Factorio Forums

On default settings with Bob's mods, if you increase the size of the starting area, ore spawns normally but the biters are pushed out. With RSO, it is pushing ore (other than the starting patches) and biters out. Is there a way to make it only push the biters out? Thanks.

Thats by design and I'm not planning to change anything in that regard.
Base game does thing differently and in a bit strange way currently so I'm not going to try and reproduce that exactly.

Also I'm not sure why you would you need that kind of separation. Starting area resources should be plenty to deal with some biter bases.

orzelek wrote: ↑

Mon May 20, 2019 6:16 pm

Also I'm not sure why you would you need that kind of separation. Starting area resources should be plenty to deal with some biter bases.

Was more so just something I noticed. I'm playing with Bob's mods and tried to go default settings but the biters were a little too much because I expanded too quickly. I then tried with a larger starting area but had to refresh the map a couple times to get quartz. Once I got going I realized my galena/lead situation is sub par. At that point I tried introducing RSO to the mix and noticed this issue.

It's not so much a problem of not enough ore in the starting area since that can be adjusted anyways, its more a problem that once the starting ore patch is gone, any expansion requires you to go the edge of the starting area. For example, if the starting area is normally 10x10, base game will give you the starting patches plus others within that 10x10 area. If you go to 20x20, same thing. With RSO, you get the initial starting patches but the rest of the 20x20 is empty.

In short, I was trying to play with biters but make it easier by having a larger starting area. However, RSO makes the entire starting area blank requiring quite a bit of travel to get to more ore patches.

Anyways, figured it wouldn't hurt to ask. Thanks for the reply and the mod.

There might be slight difference in understanding what starting area is at least for me.
Starting area has certain set of resources and free space to build your base.
When you are ready to go out then you need to venture outside of it to get more ores (usually higher tier ores are all outside) and potentially fight for those ores with biters.
One thing might be misleading is that RSO measures starting area in regions so high multipliers to size of starting area will place ores and enemies pretty far. This aligns with the goal of mod to use railways more then base game - you can have very large area for start and build up base to prepare for further expansion.

Quartz should be always in starting area unless something goes wrong - main reason for that might be having a lot of water that increases the risk of losing whole ore patches.
And if you are running out of one of starting resources then maybe tweaks to resource gen are in order - ore setup is still the same as 2 major versions ago so changes in bob's mods could require some adjustements.

As you can see, the ore distribution is the same but the biters have been pushed out. As you can see, everything has been pushed out.

I fully understand your thought process on what a starting area should be and don't necessarily disagree. I'm not a huge fan of biters but also don't like to turn them off so I noticed this while playing with the settings. If it's intentional, so be it.

As for lack of quartz, that was without RSO but happens more often than you would think.

It would seem that base game uses starting area only for biters now.
I'd recommend not using 600% starting area with RSO.

Doing 200%-300% should be a max.

bsnowb, I don’t know if what I do will work for you, but I like to leave biter expansion on, then use the RSO setting for changing the biter spawn chance to a lower number. Allows for dealing with lower numbers of them initially, but they can expand and grow in number as time goes if you let them.

orzelek wrote: ↑

Tue May 21, 2019 10:02 pm

It would seem that base game uses starting area only for biters now.
I'd recommend not using 600% starting area with RSO.

Doing 200%-300% should be a max.

Yeah, 600% is the max so I used it to get the best visual representation of what I was talking about.

FuryoftheStars wrote: ↑

Tue May 21, 2019 11:57 pm

bsnowb, I don’t know if what I do will work for you, but I like to leave biter expansion on, then use the RSO setting for changing the biter spawn chance to a lower number. Allows for dealing with lower numbers of them initially, but they can expand and grow in number as time goes if you let them.

I'll try that out, thanks.