Just found a new way of playing Factorio

[Porter65]

I was fiddling with the parameters, and somehow I stumbled upon this setting.

Deposits: all 3 parameters down to 17% (frequency, size, richness)
Biter evolution: only from pollution, x4
Starting area 17%
More desert / few trees (low pollution absorption)
Increased biters base, 120% Rampant (AI actions & difficulty)
Ruins mod: more ruins (but stay within reason)

I also added Alien biomes with experimental rivers.

The end result is that your starting area has no minerals!! I'm exploring the country side, picking loot from ruins, sometime a few ore or plates and preciously keep them to make ammos or something.

I just spotted a 30K stone deposit. Now that's the most interesting one to find, but it means it is still possible to find ore, only it has become ultra rare!

Not much of a time pressure or anything, biters will evolve only when you pollute, and you don't at start. Well, they will also settle the map over time ... But you move from a spot to another, trying to find ruins, building up your inventory, until you hit a ore deposit I guess. The campfire mod is a must have for this 'alone in the willderness' feeling

Not sure if it will entertain me a lot, but I thought it would amuse a few of you for a few hours .... or not


Edit: After 10 days (I use a time mod), where for 3 days I had to fend off small biters with my axe (my ammos were long gone), I finally found successively 60 ammos clip, a rover vehicle and ... a ore deposit, 95k, not too defended !! There is some 500 tiles north a copper deposit (24k) free of biter what's more!
I'm in, ready to conquer Nauvis for good now!

Here is my night base (deployed with 2 companions drones*, and my inventory after 10 days):
(* companions drones had their laser removed, they are 'only' used for claim, repair and deploy)

[ssilk]

I also like that kind of changing the game from puzzle more to explore.

The exploration aspect of Factorio fascinates me much. I can understand that not everyone will understand that, but I the first time I went out by car, driving and driving kilometers over kilometers was a key element. After an hour or so I looked to the map and suddenly I understand how crazy large this is. And I know I could do that for some more hours. I felt so tiny and on the other hand so curious, what will happen, if I really do that.

And somehow I don’t like how “narrow” good games need to be to make fun. More space would be much more realistic, but not fun. And there are also a lot of technical issues.

But what, if? What, if we could explore crazy vast maps? What if the average distance between two players is 20 kilometers at start? What if hundreds of other players could enter such a game?

I always think of this chain of basic ideas:
1. Factorio maps are generated. So if there would be a way to save just the changes of a map, the save would not take so much space on disk and you could create really, really huge maps without fear. 2000 kilometers in diameter, why not? When I load the game, the needed chunks are regenerated, the changes are placed over them and - voila - you have the exactly same map, but 99,999% is just pure wilderness. Never touched by biters or players. They don’t need to be saved, they can be regenerated.

2. Now with that vast maps, it would be possible to play multiplayer? The first problem would be to find the other players. You can explore twice as fast then.

3. More players without the disadvantages. Because they are so far away. And depending on their distance it would make either sense to join an existing group or making an own new group. Fractions evolve just by distances.

4. Because it’s about exploration we need a kind of automatic explore. E.g. exploration bots. You send them out into one direction and they will go as far as possible.

5. Because it can happen, that there is not enough iron in a part of the map, it makes sense to exchange things with other groups. That is a big problem, because building trains is a) too slow, b) takes too much resources.

6. We need a much faster transport (Airplanes and later a kind of “hyper loop train” which needs much less resources). We need automated building of such transport routes. And wireless communication to make orders etc.



(That goes also a bit into direction of viewtopic.php?f=80&t=13022 because the distance would enable to have independent simulation of surface parts on different hosts)