How to encourage alien expansions

factorio

I made a map intended purely as a sandbox for designing factory layouts, with peaceful mode, rich deposits, and water only in starting area. Apparently I also chose (or effectively chose) to have enemy bases be rare and distant.

This is a problem now, because I need large quantities of Alien Artifacts for my research and production.

In order of most to least preferred, I'd like to know one of these:

  1. A non-cheating way to encourage the aliens to more frequently expand (create new base locations with spawners) in peaceful mode.

  2. A way to do the same which does use console commands.

  3. A command which will create a biter spawner.

Best Answer

In 0.12.20:

  1. In peaceful mode enemies never expand.
  2. /c game.local_player.surface.set_multi_command{command={type=defines.command.build_base, destination={250, 100}, ignore_planner=1}, unit_count=10} Size of the base is selected by unit_count. The biters that are used for building are not spawned by this command, there needs to be a nearby spawner that provides the settlers.
  3. /c game.local_player.surface.create_entity{name="biter-spawner", position={40, -40}}

Outside peaceful mode the biters select a candidate position, and send a group there once in a while. The interval depends on evolution factor and is between 60 minutes and 5 minutes (controlled in map-settings prototype in game data).

Positions selected needs to be at between 3 and 7 chunks from existing base and at least 3 chunks from player buildings (controlled in map-settings again). You can view chunks that are candidate for expansion wit debug view (F5 - F7 and F4) as green circles the map, the option name is called show_enemy_expansion_candidate_chunks.

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