Factorio Forums

A tag on spawner type entities that spawn a variety of units having a tag for enabling a simple 'night only' spawn behaviour, and associated parameter (double data type, or whatever makes most sense for referring to the surface's 'darkness' value) as a threshold.

For example, a spitter spawner that spawns special varieties of spitters when darkness is above 0.5 (out of 1.0 being full night time).

Additionally, a unit entity tag for vulnerability to day time with specified threshold and 'effect' result (which may be damage, or slowness, or explosions etc).

... and then mod them into zombies to turn Factorio into a sciency survival horror game?

yeah that's the plan. why is that so funny? should be horrifying!

You do already have the means to simlate this behaviour. The darkness of a surface can be read with LuaSurface->darkness. When this value reaches a specified limit (check in on_tick) do two things:

• 1) Loop through every spawner on the surface and set it to active = false
  2) And either one of these:
  • Create a giant invisible poison cloud at the center of the map that has a custom damage type which every entity other than your special spitter has a 100% resistance for.
  • Or loop through every special spitter and "fast replace" it with a similar entity what has a negative healing_per_tick parameter. (See create_entity fast_replace)

After the night you can reverse the changes again. If you encounter performance issues spread the loops out over multiple ticks (or even minutes for a gradual effect).

This is true, great points there 321freddy.

Okay, I added EnemySpawnerPrototype::min_darkness_to_spawn and max_darkness_to_spawn for 0.17.