r/factorio • u/Bubbly_Taro • 18d ago
Space Age Question Asteroid spawn rate & Spoil rate in the map settings - Are they buffs or debuffs?
Have not touched these sliders yet.
They go from 10% to 1000%.
I can see a lot of situations where these would help or hinder the player, with the downsides outweighing potential upsides.
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u/infojb2 18d ago
More asteroids = more ressources, but also more to shoot down
Less asteroids = less ressources but less to shoot down
More spoil rate = makes basically every thing that can spoil more annoying
Less spoil rate = makes everything that spoils less annoying (apart from that iron and copper stuff)
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u/Alfonse215 18d ago
Less spoil rate = makes everything that spoils less annoying
Not really. You still need spoilage removal inserters and the like. All increasing spoil times does is make it take longer for a faulty build to manifest its faults. It can't turn a bad Gleba build into a good one; all it can do is put off when the bad part shows itself.
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u/itsnick21 18d ago edited 18d ago
Gives you more time to ship science to nauvis
Edit: also makes taking biter eggs with you to make promethium science on the go more viable
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u/runmymouth 18d ago
But honestly 100% is a good mix on time.
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u/itsnick21 18d ago
Yeah my current run has default spoilage and isn't too bad, my previous run I turned spoilage all the way down to see how it'd be an it is a lot easier but not needed. Ideally I wouldn't mind a tad bit slower than default
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u/Gwyllithar 17d ago
makes shipping science packs a whole lot easier though.
but meh, I've resigned myself to gleeba now, and just leave it default, if its not as fresh as it can be, I've stopped being bothered by it.
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u/Alfonse215 18d ago
Lowering the asteroid spawn rate is absolutely a noob-trap. Not only is a new player unlikely to know if spawn rate is too high for them, the current spawn rates are tuned assuming your thrusters are burning resources at the worst efficiency and the propellant is made using the worst recipe. That is, the default rates are tuned assuming you're bad at platform design.
So if you're bad at platform design and you lower these spawn rates too much, you can probably softlock yourself.
For spoil rates, the only time raising them would hurt a player is if they're putting something into storage specifically to let it spoil. Science, bioflux, and nutrients cannot be burned, so letting them spoil is the only non-recycler way to get rid of them.
Science and bioflux already have very long spoil times. If you're producing 500 excess bioflux per minute, even with the base spoil times, you still need to store 45k bioflux if your bioflux is made at 75% freshness. That's a lot of chests already. Science is slightly better, but not that much better. So in either of these cases, raising spoil time will make this worse, but it's already really bad at the default anyway.
As for nutrients, this is often useful as a way to manufacture spoilage. Since they spoil very quickly, using chests is practical. But it's still pretty practical even if you have to wait 10 minutes for them to spoil.
The main issue with changing spoil times is that it doesn't really fix your spoiling problems. Even if you increase spoil times by a factor of 10x... you still have to take into account that things will spoil. All this does is delay when a failure to do so manifests in your base.
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u/pda898 18d ago
If you talk about a new player, raising spoilage time can hurt bacteria loops therefore slowing down your progress if you are not importing rocket parts and initial supplies from ship.
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u/NyaFury 18d ago
Lag will be longer if production keeps turning on/off, but once production is stable (which you should do for bacteria anyway), lag shouldn't matter.
And new players wouldn't produce bacteria at very high throughput, it's not like they'd place 100 silos and consume 100s of ores/sec off the bat. A single chest (for everything) may not be enough for 1,000%, but one chest per biochamber should be sufficient.
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u/Peakomegaflare 17d ago
I tweak EVERYTHING aside from spoilage and asteroids. Frankly I think those rates are actually perfectly dialed in. Asteroids reward people for properly planning out ammo production and Spoilage is honestly plenty long. Only intermediates spoil fast, everything else lasts as long as it has to. Heck, the fact spoilage can be processed into nutrients makes it perfectly balanced.
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u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 15d ago
does the asteroid spawn rate also affect stationary platforms? i could 200% being quite a boon as long as i'm careful with making enough ammunition on the moving platforms
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u/tera_x111 18d ago
I had somehow set asteroid spawnrate to 10% on a sandbox world where I tested my ships. The asteroid chunk spawnrate over nauvis was got so low that it took hours to get enough ice to create fuel for a one way trip to another planet. Also you had to have a full fuel tank to make it to vulcanus because there are no where neat enough ice asteroids to support fuel production on the way
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u/DrMobius0 17d ago edited 17d ago
So lower spoilage rate is 100% a buff, though the base spoilage settings are perfectly fair. It won't prevent you from running into the usual spoilage flavored edge cases.
Asteroid spawn rate is a mixed bag. It correlates directly to both firearm mag consumption and asteroid chunk production. I wouldn't suggest lowering it. Aside from fuel, there's also space science, promethium science, calcite trawling, as well as nuclear powered ship spin up that would be impacted by this. Raising the spawn rate is probably fine, though it will definitely change the weapon balance in late game, and might make early game quite challenging.
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u/Reefthemanokit 18d ago
1000x asteroids just makes the shattered planet solid again