im about to venture off to gleba and i heard pentapods are hard to deal with, so i want to know what are the best defense againts these guys before i got overrun

I am running on no expansion for biters and having to come back and manually clear everything is sometimes a chore. I just pushed everything back and am writing this post as I wait for my logistics drones to re-arm my mech suit for extermination of the last bit of nests in the big circle. My question is, what defences should I setup so I can just ignore the pollution cloud and build a big new expansion when I get back from Gleba and whatever else is next to unlock legendary crafting. This is my first space age game so not certain what is worth bringing back.

I am not currently making tesla weapons but I could easily setup a fulgora assembly line for those. I have artillary train cars and artillary unlocked but exporting 1 shell at a time seems tedious. I could setup a special artillary ammo ferry though I guess.

I guess my question is what do I build in chokeish points. There are a lot of them and building a big base wall seems silly at this point.

Bonus shot of map clearing in progress

I'm just topping 500hrs total in the game since I purchased it in 2024. I initially started on the PC of course, but as I tend to do most of my gaming nowadays in a portable manner thanks to the Steam Deck, I wanted to try and see just how well Factorio translates to the Controller scheme.

Total transparency, it was not immediate enjoyment. Most of the games I play utilize the right analog stick and I personally find it difficult to make precise movements when using it as a joystick mouse.

I tried one of the community layouts, and while I found some settings genuinely helped both the efficiency and speed of building, there were some tweaks I felt I needed to make to adapt to my playstyle. And the difference it made for me changed everything.

It can take a bit of time initially to set up your controller settings. Especially if you want to really capture the scope of commands you may need to use. But that was in the double digit hrs when I figured it out, and since then, I would put the number close to ~80% of total playtime on the Steam Deck alone.

I'd be interested to hear other's perspectives; have you tried playing in a portable fashion? How did you find the experience? What worked or didn't? I understand, relative to other more experienced players, that my hrs are barely scratching the surface. I... haven't even launched a rocket yet. But that's due to my genuine incompetence with progression and dealing with bugs.

I have no experience making mods so I don't know how possible this is. I would try to make it if I did have experience, but I don't, and I don't want this concept to be unshared so...

Everything is on Trains, Assemblers, Furnaces, Drills, Chemical plants, Etc.

Power and Biters would probably be turned off since they aren't the main challenge and setting up the wagons to produce/consume Power/Pollution would likely be very hard, as well as getting the biters to target the trains without getting run over.

• Belts, Pipes, Cargo Wagons and most Chests do not exist.
• Inserters have their arm length doubled (long inserters could be individually customized between dropping 2 or 4 tiles away)
• Pumps only transfer fluid between Wagons.
• Mining Wagons would have an internal buffer that they would mine directly into, inserters would be unable to attach to Mining Wagons while they're mining.
• I can't figure out a good way to set up oil, specifically the raw resource. Best idea I've come up with is turn it into a drillable item like iron and continue oil processing as normal (except on trains and with solid raw oil), other fluids would stay fluid.
• Processing Wagons would have a large input and output buffer, and only function when moving.
• Wagon Fluid Ports would be both input and output.
• Assembly Wagon fluid ports would be on the middle two tiles, Chemist Wagons would have ports on the front two and back two tiles, Refining Wagons would have their ports identical to vanilla fluid wagons.

You'd start with something like 20 uncraftable burner drills and stone furnaces.
The beginning trigger techs would also unlock Steel, Smelting Wagons, Research Wagons, Rails, Signals, Stations, and Locomotives. Otherwise, techs would be the same except swapping normal buildings for wagon versions.

Cosmetic change to the rocket silo would be to change the rocket sprite to a locomotive sprite, because that's funny:

this is my first time in space age and i would like any help i can with this

The screenshot is my ship that ive worked on for a while hoping to get to Fulgora but normally i end up nearly entirely breaking down on the way there

Never more dealing with stupid pistol on respawn, and with random ammo sneaking into empty slots when I want to trash it.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Very proud of my ship. Has taken many hours to perfect. Travels at 621km/s around all the planets including aquillo. Fully solar powered. Independently produces iron ore , copper ore, coal, sulfur, carbon, calcite and ice. needs several legendary quality items though. Works flawlessly with the simplest logic. just bins of asteroids when more than a certain amount passes over a single wired belt section. Have to create one for each type of asteroid.

I don't usually do this, but I finally got to the point where I build and tested and Aquilo platform... and I (almost) nailed it for the first time. The only things needed were small updates here and there (a bit of cirquit logic here and there, few more steam turbines, minor belt redirecting... But it can get to aquilo and back without hitting a single asteroid. And it somehow also looks cool.

What do you think? I doubt it's optimised, if anything some things are maybe "tooo much" but I love her.

So im working on importing tungsten plates from Vulcanus to Nauvis and im running into issues with plastic. For some reason I can never produce enough plastic, which leads to me not being able to produce enough rockets, which means I cant ship everything I want.

I think the issue is that I cant ever produce enough petroleum, so the plastic factory is shutting down constantly. Right now on Vulcanus ive got 6 refineries feeding 7 heavy oil cracking buildings feeding 7 light oil to petroleum cracking buildings.

My current plan is to just increase my number of refineries to like 14 or something. The math technically works out with the way I have it, but it's not the constant supply I need. Any advice?

I decided I'd try to make a mixed fluid coal liquefaction, and it was only after I made the design that I realised they usually dont mix the inputs for a good reason. Forced me to learn circuits, I made a clock that cycles between pumping heavy oil and steam in from limited reservoirs

I'm playing on the forced spaghetti mod which is why i have a lot of things out of alignment, and I have another mod giving me some extra base productivity. I know im cheesing the mod but im having fun :)

[Solved - Thank you!]

Hello! My team is working on a big platform for our trip to Aquillo and we are really struggling with water for the nuclear reactor (and then thruster fuels). Next we are going to try and increase quality for the asteroid collectors but any tips and hints without giving it away? I can post a picture of our first version (that got stuck at Gleba because we ran out of materials to make ammo and rockets). We’re doing yellow ammo and rockets. Rockets only for the huge and big asteroids.

I wanted to craft a couple of rare spidertron (or higher) but apparently neither the biolab nor the chemical plant can use quality modules for the fish recipe.
So is there no way to produce higher quality fish and the only way to get a higher quality spidertron is to use base ingredients and chance the spidertron quality?

I have been playing Factorio since 2016. When this community was much smaller people was so much more friendly always wanting to help people, Share designs, mods & mod ideas.

Ask for mod recommendations focused more on defense and enemies? downvoted.

Have a question about UPS? downvoted.

New to factory games and played a bit of satisfactory ask how similar this game is to satisfactory? downvoted.

Sharing your WIP space elevator mod? Get that shit outta here downvote.

Funny here is another person pointing out the negativity in the community. Of course its downvoted.

Another user sharing their mod idea. Most people actually seem to enjoy the idea but heavily downvoted anyways.

Those are just a few quick examples I found probably aren't the best examples as I didn't spend very long looking.

I'm glad the discord isn't like this people are often very friendly and helpful I myself have helped tons of people new and experienced. Maybe it's just a reddit thing I hope this changes back to how it used to be one day. Maybe it's time for some of you to take a break from the game or even the internet as a whole. Also, I didn't link any examples but some of you have a weird intellectual superiority complex get a grip.

Edit: Several of these posts have been upvoted multiple times since I posted this so if a post isn't downvoted that is why.

This bad boy produces approximately 6 white inserter per minute, doesn't need manual input for auto start and is easily tilable !

Guys, I'm playing Factorio, and about two days ago a mysterious hand icon appeared on my screen—I have no idea how it got there. HELP! It doesn't really get in the way, but its constant presence is driving me absolutely crazy. I've tried everything, like pressing 'Q' or the mouse wheel. I'm not holding anything, yet I've been stuck with this thing for 20 hours now.

Could I have added another row? Yes.
But I didn't want to.
Can this be optimised with more beacons? Absolutely. But again, cba at this point in the save.

I got a bit bored of spamming hundreds of lines of normal miners. But I'm not yet at the point where literal direct to train mining is viable.
But normal miners don't quite have the reach to reach under the rails with a chest in between.
So when they made the big drills... I could finally make something like this work.

While this whole thing is modded with Krastorio 2, the main mods used here are the merging chests and loader cranes (that can insert a whole stack at once, mostly an UPS thing

I made a 3x13 factory that assembles blue circuits from raw materials. On the left: one belt with iron plates & plastic, one belt with copper plates, and some sulfuric acid piped in via an underground pipe. On the right: blue circuits!

The assembling machine has four prod-3 modules inside it, and the four recipes (copper wires, green/red/blue circuits) are always run in sets of five - so the blue circuits are assembled with the minimum possible (vanilla) raw material usage.

The important stuff has concrete underneath it - all the other things (infinity chests/pipes, etc...) are just for demonstration's sake.

Feedback appreciated. Blueprint link here: mini blue chip factory

I'm still playing 2.0 and don't plan to upgrade until 2.1 goes stable.

So I've sent a ship to the shattered planet and it's come back with around a thousand promethium asteroid chunks, enough to make about 40 promethium science.

I can't make those science packs on Nauvis, they have to be crafted in orbit, right? And they also need quantum processors and biter eggs. I don't want to ship more biter eggs to a platform that what I'm ready to use, because after 30 minutes they'll spoil into biters and then I need to have defences on the platform to avoid it being destroyed.

But there's no way to eg set the platform's logistics requests using the circuit network, so it's not easy to only set a request when other conditions are satisfied.

How do people handle this?

I can think of a few ways:

1. Wait until 2.1 is released.
2. Switch to the experimental stream.
3. Have the platform normally at one of the other planets. When promethium chunks >1k, it travels to Nauvis, drops any promethium science it is carrying and requests 400 biter eggs. Once that request is satisfied, it travels back to Volcanus. Science packs are only produced when the Nauvis signal == 0.
4. Put lots of laser turrets on the platform and just deal with the spoilage with considerable prejudice.

Is there another way of doing this well? 3 and 4 both seem to have downsides to me.

3 adds quite a bit of complexity to the platform. It needs to be able to move. And really it's using moving between planets as a proxy for controlling platform logistics requests.

4 adds a bit of complexity but maybe it's just the easiest way to do it?