Factorio Forums

When a expansion party settles near an engineer's wall and spawns a worm about 24-48 tiles away (outside of laser range, but inside of large and behemoth worms), they will destroy the walls and defenses with no way for the engineer to retaliate or defend with turrets on the wall at all (the flamethrower's range is too short as well). The solution to this seems to be gaming wall distance at around 16, which isn't so intuitive.

I upgraded from 2.0, having heard about the buffed expansions, which I had assumed only meant expansion parties were bigger (and I knew that was true!), and was looking forward to have more fun expanding my factory. Huge expansion parties and more often seemed like a breath of fresh air compared to minuscule previous expansion. I was a little miffed when some biters settled directly on top of a solar+radar outpost, with many buildings in the area, but didn't assume it was sign of things to come.

Unfortunately, this happened twice: Expansion party came, out of range of wall and it's defenses, 6-8 large worms settled in that Goldilocks zone, and my wall was destroyed, and I was forced to move it back with robots. The wall was near my base, and I was not about to move my wall back any more. The second time this happened, I loaded a previous autosave and disabled expansion. I don't think I will play with it on in any more of my saves until this is remedied in some way ¯\_( '-' )_/¯

That behavior is not new. I struggled with that constantly with one of my bases in 1.1.
The only answer seems to be getting artillery installed ASAP and placing if far enough back from the wall to have the danger zone outside its minimum radius.
The only other turret with the rang is the rail gun, and that's more overkill than the artillery. Much later in the game and only with Space Age enabled.

bloopybloop1235 wrote: Tue Jul 28, 2026 3:02 pm
I upgraded from 2.0, having heard about the buffed expansions, which I had assumed only meant expansion parties were bigger (and I knew that was true!), and was looking forward to have more fun expanding my factory. Huge expansion parties and more often seemed like a breath of fresh air compared to minuscule previous expansion. I was a little miffed when some biters settled directly on top of a solar+radar outpost, with many buildings in the area, but didn't assume it was sign of things to come.

Thanks for the report, and welcome to the forum

There was 1 function related to the expansion, which estimated the final base size vs the number of units,
And essentially this function was way way underestimating how big the bases will be, so would pick a position too close to the walls.

E.G
Before: 100 units = radius 13.8
After (fixed): 100 units = radius 31.5

So with this fixed the expansions should be further away as intended more consistently

Still its tricky with the worms as they have a huge range and we can't 100% force they don't spawn too close to attack

Thank you very much!

Klonan wrote: Thu Jul 30, 2026 7:09 am Still its tricky with the worms as they have a huge range and we can't 100% force they don't spawn too close to attack

I think that is fine because guaranteed safety would be boring.

Makes sense to me