whatever I had in the furnace, is there any way to make my inserters put more items than that in a furnace? 6. oh hey my coffee is done 7. What is the function of radars? 8. How do I turn on detailed info on my map to see pollution? 9. how the fuck does your guy already know how to build fucking drills conveyor belts robotic arms and shit right off the bat? kek

[Jonathan88]

Welcome to the forum!
Playing Factorio with no prior knowledge and figuring stuff out yourself is the best way to start playing! Factorio is all about learning how to do stuff and how to make it better, not how to copy stuff other people do.

So the answeratinizimicatifyers:

1) Pollution makes the aliens 'angry'. The more pollution you put out, the more they will attack you. However, say your factory is large and only one section is producing lots of pollution, only the bases near that section will attack, and they will attack the machines making the pollution. You can see this on the map with extended info on.

An example of this is having a mining outpost - any biters within the 'red cloud' of pollution produced by the miners will attack the mining outpost. You can counteract this by putting efficiency modules in the miners or killing all the biters
However, they also like attacking military defences (e.g. turrets, you or for some reason radars...)

2) There are many methods of taking out the bases but in early game you will not have unlocked all the technology. What you do depends on how 'early' on you are. To begin with, you just leave them alone and pray... then you might be able to run in with a machine gun if it is weak enough. For weapons, the sub-machine gun is best until you research the combat shotgun... but I'll leave that for you to discover...

For the stage I think you are at, turret creep is generally the best option. Some players consider it 'cheating' but all is fair in love and war... Basically, you advance on the base, building a line of turrets then building another line in front and removing the line behind. This way you can run in, shoot the base a bit, let an angry mob of biters follow you and then run behind your turrets! Or you can just advance the turrets to a point where they can attack the base directly.

3) As of being tired... we all played Factorio well into the early hours the first time of playing...

[Maple]

Welcome to the forum!
Playing Factorio with no prior knowledge and figuring stuff out yourself is the best way to start playing! Factorio is all about learning how to do stuff and how to make it better, not how to copy stuff other people do.

So the answeratinizimicatifyers:

1) Pollution makes the aliens 'angry'. The more pollution you put out, the more they will attack you. However, say your factory is large and only one section is producing lots of pollution, only the bases near that section will attack, and they will attack the machines making the pollution. You can see this on the map with extended info on.

An example of this is having a mining outpost - any biters within the 'red cloud' of pollution produced by the miners will attack the mining outpost. You can counteract this by putting efficiency modules in the miners or killing all the biters
However, they also like attacking military defences (e.g. turrets, you or for some reason radars...)

2) There are many methods of taking out the bases but in early game you will not have unlocked all the technology. What you do depends on how 'early' on you are. To begin with, you just leave them alone and pray... then you might be able to run in with a machine gun if it is weak enough. For weapons, the sub-machine gun is best until you research the combat shotgun... but I'll leave that for you to discover...

For the stage I think you are at, turret creep is generally the best option. Some players consider it 'cheating' but all is fair in love and war... Basically, you advance on the base, building a line of turrets then building another line in front and removing the line behind. This way you can run in, shoot the base a bit, let an angry mob of biters follow you and then run behind your turrets! Or you can just advance the turrets to a point where they can attack the base directly.

3) As of being tired... we all played Factorio well into the early hours the first time of playing...

Thanks for the answers! When I first bought Factorio, it was early morning, and I was hooked on the game. I had played all through the day and until about midnight. When I had woke up the next day, and went to school, I was fuckin' hallucinating conveyor belts and inserters and shit everywhere. Needless to say, I didn't do well on any of my schoolwork that day.

[Jonathan88]

Thanks for the answers! When I first bought Factorio, it was early morning, and I was hooked on the game. I had played all through the day and until about midnight. When I had woke up the next day, and went to school, I was fuckin' hallucinating conveyor belts and inserters and shit everywhere. Needless to say, I didn't do well on any of my schoolwork that day.

Hehe

[Frightning]

~snip~
For weapons, the sub-machine gun is best until you research the combat shotgun... but I'll leave that for you to discover...
~-snip~

This is not strictly true, early on, when you first research the SMG and (basic) Shotgun, both weapons have their uses. The SMG is a better defense against small-moderate numbers of small biters, but the shotgun's spread makes it better against large numbers (typically very dangerous, though much less so once you have Heavy Armor). What's more interesting, is that the SMG w/ Regular Mags is very ineffective at killing spawners, whereas the shotgun is actually pretty good at it (reason is the flat physical damage resistance vrs. damage of weapons in question). Super early on in the game like that, you can actually take out bases with 1-2 spawners if there are no worms (maybe 1 small worm, since you can bum-rush said worm after depleting the biter population). Once Small Spitters show up, the SMG starts to become more important because the spitters are ranged and the shotgun doesn't perform so well against distant targets. Moreover, once you've researched Piercing Mags (military 2) the SMG starts to be the better weapon for pretty much all purposes.

If there are no worms in a base, then Gun Turret creep can work rather nicely early on to clear out larger bases, but if there are worms there, than it is typically very difficult to turret creep with gun turrets because the worms match or exceed the range of gun turrets. (Note: Bring some Walls, plenty of ammo, and repair packs for this; pre-place the walls before dropping in the turret and stuffing some ammo in it). If you have access to Poison Capsules, those are very good at dispatching worms, as they do a total of 160 damage over 20 seconds (multiple poison clouds do stack the damage), and worms can't move out of it and have no poison resistance, so 2-4 depending on worm size is enough to take them out.

Once you get Laser Turrets, you can pretty-much flatten any base you desire with Laser Turret creep, so long as you bring enough of them. Combat robots (distractor and destroyer capsules in particular) are also very effective late game, though a more expensive method.