Friday Facts #445 - The Biters Bite Back

[Rammix]

I would prefer to opt out from any updates which boost biters' activity / strength / etc.

While there are many people who like biter gameplay, there are also people like me who don't want to interact with them whatsoever. I would completely disable them or at least make passive on any map I play, if it didn't affect the achievements.

So, if you want to boost biters, please at least allow discarding that boost without disabling achievements. Thank you.

[BHakluyt]

Now that we have radar alerts for biter spawns, it would be awesome if we could get radars to output "biters detected" to the circuit network

Yes please? Please please please? And then it should be just a copy paste hopefully to do the same for the pentapods on Gleba...?

[CheeseMcBurger]

Especially on Gleba it feels very demotivating if you clear a lot of nests just for them to be back and immediately spawn really strong enemies.

I'm back on Gleba right now. Haven't had to kill any enemies on Gleba for about 150 hours.

Then I started to kill 4-5 Nests just for fun.

Now I'm forced to clear nests every ten minutes. I don't have defenses yet, cause I did not need them earlier, so I need to wipe them by hand. It just sucks ass.

[Linck]

After the update I'm now getting annoying expansion alerts all the time on my Nauvis base. It's normal that they expand, and I have artillery to take care of that. My base has been having no biter problems for more than 30 hours, probably more, but now I'm basically getting an alert every minute, which doesn't help me in any way, it's just being a nuisance

[GregoriusT]

Especially on Gleba it feels very demotivating if you clear a lot of nests just for them to be back and immediately spawn really strong enemies.

I'm back on Gleba right now. Haven't had to kill any enemies on Gleba for about 150 hours.

Then I started to kill 4-5 Nests just for fun.

Now I'm forced to clear nests every ten minutes. I don't have defenses yet, cause I did not need them earlier, so I need to wipe them by hand. It just sucks ass.

Oh that might not have been the update doing it then, you might have caused their expansions to "actually work" by removing "problem egg rafts", because they really do expand rather fast on Gleba to the point you need Artillery to keep the nests down at high Glebevolution..

[motmontheinternet]

+1 for being able to disable expansion alerts. It's fine if the alerts are on by default.

[cbtmessageman]

+1 for being able to disable expansion alerts. It's fine if the alerts are on by default.

Run the /alerts command in the console. You can mute and disable the Expansion Base Built alert individually.

[GregoriusT]

+1 for being able to disable expansion alerts. It's fine if the alerts are on by default.

Run the /alerts command in the console. You can mute and disable the Expansion Base Built alert individually.

in which case, make the /alerts gui not hidden behind a frikkin command that you potentially cant type in if you dont have a keyboard (see switch version)

[eugenekay]

in which case, make the /alerts gui not hidden behind a frikkin command that you potentially cant type in if you dont have a keyboard (see switch version)

Zl + Zr + Minus is the default binding to open Chat/Console on Switch.

IMG_0434.jpeg (3.6 MiB) Viewed 1118 times

The /alerts command works fine; the GUI was added in Version 2.1.7 which has not released to Switch yet.

IMG_0436.jpeg (3.18 MiB) Viewed 1118 times

[hojava]

I usually play by destroying all nests within my pollution radius and slightly beyond it. However, after I started building a mall, my pollution spread quite far; consequently, I don't see any nests on the map within the pollution zone, yet I still see biters coming my way. When I head in the direction they came from, a nest appears right under my feet - and only then does it show up on the map. In other words, I don't see new nests until I rediscover them. I'm using the latest stable version on Steam.
Is this not supposed to happen, or does the revealed map not always show up-to-date information?

Yes, this is expected behaviour. If you look at the remote view, you see brighter and dimmer areas - bright areas are currently scanned by a radar. All the areas close to radar or player are bright constantly. But radars are also scanning. In the beginning, it reveals new terrain. Later, the scanning continues, but no longer reveals new terrain due to distance limitation of the radar. The scanned chunk appears like a bright square on the remote view. The trick is that only the brighter, currently scanned areas, get up-to-date information. All the darker areas are just a record of the last state when it was scanned/seen by a player. If biters expand there, you won't see them until you come close enough or the chunk is randomly scanned by a radar.

[wanne]

Victoy poling is back and it is 1 pole/pipe per chunk... If you do it on 5 chunk wide rows there is no more expansion in that direction.


Apart from that: I kind of do not like that enemies now expand in all holes. I kind of liked that you could survive on your conquered chunk of land and of lands and only expand into the gaps between nests and keep your pollution footprint low if you have been fallen behind. And then a few ammo-upgrades later you can get back to these chunks between the gaps. But the alerts should give you enough advantage to keep your cleaned territory.

[Jap2.0]

Victoy poling is back and it is 1 pole/pipe per chunk... If you do it on 5 chunk wide rows there is no more expansion in that direction.

That is not correct. There was a bug that allowed something similar to this in early versions of 2.1 but it has since been fixed.