Factorio Forums

In vanilla, I'd sometimes play with no biters just to avoid the stress of defending my base. As far as I can see, if I have biters off in Space Age, I'm locked out of biter eggs, which means no biolabs, no productivity 3 modules, and no promethium science. Which is a problem, but I can still get quite a long way. But if I dsable pentapods on Gleba, I'm basically locked out of the whole of the Gleba tech tree, and therefore basically the rest of the game.

Is that right? Or did I miss a way of getting biter/pentapod eggs without enemies?

I don't *mind* playing with enemies, so it's not really an issue. But I thought about it because my current world is a railworld with enemy expansion turned off, and I cleared a huge space around my starting area for peace and quiet. But now I have a logistics issue as I need to ship bioflux to a captive nest that's *miles* away, and ship the eggs back (or build out there, which means shipping in all the other ingredients I need). Biter eggs have a 30 minute spoil time, so it's not like I'm in immediate danger of being overrun, but equally I don't relish shipping trainloads of eggs around. So I guess I'm setting up a belt line out there, which will be longer than my main bus.

You can use the "no enemies" checkbox in the map generation screen. It turns off the spawning of the actual biters, stompers etc. so nothing attacks you, but the nests themselves still spawn so that you can obtain eggs.

Additional question about no enemies mode: What happens when eggs "spoil"? I'm assuming they either evaporate or turn into actual spoilage? Or do they not have a spoil timer in this mode at all?

I want to put in a plug for playing with pollution turned off. You still have nests on Nauvis and Gleba, they still expand, and if you go close they still attack you but they don't send raiding parties. You still have to kill a demolisher, you still have to safely handle eggs that spoil into biters/pentapods, and you can still go out and get rowdy with some spidertron or PDL or whatever. If you set up artillery, you can trigger attacks if you aren't careful but nowhere near the Klandathu-level defenses needed. I am routinely away from Nauvis dicking around for dozens of hours and the biters don't attack. I don't really care for zerg-rush/tower defense and I feel the balance is perfect.

travvo wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2025 9:20 pm I want to put in a plug for playing with pollution turned off.

Yep. I frequently play in this mode + turning expansion off. Its the easiest way to do a "full achievement" run.

vark111 wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2025 9:12 pm Additional question about no enemies mode: What happens when eggs "spoil"? I'm assuming they either evaporate or turn into actual spoilage? Or do they not have a spoil timer in this mode at all?

They vanish.

Bilka wrote: Fri Feb 14, 2025 9:09 pm You can use the "no enemies" checkbox in the map generation screen. It turns off the spawning of the actual biters, stompers etc. so nothing attacks you, but the nests themselves still spawn so that you can obtain eggs.

Thanks, that's good to know. As is the "no pollution option", which I'd never tried.

(And for what it's worth, the huge long belts I ended up using to transport bioflux and biter eggs work just fine, so all is good on my current world. It's a bit ugly, but I'll save aesthetics for my next playthrough