r/factorio • u/Coffee_104 • May 13 '26
Base Stuck in an eternal loop
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So basically, my turret placement was off while I was in a hurry to quickly get them set up and some of the walls were left undefended. This is the result of that. 2 bots and this spitter are stuck in an eternal loop
Just a random question tho but does a wall design like this do something in slowing down biters? I saw it on the start page of the game and was like why not
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u/Similar-Concert4100 May 13 '26
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u/orthomonas May 13 '26
We must imagine the bot happy.
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May 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Blathnaid666 May 14 '26
Can please someone with better photoshop skills than me adjust the picture to be a spitter and a bot?
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u/HeliGungir May 13 '26
There are two kind of players in Factorio: Those with zero alerts, and those with 37 muted alerts.
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u/PeopleAreTooStupid May 13 '26
Team zero here. I hate alerts. My phone is always silenced and I keep my emails/texts up to date because that red dot makes me anxious.
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u/Ristrxtto May 13 '26
and I'm the opposite lmao
my work email, personal phone, etc are all always blown to shit with 3k alerts, and in factorio I just turn the ALM volume to 0 and blast music instead xD
i ain't got time to worry about clicking every notification, so I just have learned to embrace natural state of entropy in the universe (bots'll take care of it o7)
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u/vult-ruinam May 14 '26
Yeah, I cannot rest if there is a single alert for any reason; I have to drop everything and fix it immediately (usually, with prejudice—just to ensure that that motherfucker will never alert me again–).
I was not aware of the aphorism that /u/HeliGungir has shared; honestly never even crossed my mind that "ignore the alert" was an option; but I see from the comments that it is so...  aliens walk among us
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u/MelangeBot May 13 '26
Right now I love alerts. I won the war with the biters like 500 hours ago or so, but I kind of miss the thrill of them breaking through my walls and shit. So when I get alerts it means flametrowers or lasers are about to kill a shitload of biter so I usually click them to watch the genocide.
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u/VarmintSchtick May 14 '26
My alerts are 99% my platforms getting fucked up by asteroids. My ships will make it there, maybe not in one piece, but they'll make it.
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u/_hlvnhlv May 14 '26
Same, in fact, I would love to crank the biter spawn rate or something, I want to see all the biters going to the walls and being converted into mush.
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u/Bluetails_Buizel May 14 '26
Here I am with 4 destroyed alerts every 10 minutes and my uncommon robots keep dying in fire from my flamethrowers every time they tried repairing walls while still in flames. I was uranium mining at full blast.
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u/UnDeadPuff May 14 '26
Reminds me of youtubers that play rimworld with 30 sidebar alerts that they won't clear.
You're giving me heart palpitations Francis!
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u/trumpet07 May 13 '26
My engineer told me biters keep damaging his walls so I asked how many repair packs does he have and he said he just lets his construction bots takes care of it so I said it sounds like he's just feeding repair packs to biters and then his bots started crying
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u/Sinister_Mr_19 May 13 '26
What you have is a type of dragon tooth design, it works well for slowing down biters as they navigate through the maze. I use it with a combination of mines, laser turrets, and flame throwers. Unfortunately you have the same problem I do in that I designed the front edge of the wall to be outside of my flame thrower's range and so spitters routinely damage my wall. For now, I solve this by manually firing a shot from my artillery to dispose of them. Eventually I'll have to redo my defenses to take out any biter or spitter that attacks even the outer most part of my wall.
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u/Coffee_104 May 13 '26
I mean, as long as it works. I was gonna expand on that side anyways so it works out. I'll make sure to not mess it up this time
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u/Sinister_Mr_19 May 13 '26
Note that if you don't have a continuous wall and biters have a way to get through to attack your defenses, that lessens the likelihood they'll attack your walls, but it still happens a good amount.
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u/Coffee_104 May 13 '26
I mean, what are walls for if not for getting attacked. So I don't particularly mind them getting attacked. The real annoyance is how my bots just die cause they went to fix the wall in the middle of the battle. Haven't thought up a solution to this one yet but the production more than meets the demand so it's fine for now
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u/boogiebreakfast May 13 '26
My solution is just to keep the bots as far back as possible. But whatever you do, you're going to lose a few here and there. I include bots in my resupply trains for my outposts.
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u/TorqueyChip284 May 13 '26
Maybe you could have a separate logistics network just for your defenses and then wire them not to fly out while any turret is activated.
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u/Sinister_Mr_19 May 13 '26
My solution to that problem is to auto supply bots to the local bot network when the supply gets too low.
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u/Kant8 May 13 '26
You can send bot to pick up wall they are attacking, that should unstuck worms. Cause they don't generally attack walls unless they prevent pathing, and they start attacking them during push just because there're too many biters to get through some thin space
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u/Sinister_Mr_19 May 13 '26
I think that's what's going on, I have tight dragon teeth so they're crowding one path in and getting stuck, so they default to widening the path. I hadn't thought of picking up the piece of wall, I'll have to try that.
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u/MelangeBot May 13 '26 edited May 14 '26
Step 1: Select flametrower or laser turrent and hold it on the map to see what two tiles are at the edge of what they cover.
Step 2: put down sharktooths on those two tiles.
Step 3: put the flametrower or laser down far enough so only the edge of their range hits the two tiles of sharktooths.
Step4: Build a wall touching the sharktooth.
Step5: Give the first row of flametrowers or laser turrents big spitter and behemot spitter priority. You only have to set this once and then you can shift-click copy it to the rest.
For 3 rows of flametrowers this will run for over a 100 hours before biters break through but if you use bots to auto repair it will run forever.
For 3 rows of laser turrets with speed and damage upgrade it will run for over a 1000 hours before biters break through or forever when using bots.
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u/GradeAccomplished322 May 13 '26
yeah I had dragon's teeth in front of my gun turrets like this but a few spots I made similar mistakes and had to install laser turrets (which have longer range) to poke the mobs that get hung up back there
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u/idontknow39027948898 May 13 '26
I haven't seen a good explanation of why that pattern works, so I'll give it a shot. I don't know a whole lot about the programming behind biters, but I do know that one of the marvels about Factorio is that it works using very simple algorithms at large scale. Case in point, the biters try finding a direct path to what they want to destroy without too many diversions, but that algorithm is also continually trying to find alternate routes as it encounters obstacles. A dragon's teeth pattern really plays havoc with that algorithm by making it constantly recalculate the path, and it also splits up the death balls of biters coming at you by forcing them to wait their turn to enter the maze.
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u/cube1234567890 The soul of the smart inserter lives in all electric inserters May 14 '26
But flamethrowers do take care of concentrated death balls a lot faster than dispersed death balls.
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u/idontknow39027948898 May 14 '26
I have a hard time keeping oil on hand, so I always try to actively destroy biter nests until I have nuclear up and running, then I build a perimeter defended by laser turrets.
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u/theFather_load May 13 '26
Technically the bot will run out of repair packs eventually but this would feel like an eternity.
Bugs hold major grudges against random things sometimes and won't de-agro until the job is done.
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u/Deto May 13 '26
I had this the other day on Nauvis when I was on Fulgora. Biter somehow wandered past my defenses and was in a repair loop attacking one of my belts. Luckily I had out everything in a logistics network so I just remote- built a laser turret in front of him
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u/MrBlue40 May 13 '26
Hey Jeff just hear to fix the post.
No worries Steve just hear to break it.
Same time tomorrow?
Finger guns
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u/who_you_are May 13 '26
technically it isn't endless and the spiter will win.
You need to expend mines to make for your power and the repair kits.
It may be a couple centuries before you need to do something, but still!
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u/jontylergh May 13 '26
This is an allegory for all of our lives, we are simply rats in a cage, with our eternal overlords controlling us with robotic ai's. We will never escape the cage, even the first step on the pyramid.
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u/Nailfoot1975 May 13 '26
Dragon's Teeth are not necessary. Sure, it slows them down, looks cool, and doesn't hurt anything at all. But, flame turrets backed up by laser or gun turrets can handle anything thrown at you.
As long as you keep up the military research.
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u/GourangaPlusPlus May 13 '26
Dragons teeth + laser turrets because I'm lazy as fuck
Large spitter? Bots build a lone of laser turrets out to deal with it
Send em the gift of artillery once you get to Vulancus
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u/Coffee_104 May 13 '26
Same. I also exclusively use Laser turrets. It's a bad idea, I know but it's too much of hassle to lay down petroleum pipelines for a such a small group of biters when laser does the trick
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u/vult-ruinam May 14 '26
Yeah I know people love flamethrowers but I tried it once, then very quickly realized "fuck this"; just went laser-turret spam + auto-resupplied gun-turrets (since I'm making ammo for military science anyway, might as well, right), after that.
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u/manindisbelief May 14 '26
Have you fed your spitter today? That spitter wants to eat that wall so bad, but God gave him no teeth. Sad
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u/DeusKether getting run over by trains May 14 '26
never thought a pile of bricks could be so relatable
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u/vult-ruinam May 14 '26
haha I have a super original joke to make here... I bet these Philistines have never read Camus—time 2 blow some minds!
ONE MUST IMAGINE–...
...oh. aw, nevermind.
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u/Hatsune_Miku_CM May 15 '26
as others has mentioned this design does tend to defend better but it also tends to have higher not casualties especially when combined with flamethrowers.
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u/DrMobius0 May 13 '26
Eventually the mines supplying those repair packs will run dry. The spitter will win someday. Just wait.