Factorio Forums

Hello everyone. I'm new to mod making and I thought i would give making a mod for factorio a go as I know lua. But after looking through the API's i'm not certain if my mod idea can actually be done. I want to make an environmental hazard to add difficulty to the game, this would be in the form of an ore.

But there are two things that I want the ore to do that I can't think of a way of implementing. 1. The ore is toxic, and i want it to do damage to the player when they walk over it or attempt to mine it by hand. 2. I want the ore to spread on its own, checking tiles around it to see if it is free and have a chance of adding the ore to that tile.

I know i can add a new ore to the game and I'm already working on that aspect. But would the 2 properties I described be done using the current mod API, or is it something outside of it's technical capabilities?

Many thanks in advanced.

You could use the payers current x\y coordinates, then do a entity search to see if there is some of your ore under the player, and then call the damage method on the player if there is.

I think it's do able, but performance may be an issue?

Hay, that mite work. I was thinking along the lines of the ore actively searching for the player, but now i think of it that would be a bit of overkill when it comes to calculations, as all the ore entity's will be doing the same scan over and over. Now i just need to figure out if I can get the ore to spread.

Sounds like you want to make Tiberium!

Checking the player's location every ~30 ticks or so and testing for the presence of Tiberium, then damaging if found would be fine for performance. As for spreading, well, you'll probably want to make a new type of entity and place it down at mapgen, and have this entity do the periodic expansion of Tiberium fields -- a Tiberium spawner, of sorts; if I'm not mistaken this is now the C&C games themselves handle Tiberium expansion. Perhaps code it as a radar-type entity and make use of the on_sector_scanned event for spawning new fields.

I can neither confirm or deny your assumptions .

But i have been looking at the code for bitter spanners and i think i can uses that if it is possible to get a sawner to spawn ore, and to also give ore enemy attributes to the ore allowing it to do melee attacks on the player.

I will see if that works, in the mean time any code suggestions on the best way of doing things in the most preference friendly way would be of help.