Factorio Forums

I've been playing around with the new artillery and it's map revealing property. Want to know what's in some chunk on the map? Shoot it. Sadly that is a quite expensive and slow way to reveal chunks. That made me think that maybe we could have something that has the revealing property without the damage at a far lower cost and maybe revealing a larger region.

So my idea would be some form of exploration / radar drone that you place in a radar (or roboport?). You can then target a point on the map and a drone starts from the nearest radar (with a drone). The drone would reveal the map as it flies to the target, then circle the target chunks to reveal the chunks around it and either crash or return to the radar.

Flight time could be limited by fuel and if drones crash at the end then I would suggest that they spiral around the target revealing more and more chunks till they run out of fuel. The farther away the target the less they reveal.

one bad sideeffect would be that this would increase map size pretty fast.
in addition to that it depends on play style. if you plan on creating a mega base you are usually going straight into one direction instead of spreading evenly.

I don't see how that would be.

First you have to research radars and build them. Then research drones and build them (maybe even one per exploration mission). So "fast" isn't going to happen in the sense of early.

Then you have to manually target an area for exploration. You click there, it takes time for the drone to fly there and then you get maybe 9 to 25 chunks explored. If you don't like it there then you send a drone somewhere else to explore. But unless you build 1000 drones and click everywhere the map won't grow much.

The goal isn't to quickly reveal large areas of the map. That's what radars are for. It's a more targeted temporary look at a small area. For example your radar just found an oil well at the edge of your map. Now you want to see if there are any aliens around it so you send a drone for a quick look.