Factorio Forums

Hello, I have played this game on and off for the past year and it frustrates me that I get to a point early on when the game forces me to focus on upgrading military while I'm trying to build. Often when I'm playing I take it slow and try to build my base in different ways to see what looks cleanest, most efficient and can be upgraded later. I play casually and often while watching a show or YouTube as well so I don't really want to speed build just so that I don't fall behind the biters evolution/expansion.

I know I can play with larger starting area or put biter evolution low but those are workarounds because I still want biters to level and I'd be too op at certain times if biters are levelling slow the whole playthrough.

So my idea was to have a shortcut to enable build mode like in The Sims (and many other games) but not necessarily be enabled every time I build. I want to be able to pause biter evolution, their expansion and crafting , since getting resources without biters progressing would be too OP so unpause if I need more supplies or to test if my setup is working (or maybe even have an option to just disable biters which would be useful if you are testing multiple things and don't want to pause, unpause a thousand times or you're doing a semi peaceful playthrough (easier than changing settings manually with change map settings mod).

Does something like this exist or is it even possible? I haven't coded with Lua before and didn't really understand how mod structure works when I took a glance at some mod folders but I could try to learn since I do have some coding experience. Any help with making it would be really appreciated (even where to start would help lol) or if someone who is experienced with mod making wants to make it, you will most likely do a much better job than I will!

There is the blueprint lab mod that gives you an extra surface to test build stuff. There are no aliens there and cheat mode is enables so you can craft anything for free. Can't do science stuff there though. Great to test build something or to make blueprints.

Unfortunately time still passes on the main surface while you are in the lab playing around. The way I do it is to save before entering the lab and the load that save when I'm done playing around and put the result in my blueprint library. The advantage over quitting the game and starting a sandbox is that you are always at the same tech level in the lab so you see what you can actually build now. And of course you can keep example builds in the lab and visit them quickly at any time for cut&paste jobs.

AlmightyBeing wrote: Sat Oct 02, 2021 1:22 pm I know I can play with larger starting area or put biter evolution low but those are workarounds because I still want biters to level and I'd be too op at certain times if biters are levelling slow the whole playthrough.

This does not answer your other question, but for this reason I like to set time evolution rate to 0, but then double the destroy factor for evolution to balance it out.