Factorio Forums

I wanted to play Space Age again, in deathworld marathon, for a challenge. I completed a deathworld marathon in vanilla last year and it was great.

I generated a few maps, and biter nests are often very close to the starting patches.

Somebody on discord told me a case where the nests were right on the iron patches.

Is that even doable? Should I abandon trying deathworld marathon in Space Age? Will that be patched in 2.1?

(not sure if I should have posted this in the balancing forum)

Can happen due to pure chance, AFAIK there is no check to prevent this (though it's probably not impossible to beat).

If you still get problems after generating 30-50 seeds, then there might be something for real but not until then.

Definitely chance. Not so long ago I wanted opposite - to have nest very close to the starting point, and it have taken me dozens of seeds to get.

FWIW, most of the deathworld maps I've rolled pre-2.0 also had biters nests on/near the starting patch.

While you can roll until you get a map where this doesn't happen, there is some fun to be had in working out how to avoid provoking attacks while you build to the point where you can clear out the nest. Some ideas to get you started:

• Put power and smelting far away from the biters; In deep forest, if you can manage. Hand-carry ores from the patches to the smelters.
• You can hand-mine ores. You can also make careful use of electric miners if you make sure to turn them off before they generate enough pollution to spread. Burner miners are possible too, but you need to be even more careful.
• Sometimes you can find other patches to mine. One of the maps I've played through I found a second iron patch further away that was far enough from nests I could set up some burner miners I could leave running while I was doing other things.
• Those nests aren't as scary as they look, since all the biters are going to be small this early in the game. (they're not pushovers, of course)

Somebody on discord found a good seed and I started a game.

For now it's fine, my pollution is almost touching the nearest nest and I just finished getting splitters and turrets.

Technically, you can clear a base with light armor, fish and pistol, but it's a bit painful. Focus on worms and don't let biters overwhelm you.
Probably better, to get turrets and/or military first. The shotgun is decent at clearing nests

even in deathworld?

jokoon wrote: Wed Oct 22, 2025 7:19 pm even in deathworld?

nest size matters, of course. deathworld probably has mostly too big ones. That one in the screenshot looked doable, but when I look at it now, maybe not.