Personal Defense

[greycheek]

How do I get my character to be able to fight aliens with personal weapons? I can't find the way to do it.

[Koub]

craft yourself a modular armor, and add it a power source and one or several PLDs.

[Serenity]

Pay attention to the tooltips. It now says what items equipment needs to be placed in

[valneq]

How do I get my character to be able to fight aliens with personal weapons? I can't find the way to do it.

Do you mean pistols, submachine guns, shotguns? Do you mean grenades? Or do you mean personal laser defense? Or is it maybe the defender / distractor / destroyer capsules you want to use?

Pistols and the like are used with "space" to attack enemies closest to your cursor. Or by pressing "C" to shoot a specific entity, which could even be one of your own structures. The equipped weapon and ammo type are displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen. Change active weapon with "Tab".

Grenades need to be taken in hand an clicked where you want to throw them. Same holds true for capsules (poison, slowing) or the defender/distractor/destroyer capsules.

Personal laser defense is like a laser turret that you carry around. Once it is operational it will shoot at enemies automatically. But it needs to be placed in modular armor / power armor / power armor MK2. Once you have any of these armor types, you can open its equipment grid by right clicking. With the equipment grid open, you can just place the personal laser defense in the grid. Be aware: personal laser defense requires electricity from the equipment grid. In order to get electricity available, you also need either "portable solar panel" or "portable fusion reactor", possibly complemented by "personal battery" to buffer up electric energy.

Some additional information can be found in the wiki:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Modular_armor
https://wiki.factorio.com/Equipment_modules

[csduff]

Equip a rocket launcher and load a nuclear warhead into it. Caution: do not aim at feet.

[greycheek]

thanks, I get it now.

[valneq]

thanks, I get it now.

That is great! But what exactly was your problem in the first place?

[greycheek]

I couldn't find any documentation. Incidentally, pressing Tab to switch weapons doesn't work for me. I have to manually place a weapon in the first slot in order to use it.

[valneq]

Incidentally, pressing Tab to switch weapons doesn't work for me. I have to manually place a weapon in the first slot in order to use it.

Let me see if I understand:

You have two (or three) weapons equipped in the bottom right corner. Note that each weapon uses its own ammo slot right below as indicated by the common green highlight for the active weapon. Also note that they may require different ammo type: shotguns need shotgun shells and cannot work with firearm magazines. In order to switch between two weapons via [Tab] you need to have ammo equipped for each weapon, even if they could in principle both use the same type of ammo. For example, both the pistol and the submachine gun accept firearm magazines.

However, when you press [Tab], the green highlight (indicating the selected weapon and its ammo) does not switch to the second weapon.

Then, maybe your keyboard settings have changed this to a different key. [Tab] is just the default setting.

[greycheek]

I see now. Each weapon needs its own ammo.