Factorio Forums

Left-clicking a biter gives the error "Can't open enemy structures." while I find it incredibly hilarious it probably should not return that "error".

Discovered this when I ran out of ammo and began left-clicking hoping to melee with the pick axe while retreating and that kept appearing in the console. How do you melee biters anyways? I remember a crash fix a while ago when meleeing a biter but I've never managed to figure it out. Plus the pickaxes have damage values on them.

I ended up dying from laughter. No really I had to reload my last autosave because I found this so hilarious and died.

In viewtopic.php?f=23&t=30594 the devs stated that this is not a bug.

However I will leave it open as in my opinion the message is misleading. Even if you make the biter a member of your own force you are not able to "open" it. Nothing happens when you click on it, except that there is no error message.
I know that this error is a catch-all for any enemy structures, but maybe it should only be printed for entities that can actually be opened (i.e. display a GUI or perform an action).

You can melee attack biters/spitters by pressing Space or C when you're out of ammo and have an axe. This will not work on spawners though.

I'll make it so it doesn't even try to open things that have no associated GUI as that makes no sense.