Artillery cleaning all chunks -> no more enemy?

[Harb42]

Hi all,

Recently, in my game, I was fed up with the constant attacks of pentapods on Gleba. To take serious action on the matter I sent my black belt diplomatic delegation: the legendary artillery wagons. My base is not that big and did not venture far away neither.
So, I put few artillery wagons in the middle of my base and let them work. They destroyed all the eggs, they shot even in undiscovered areas too.
And now comes the interesting part. Since then there is complete silence on Gleba. Just before writing this post I checked out my save in debug mode with some chunk options enabled. 'Pollution' is spreading on Gleba, but there are no enemies, no candidates for expansion. I haven't used scripts, etc to verify this yet.
So far I am happy with the results but it feels like a glitch or exploit.

- Can this situation really happen? (As long as I don't explore new chunks, there won't be new enemies?)
- If yes, is this intended?

[eugenekay]

Yup - if there are no Spawners then the Pollution does not get "absorbed", and no new enemies are spawned.

You can fire a few Artillery shots wildly into unexplored territory to force new Chunks to generate.

[jdrexler75]

Pretty sure it doesn't work like that on Nauvis though, fresh expansion parties keep coming in from the edges of the already generated chunks, whether explored or not. So left to their own devices the biters will repopulate the world.

If this method works on Gleba (and is not a bug that gets fixed), it beats my method of just building a bunch of walls in each chunk where my spore cloud reaches so that they aren't considered as expansion targets... at least by remote exploring with Spidertron no extraneous chunks get generated.

[eugenekay]

Chunk generation extends slightly beyond the Visible range. Nauvis generally has denser enemies than Gleba, so it is more likely that there is an “invisible” spawner somewhere.

You can examine the Savegame in Editor Mode with “generate neighbor chunks” turned off.

[MEOWMI]

It does seem very much intended. It can happen on Nauvis too technically, but usually you have to do that deliberately. The main difficulty in normal play is distinguishing between unexplored and ungenerated chunks, but the debug setting makes for a decent way to check for it outside of editor mode.

Ungenerated chunks won't generate expansion parties.

If your pollution cloud reaches the ungenerated chunks, it will force generate them.

Spidertrons, however, will generate chunks in some radius nearby, but the radius is not as big as around the player character. There are also other things like radars and artillery shots.

I noticed it also happened for me on Gleba, due to the combination of enemy terrain requirements, low enemy density and infrequency of expansion (however it wasn't 100% cleared, just some parts of the map). Confirmed via the expansion chunks debug setting, which easily extends further than artillery chunk generation. Enemies on Gleba are harder than biters and require far less pollution/spores to attack, so it makes sense for their nest expansion to be slower and more sparse.

[schorsch_76]

I had the same things happening on Nauvis. After the last attack on the biters with my tank, it seemed that i cleaned out the last one attacking. After that, bot one biter challenged my defenses. as i am on aquillo right now, i am not sad that they done visit me anymore