Factorio Forums

TL;DR
Add a technology unlock that allows you to glass (clear all player owned entities) on a planet's surface

What?
This could either be a tool which "destroyed" all player entities, but leave the underlying geography undisturbed.
Or it could act like a new landing site on the planet, essentially generating a new surface location. (which might allow for the option of having multiple surfaces on one

Why?
Sometimes you just want a fresh start on a blank piece of paper, and tearing down the previous incarnation of the base can take hours, and isn't very interesting game play (in my opinion at least).
I'd like the option of sacrificing everything I've built in return for a new start.


Q: "Why not just move to a new area of the map?"
A: It doesn't feel good to have all the old junk hanging about, forever waiting to be cleared up. People who build much better bases than I do might also consider the impact on UPS.

Q: "Refactoring and maintaining legacy systems is a fact of life in software development, philosophically it should be something the player has to deal with".
A: Fair enough. It would be nice to have the option though - perhaps locked behind the very last military tech "Glassing Planets", or if it's more like a new landing site lock it behind the last yellow science

If you really want to do that and happen to not care about achievments, you can use the map editor to regenerate the surface nauvis.

Dont try to destroy your base with military equipment. The devs have for some reason decided that remnants are now permanent, until you build another entity on top of them. So destroying your old base is gonna leave remnants everywhere and unless you cover every tile with a new non-tile entity, you will have some remnants left. I really dislike that change.

You can easyli do that job in the map editor. it needs not 5 minuts if you like.

And if you only want to start the same map, you can copy the mapcode for a new start - it will be 100% same map with all same ressources.

You can use a chunk delete mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Delete-Chunk-Tool
Deleted chunks will be autogenerated again as virgin chunks with all original content (resource patches, enemies) if uncovered again. This closely resembles discovering the same place again as if it was the first time.

I appreciate you can achieve the same result with the editor or mods.
I would like to request an in-game vanilla feature for it

I agree it would be nice to clear up remnants somehow!