Ways to use biters for resources & electricity

[stann_co]

TL;DR

Abilities to use biters to gain resources, like electricity, or meat. and have an incentive to not murder every base on sight. Which in turn also means a need to constantly maintain defenses

fff-268-biter-attack-wallpaper.png (5.91 MiB) Viewed 3407 times

What ?

New features to procure materials from biters
Possible new uses for biters could be:

• Biter meat. Which isn't that needed for the player, but could still serve interesting purposes. Like conversion to fertilizer maybe.
• Biter... Milk Whilst disgusting could be an interesting, use for generating electricity, imagine they're basically like battery acid. Or as an alternative to lubricant
• Biter blood. Could be same use as milk suggestion

The thing that makes it interesting, is like cattle. It's hard to milk, or get meat from a cow if it's 90% bullet holes. Therefore they would need to be made docile, or sleepy first.

A way to do that could be like this:

• Step 1, lure the biters after you
• Step 2, get the biters trapped, and start pumping them with sleeping gas
• Step 3, milk or slaughter them on a specific procurement platform to gain resources.

Here's a drawn example

biter milk.png (36.22 KiB) Viewed 3407 times

A few new things would be needed for this. A sleeping gas dispenser, gates that allow some biters to enter, a way to turn off defenses (to let biters pass through) a platform for milking, or getting blood, meat.
If biter milk should be turned into electricity that would also need a new contraption.

Why ?

Why all this talk about biter milk. (sorry about that btw)
Having biters serve a purpose more than just canon fodder, would mean more ways to get certain resources, like electricity for example, which there is only 3 methods of generating now.
And at the same time, would mean an incentive to not destroy all biter bases on site,
which in turn would mean to maintain defenses more strongly as well.

[FuryoftheStars]

Not really sure I'd want this, but this all sounds like it might be moddable.

[Qon]

Sustainable Energy mod does kind of that, but incentivizes killing bases. And it has the best name.
The Free Energy Promise Gives fuel value to small artifacts too, so you can run your base on the corpses of the attacking horde of biters.

Old mods that require some updating to run in current Factorio and maybe another separate mod as well that reintroduces the artifact loot.

But this is very unlikely to ever be implemented in vanilla Factorio. The enemies are extremely CPU intensive at large scale, they can't really be used to power your factory in a balanced way that competes with the efficiency of coal mining and if you are burning artifacts then you can only use burners with steam engines which is the least CPU efficient power generation method. And the way they would be made efficient would be to remove their dynamic nature and their point as an interesting different mechanic. As long as they run around freely they will not be a proper alternative.

[ssilk]

There are lots of mods that use the (dead) natives for different things.


https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SchallAlienLoot
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/LootMilitaryScienceFv11

https://mods.factorio.com/query/Alien%2 ... ersion=1.1
…

[mmmPI]

I like the idea of the sleeping gas, and i suggest a gentle method to generate electricity from biters :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy6LaXAsZbk

I know they call it "hamster wheel" but those are just tiny biters.

Maybe instead of dying, they just fall asleep and then you can mine a sleeping biters, which would be an item required to make those "biters wheel".

Worms and spitters i thought could be used to gather "acid" because they seem to produce a lot of it.

[ssilk]

I thought over this second method and it reminds me too much of Jews brought into a shower and being gassed to death. I really would prefer some kind of hamster wheel method, which sounds funny.

[stann_co]

I thought over this second method and it reminds me too much of Jews brought into a shower and being gassed to death. I really would prefer some kind of hamster wheel method, which sounds funny.

oh god, yeah i guess i could see that. in my head it was more like a cattle farm. the gas part could be switched out for something else.

i can't come up with how hamsterwheels would work practically, but maybe theres something there

[aka13]

Because 80 year old events in human history totally have to be something you get reminded of, at every possible space, and associating a specific type of human with acid spewing bugs is of course a totally normal thing.
I'd be careful with hamster wheels, they might remind someone of slavery n stuff.

[Stringweasel]

This is an interesting idea. I'm working on something, let's see where it goes

Won't be using gas though.

[ssilk]

Offtopic

Because 80 year old events in human history totally have to be something you get reminded of, at every possible space

Maybe this thought is not harmful to you; I know people, which it would be.

And don’t mix this: I don’t like to be reminded all the time from whoever, how bad Germans was with their concentration camps and how strong are the dangers of being mistreated in Germany (as Jew, as Asylment seeker …) and how Germany has a special role in the world because of this, and so on. I know that all and I would say more than 80% of the Germans knows it, too. You cannot force someone to believe things, which are 80 years ago, by repeating it over and over: this results in bad feelings and bad behavior against those, who tell it.

That means I should not remind, too.

I will not reply to any answer.

[mmmPI]

This is an interesting idea. I'm working on something, let's see where it goes

Won't be using gas though.

I think it went on the mod portal :

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/biter-power

it sounds fun !

I was thinking of getting acid from the worms like the humans currently milk snake to get venom to inject into horses so that they create antibodies which are then extracted and used to make anti-venom for humans. Like they show on this video :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ziWrneMYss

Not nice to any of the animal involved, but i didn't think it could remind of tragic event from the past.

I thought you could use the acid for mining things like uranium, but a temporary immunity against the "slow" debuff would be more inline with the video.

When reading the suggestion it was about biter milk and an incentive to not destroy all alien bases. So i thought that would give an incentive to try and get a few worms inside a well sized box of wall so that it can spit on a "collecting entity" that woud fill with wormic acid instead of getting destroyed . Or that "collecting entity" could be used in the outer defense wall so that every attacks waves allow the player to collect some acid, as if after/during an attack the leftover acid that was spit aggressively is recycled when cleaning up the wall.

[Stringweasel]

I think it went on the mod portal :

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/biter-power

it sounds fun !

Oh yeah, this is where I got the initial idea from, although I did go my own direction a little as to what I though would be and be realistic for me to implement.

I wanted to add acid as ingredient to incubators or the egg extractor maybe, but I also want the tech be available alongside steam power for early game, when acid isn't available yet. Maybe I should rethink this though, would be fun with the use of acid, and killing spawners is hard so early in the game anyway.