Factorio Forums

The way asteroids deal damage got a rework in the experimental branch, and now each medium asteroid destroys 2-4 entities on impact even at 0 km/s. This change doesn't generally offend me (you should always plan for some attrition and you shouldn't send an unprepared platform on a journey imo) but I think an exception should be made for ships parked in orbit of a planet. Before, you could pretty well build a platform over Vulcanus and send up repair packs to handle the small chips of damage before it can defend itself. Now it's a bit less viable.

Was this an intended change, or is the new system just not done yet? In any case, even if they leave it as it is, I'll still be building ships over Vulcanus and eating the damage. I'll just be a lot more annoyed about it than before!

Is this actually new, though?

I thought Nauvis was the only planet where you were guaranteed not to get pummeled by damage-causing asteroids while assembling a platform.

Gods, yes. All of my platform-making infrastructure is on Gleba, so this is the one thing that I'm really dreading updating to 2.1 for.

Kyralessa wrote: Fri Jun 26, 2026 2:54 pm Is this actually new, though?

I thought Nauvis was the only planet where you were guaranteed not to get pummeled by damage-causing asteroids while assembling a platform.

As I said, the damage was much less (for medium asteroids, while stopped at 0 km/s) in the 2.0 version. Something like 50 damage per asteroid. While building a ship over Vulcanus, I've only ever needed at most 2 more rocket loads. (one for repair packs, and one for extra platform foundations if you got unlucky) That's pretty easy to deal with if you're established on Vulcanus.

On the other hand, now you only really need another ~5 rocket loads to combat the attrition during the ship building process on a mid-large ship. In practice that's fairly trivial, so it's only annoying and not challenging!

I think the real problem is that there's medium asteroids in orbit at all, they could be removed for the inner planets and not much would change. Maybe replace them with small asteroid chunks spawning, if it's about the principle of the other planet orbits not leaving broken ships up without some support.
But I really like the changes to asteroid damage, feels like an actual space rock tearing through metal sheets, please don't revert that.

I understand that there should be inherent risk in placing your main shipyard on a different planet, but this change will further emphasise everyone building ships on Nauvis, which just contributes to the "samey" feeling that a lot of 2.1.7 changes seem to favor.