Factorio Forums

If this problem has already been addressed please disregard. I am making this suggestion on behalf of new players.

I think it would be a shame for a new player to click new game with default settings and be given a desert biome start. Starting in the desert means your pollution will spread much faster and attract more enemies quicker. A desert biome start can be hard and is very unforgiving, even more so for new players.

Imagine being convinced to try this new game, spend multiple hours learning only to face insurmountable waves of enemies and be forced to restart. And if that newbie asked for advice unfortunately I would tell them they just got unlucky with their seed and they should start all over again but make sure they get a decent seed this time. Sometimes its not enough to go back 15 minutes to the last auto save. Some people might give up and uninstall or refund

I like the defence aspect of the game I just think there might be too much variance depending on map seed between having a manageable first game experience with biters and being absolutely swamped.

The problem I am considering can %100 be solved by changing the map generator values but I think that most brand new players won't know understand what they all do properly and would just click default.

My suggestion for a solution would be scaling certain parameters on the % of desert tiles near spawn. More desert tiles could mean a larger starting area size, more time before the first wave or maybe starting with more turrets and ammo?

Another suggestion could be to have a fixed default map that has been hand crafted a little bit. Give new players a map with a non-desert start that somewhat has a perimeter of trees and cliffs that intuitively gives the new player a place to fortify and then later expand out of.
As an aside it would also be interesting for the community to have a shared seed that all players would use. It would be cool to see what different players do with the same seed and how different everyone's world looks despite the same start. Could be interesting for speedrunning too

Another suggestion could be to have more warning of the first biter wave. Maybe even pause the game and give a little pop up explaining that a wave of biters is on their way soon because of the players pollution cloud and they should craft some ammo and turrets.

I am hoping these suggestions would give players a more balanced experience that would be a little less frustrating

Just evaluate the preview area biomes for there being a desert.
If desert tiles are above a certain treshold the game could display a yellow warning, stating that deserts are higher difficulty.
"Take note: Your current spawn area is in a desert biome. This makes the game more difficult."

As someone with 1.5k hours in the game, I always still reroll until i don't have deserts nearby, because I don't like dealing with biters in super early game.

yoinkysploink59 wrote: Wed Aug 05, 2026 11:10 pm Imagine being convinced to try this new game, spend multiple hours learning only to face insurmountable waves of enemies and be forced to restart.

One of the nice things about pollution-based enemy attacks is that they're pollution-based.

New players are way slower at building stuff than experienced players. They usually hand craft a bunch (which produces no pollution) and it usually takes them a long time to build a furnace stack that can actually fill a yellow belt. Put simply, new players don't generate that much pollution.

A desert start is at its most problematic if you are pumping out a lot of pollution very quickly. Lower amounts of pollution don't go far on their own.

So while it can happen that a new player will get overwhelmed by "insurmountable waves of enemies", they generally have to have a 20+ hour run to get there.