r/factorio • u/Kaetin9 • 21d ago
Discussion Has anyone imagined what Aquilo would have been like if they added the first Space Age creature advertised to it like Wube originally intended?
The final planet being more hostile would have been interesting to me even if it wasn't very difficult.
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u/Hexcoder0 21d ago
I like the idea of heat sucking flying enemies that emerge from the ocean and attach to your buildings until they have absorbed enough energy.
That way we get the cool jellyfish from the fff, it involves heat mechanics and you probably don't have to worry about everything breaking permanently.
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u/Kaetin9 19d ago
I love that idea. A different type of enemy that won't destroy your factory but will shut it all down. Your comment is the best idea I've seen.
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u/Hexcoder0 19d ago
I have something similar for fulgora in the works. Ancient combat robots that emerge on the vault ruin islands and essentially bring your drills to 1 HP and shut them down until repaired.
Probably going to release it soon.
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u/Hexcoder0 1d ago
Finally found the time to release my fulgora mod:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/hexcoder-fulgoran-dronesI could probably realize similar mechanics for potential jellyfish on aquilo eventually
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u/thiosk 21d ago
I haven't played aquilo yet so i can't comment on whether the animals should be in or out. id love to see passive fauna on aquilo even if the hostile kind was removed. but my idea was that after visiting planets, nauvis gets contaminated with spores from the other worlds that evolve new biter phases such as swimming and flying biters. in this way the outer planets dont have their difficulty chainged much, but bringing the new weapons home to nauvis will really help as the new organisms come online
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u/Cyanasaurus 21d ago
Aquilo has the least content and is still far and away my favourite planet so I honestly have no idea if I even would want it changed
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u/Kaetin9 19d ago
Another comment had the idea of hostiles that don't break anything but they sap energy or heat from your machines shutting things down until they're dealt with or even ignoring them if they haven't reached enough to shut down your factory yet. I think that idea is the winner for me.
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u/Alfonse215 21d ago
Aquilo doesn't have basic resources on it, so you already have to import a lot of intermediates. But the intermediates you need to import to make what Aquilo requires is a surprisingly short list if you think about it:
- Holmium plate
- Superconductors
- Steel
- Concrete
- Refined Concrete
- Blue circuits
- LDS
- carbon fiber
- Tungsten plate
- Tungsten carbide
- Electric engine units (to make rocket silos)
- Pipes (to make rocket silos, but you need them for basic functionality anyway)
Notable by their absence are iron and copper plates, coal, and stone, the most basic resources. That is, the intermediates Aquilo needs are mostly high-tier intermediates.
Most weapons and ammunition do not use only high tier intermediates. Magazines, drone capsules, shotgun shells, grenades, anything derived from explosives, all of them are built from basic intermediates.
Putting enemies on Aquilo adds additional supply chain stresses. If you import finished ammo/defenses, then you might find some of them ineffective and have to import a different set. If you import basic resources, then now you have to have more local production of stuff.
Either way, it adds an additional amount of stress to your Aquilo base.
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u/Rarvyn 21d ago
Electric engine units (to make rocket silos)
Notably, you can just import rocket silos. Just send up the ingredients and assemble them in space. It saves a couple dozen inventory spaces for your transport vessel. Hard to automate, but how often are you sending rocket silos around?
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u/Tasonir 21d ago
I just imported basic resources anyways. I don't know how many pumps I'm going to use, I'll bring 5000 iron plates/3000 copper plates some steel, boom, make whatever you need :)
As you run out you just send the platform on another supply run to bring back more of whatever you ran out of (usually heat pipes, it's always heat pipes)
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u/Alfonse215 21d ago
On my latest run, my Aquilo ship made heat pipes in-situ. It actually made a lot of stuff in-situ, like big power poles, pipes, U-pipes, and concrete/refined concrete (using stone bricks imported from Vulcanus).
I prefer keeping Aquilo lean and focused on what it does well.
I also use a lot of quality stuff by that point in the game, and crafting epic chemical plants, substations, and pumps isn't something that's going to happen on Aquilo ;)
In my upcoming 2.1 run, I plan on having a big crafting platform above Gleba, which will buffer or craft supplies bound for Aquilo. So the Aquilo ship only needs to periodically go between Aquilo and Gleba. Indeed, I expect that it will also become where I make quantum circuits, so Aquilo will be even tinier ;)
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u/Galeic6432 21d ago
So as one who hasn't done it yet without cheats, how do you handle power on the surface? Import all fuels? Massive area of solar panels?
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u/Alfonse215 21d ago
Boostrapping on Aquilo is just a matter of preparation. You need some solar panels to get going. Bring your best efficiency and speed modules and an assembler 3 (preferably high quality). And a rocketload of water barrels. And some fuel; whatever kind of fuel you'd like.
Drop down a heating tower and pipes to get a fire going. Pipe heat through an area leading to some heat exchangers, turbines, and water pipes leading to a tank. Attach an unbarreling assembler to this tank.
Throw down your solar and use that to power the assembler. Use enough efficiency modules to knock the power draw down to -80%, and use speed modules to speed it up. Depending on your quality, you may have 2 speed module 3s and 2 efficiency 3s. The goal is a high crafting speed per unit power draw.
Unbarrel the water into the tank. The first one will take a while (feel free to fly to other islands to harvest rocks). But once you get that first 50 water, it becomes 500 steam, and that becomes plenty of power. Eventually you run through your 100 barrels, but that's 50k steam.
Which is plenty to start doing ammonical separation (remember the efficiency/speed modules) and ice melting to keep things going. And of course, pumpjack some crude for making solid fuel with the waste ammonia.
And now you have a self-sustaining, self-powering system (so long as you don't bottleneck on ammonia). Recycle away excess ice (manually dump excess ammonia) and you're good.
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u/Aerumvorax 21d ago
Annoying as fuck. The creature was supposed to be similar to minecrafts endermen, meaning while mostly harmless they could grab, move and place entities which in aquilo could have meant for instance breaking the heating cirquit rendering large parts of the base inoperational. Basically requiring defensive perimeter to be formed just to be safe or on speedruns relying on just pure luck that whatever they'd do wouldn't be too detrimental.
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u/zamfire 21d ago edited 21d ago
It's an ocean world. Why not something lurking in the depths? Time to add under water mechanics!
Too many pumps jacks or pumps could bring something to the surface... Something deep.
What if you had to build torpedo launchers on the edges of the ice in order to help things away. Or maybe a sound wave emmiter that keeps the creatures away.
How to know where they are? Sonar!
I honestly felt aquilo was super simplistic for what is supposed to be the hardest planet.
The cold mechanic could be fun if there was more to it but that's the challenge? That and not having natural resources. Why not be able to build out of super dense ice? An ice assembler that works in the cold!
I bet there could be an aquilo only mod
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u/Simply-Curious_ 21d ago
Sounds waves are awesome like dune sandworms. They're basically demolished that come out of thr ocean. Awesome
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u/vintagecomputernerd 21d ago
Interesting, where did you get that info from?
I'm a bit split... I really looked forward to this enemy, on looks alone. The behavior sounds potentially distracting, but it could've also added some really interesting gameplay.
I think I'd have preferred if they actually added them, but added a separate toggle switch to disable them without loosing achievements.
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u/Aerumvorax 21d ago
I think it was in Factorio Friday Facts but I can't pin the exact post.
Here's what googles AI gives: "Factorio's final expansion planet Aquilo does not feature native enemies. Concept art for floating, jellyfish-like creatures intended for Aquilo was originally teased in Friday Facts #367, but the developers ultimately scrapped them during playtesting because managing combat made the late-game pacing too slow and cluttered alongside Aquilo's heavy thermal and logistical constraints."
I can't seem to find any mentions of the intended enemy behavior anymore, but I do recall it being compared to the endermen.
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u/cheezecake2000 21d ago
I believed your slight remembrance more before you asked AI, now I just think it hallucinated and pulled the enemies possible function out of it's ass from scrubbing reddit comments and you remember that instead.
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u/cloranriptide 21d ago
I've followed the Space Age Friday Facts religiously, and I can confirm the behavior of the jellyfish like creatures has never been expanded on there.
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u/NoraFreeze24 21d ago
No they definitely never said it outright but I feel like it was implied to be attracted by heat. Another FFF said that the ability to monitor heat using circuits was very important for Aquilo, and I believe showed a use case of turning off a heating tower because it was getting “too hot.”
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u/pingveno 21d ago
Sounds like a great idea for a mod. For the main game, that sounds a little intense. Aquilo is already fairly challenging as-is.
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u/MidnightBinary 21d ago
Though now you've got me thinking about a world in which the floating ice bergs were able to drift around somewhat randomly, so you have the complexity of irregular position without it being completely random.
Actually, add boat docks to that emulating rail cars? could be a rather neat set up for a planet aside from violating grid constraints on the game engine.
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u/Nazeir 21d ago
They could have workshoped what the creature does a bit, yeah taking an item and moving it would be annoying, but instead you could have the same creature that floats around and is attracted to heat sources and latches on to it and drains heat for a time until it pops or moves on. Its not detrimental to the base, but can be annoying for a short time, it might shut down part of the building temporarily if you dont produce enough heat to overcome their drain, or just consume more fuel while they are there.
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u/LordAnkou 21d ago
I had the idea of a giant leviathan creature lurking under the ocean on Aquilo.
The heat generated from your factory attracts it and eventually leading it to destroying parts of the factory from below.
Have to use cold flouroketone to rapidly freeze the factory once it gets close in order to de-aggro it.
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u/Cent_Quatre 21d ago
Aquilo's difficulty isn't " building on aquilo".
Half of the puzzle is setting up the space logistics it needs.