Millions of Biters slowing down the game

[toydarian]

Hi Community,

I have this little problem:
The evolution factor got quite high, almost to 1. As I just like to build and those Biters were annoying me, I decided to reset the evolution factor.
So, using the console, I reset it to 0 and I killed all enemies (also using the console).

I was quite happy for a few minutes until I realized that the game slowed down. Soon it ran only half speed.
Soon I found out that incredible amounts of small biters were spawned and caused this. By killing them off, I could get to normal speed, but a few minutes later, it was slow again.
I attach a screenshot of just one group of biters, I don't know how many of those groups are there, but I know of at least 3.

Here is the Question:
Is there a way to control the maximum amount of enemies or the interval of spawning using the console?
I'm really looking for a technical solution, not a way to battle them. They can't even penetrate my body shield

Thanks in advance!

Toydarian

[Nexela]

You could destroy all the loaded enemies and bases

/c local surface = game.player.surface
for key, entity in pairs(surface.find_entities_filtered({force= "enemy"})) do
entity.destroy()
end

[BlakeMW]

One of the main reasons why the game has evolution is to keep the enemy count relatively constant even as pollution increases.

Basically each enemy type has a "pollution cost" to be spawned, for example these are the biter pollution_to_join_attack values from the data:

small biter: 200 pollution
medium biter: 1000 pollution
big biter: 4000 pollution
behemoth biter: 20000

So if you roll back from behemoth biters to small biters, the same amount of pollution will be spawning literally 100x as many biters.

You could technically mod these values to reduce the spawn rate, but it can't be done from the console because these values are fixed once the game has loaded.

[toydarian]

BlakeMW, thanks for the explanation!

Nexela, that sounds like a great workaround! Thank you

[Rseding91]

You could destroy all the loaded enemies and bases

/c local surface = game.player.surface
for c in surface.get_chunks() do
for key, entity in pairs(surface.find_entities_filtered({force= "enemy"})) do
entity.destroy()
end
end

That's going to search the entire surface * chunk count.. you don't want the get_chunks part in there.

[Nexela]

Oops, I mostly just copied it from reddit and didn't think about the chunk part.