Factorio Forums

Short version: Can items that have been dropped to the ground time out after a certain time? Say, 10 or so minutes?

I've often noticed that when I expand my walls or move beyond them, biters have chewed through a lot of those placeable "stones" that litter the gameworld. Normally, when you start building, you clear them and use the stone and coal for something. However, when biters or artillery destroy these placeable stones, they drop a significant amount of "stone" items to the ground. These exist indefinately, and if your base produces significant pollution, you can have a lot of these outside of the walls.
Since these "stone" and "coal" items exist as entities in the game world, they consume memory and most likely some minor UPS as well. Since the player has no way to collect these automatically, I was wondering if it would be possible to have these simply time out and be removed from the world after a while.

[Edit] Another option would be to change the behaviour of these placeables to that of trees. IE if you ram them or destroy them rather then mine them, they drop nothing. Trees leave no wood behind when biters munch on them.

I agree. Also annoying item explosions would be much less annoying. I do not see any sense to punish player by such way if he takes armor off without thinking. I do not also see any reason why items, which are not interesting for anyone should last forever eating CPU cycles.

I don't think the occasional stone item on ground will be an UPS killer. There is only a small amount of stone present on the map and once the artillery has killed that there won't be any more. So you don't get more and more stone on the ground over time.

Maybe a secondary effect of adding a mechanic like this is that now they can make biters drop stuff like biomass when killed.

I think it's a good mechanic to have.

The skeleton of a dead player has this feature so maybe this can be modded in.

Alternatively, have big rocks no longer explode into items.
With alien artifacts gone, they're the only cause of this problem here.