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> I don't really think this adds to the game in any way.

I think they are intended to push you along with development. Since they continue multiplying and evolve to become stronger if you don't destroy their bases, you need to make sure your tech develops and that you deal with them. It's meant to push you towards constantly improving your tech, rather than focusing on e.g. optimising your copper plate assembly lines for hours on end.

And weaponry is a massive part of the tech tree (not to mention rewarding; train based artillery: yes please).

> I want to play the game, but I don't want my stuff getting destroyed if I do a subpar job of defending it.

You're looking for "peaceful mode".

I've played on both peaceful mode and normal settings. The advantage of biters existing is that they act as a check on runaway expansion and encourage you to move to cleaner energy sources. When you replace coal plants with solar or nuclear, you'll find that biters aren't annoyed by your base so much.

I played my first couple of games on "peaceful mode", and played one on non-peaceful (in order to get the achievements for completing the game without solar power & lasers).

There's .. enough complexity to the game such that I can see it'd be better to start with non-peaceful.

Comparing non-peaceful mode to peaceful mode, a bit more of your time goes into setting up and maintaining defenses; but once a good set of defenses is established, playing is ~roughly~ the same as what peaceful would be. Peaceful is fun. Non-peaceful is also fun. But the powerful weapons at the end aren't as enticing on peaceful as they are on non-peaceful.

The developers explained the rationale in an old blog post. Basically they were able to see through playtime statistics that people playing in peaceful mode gave up at a higher rate than non-peaceful, because they didn't feel that pressure to keep improving things.

Sounds like peaceful mode is for you.

I happen to like the biters. They give a nice "pay off" for all the industry you're creating. They're a chaotic externality that changes how you have to design things.

I think they're a bit too binary though. Either they're brick walls or cotton candy.

I don't know if it means anything really, but:

Subnatucia: gather resources and build things so you can get off the planet you've crashed on. Encouraged to respect the environment. Actually get to leave the planet. No automation.

Factorio: gather resources and build things so you can gather resources and build things so you can gather resources and built things so you can... Environment is just a resource. Build a rocket, but instead of leaving just keep building more rockets.

I thoroughly enjoyed Subnautica despite some resource grind. The experiences it creates, culminating in what I can only describe as "leaving your first apartment for the last time", were well worth the investment to me. I put it in my top 5 games of all time.

I stopped playing Factorio immediately after launching the rocket, and didn't enjoy the time I spent doing it. I think I only kept playing because I could slog through and finish it and I was "working" from home with the goddamn plague anyway. In a lot of ways it is like Universal Paperclips: the automation exists for its own sake to the extent that you'd destroy the universe just to keep the score going up.

With UP, a lot of people talked about the dangers of AI, but seeing what Factorio does to people maybe we don't even need the AI. We have developers out there right now optimizing for "engagement", looping people into their own little recursive realities to efficiently harvest their eyeballs for advertisers. We know this is harmful to them. We know this is harmful to society. But the factory must grow. We need more paperclips.

Playing Subnautica at the moment, and I'm finding it kind of slow to get going. I have upgraded my tanks to 135? capacity and most of the personal equipment available to me so far, haven't really started any base building (haven't figured out how to get that off the ground, didn't realize it was a thing until recently though), but the process seems very slow. Also grabbing things seems to require too much precision and proximity (at least on PS4), grabbing fish swimming away from your for food has been a chore so far.

Also I feel like I'm spending too much time on basic survival maintenance right now, grabbing food and water resources over and over again.

It gets better, right? I like some things about the game but I'm not really into it yet.

I heard it compared to Outer Wilds a few times, and that's why I jumped into it, because Outer Wilds is a masterpiece, in my opinion, but I'm not seeing it right now. Of course part of what I liked so much about Outer Wilds was how strange everything was and piecing together the mystery of a story scattered across its solar system, and how you're basically collecting knowledge, not resources.

Outer Wilds is incredible, but the only part of Subnautica that I would say is really similar is the exploration and the "how do I get there?"-ness of it.

I played Subnautica on PC with a mouse and keyboard and without the survival mechanics. But to the extent I've watched other players play with survival, it becomes much less of a factor. Base building helps because you can set up water purifiers, aquariums, and little farms. Things really take off once you get the Seamoth (your first sub). I would say that literally any FPS game is going to suffer from not playing with mouse and keyboard though, I don't know how people playing with controllers can stand them.

How long have you been playing that you haven't yet built your first base? As I recall that becomes available pretty quickly as all the minimum necessary blueprints are pretty close.

The ship in the distance had its first explosion recently. I was actually worried briefly I had to have something built by then for shelter from the blast/fallout, or have to make it to the ship and disable something, with how much it was warning me about it, but the explosion seemed to make no difference.

I think I just haven't really started down the base-building path yet. I built a... purifier, I think, a small motorized thing, that's just currently floating outside my escape pod. I thought I built the pipes but I might not have yet, I don't have anything else unlocked. Would building the pipes unlock more things or do I need to hunt for something in the sea?

I know I figured things out a little more slowly than the game expected me to. I kept thinking I was supposed to explore more at the beginning than it wanted me to. I actually almost killed myself trying to reach the ship and trying to find a non-radiated section to enter, since the game made it sound like I needed to explore it right away, and before that explosion happened (now I know I'll need at least a radiation suit).

Now that I know that food and water becomes less of a hassle once I get that base started, I'm definitely going to push down that path, and I expect it will make things more enjoyable. Hunting the fish is one of my least favorite things so far.

I play most FPS games with a controller, have since Halo (Counter-strike/Valorant are exceptions). I prefer playing these games while sitting on the couch. I played through all of Outer Wilds on the PS4 and had no issues, for example. Even the new Doom game with its twitchy gameplay is plenty fun on the consoles.

The explosion of Aurora is not something you can prevent and you're right, the game does not really make that obvious. Many players, including myself, had some anxiety over that. It does change something though, and you'll see what if you go towards it.

I think what you're describing is a floating air pump? I'm not aware of a water purifier that isn't base-interior equipment. You can use the pipes with the pump to give yourself access to air in deeper water, but my personal opinion is it isn't worth the effort.

A large portion of the game is finding and scanning debris from the Aurora, which unlocks blueprints of new equipment. The scanner is your friend, use it a lot.

I played it more over the weekend. I've got a starter base and a Seamoth now. Definitely a lot more fun now (except the food/water management). Thanks for your help!

Yeah, the constant underlying theme in Factorio of ruining a virgin planet with all this automation and pollution just didn’t sit well with me. I finally tried it when it hit 1.0 and it was some interesting stuff but the “turn a planet into a mess, kill anything that gets in your way” aspect was a real turnoff.

Thematically I can appreciate the statement there, but I don't think the gameplay backed it up very well, at least not for me.

If I had enjoyed my time with it and been one of these people who continues to strip the planet bare in order to launch rockets for its own sake, then I would say that the game's theme was an incomplete thought since I was never confronted with the weight of my actions. I'm not sure how that would be accomplished, maybe at some point the biters cease to exist, the plants all rot and die, the day time gets darker and darker as the sky is obscured with smog. Something like that.

Seeing the endless landscapes of Factory when I’d look at guides pretty much gave me that feeling.

It’s not a theme the game actually wants to address, but it’s there, and it bugged me.

I've had the same thing. I got the hang of it with peaceful mode, and launched the rocket :)

Then I went back and tried with biters there, and enjoyed it. There is definitely an extra element with them present.

Every time I start a game now, I customise it and keep the biters, but make them weaker and less aggressive so they're not a constant pain in the arse, but still present.

I totally get the anxiety around "things piling up", but that is something you learn how to deal with. One of the things I found useful is the concept that a stockpile sitting on a conveyor belt is as valid as a sitting in a chest. And rate-limiting production by "there's no more room on the belt" is also perfectly valid.

It does get more fun when you get to the flying robot stage, and there's a screen full of whizzing robots making everything happen.

I played and completed this game a couple months ago also after first playing the tutorial/demo levels.

I feel like the demo levels were setup to teach to to fear and deal with the biters. As a result when I played the real game they were no big problem in the early game because I immediately invested in building walls and appropriate armaments. In the demos I felt like they were too much to handle and too easily overpowered me.

In the real game things are staged so the biters are initially weak, far away, and attack infrequently giving you plenty of time to prepare for them. Biters causing damage disproportionate to my ability to blink off just wasn't a problem in the real game for me. They caused more damage over time, but by the time they did I had endless supplies of the things they were breaking and automated repair, etc.

Once I automated defences (and cleared out nearby nests-- which kind of acts like a useful arcade minigame with its own strategic elements-- e.g. inching turret outposts closer to the nests), it's unusual that biter attacks took any of my attention at all -- maybe just a glance on the map if it told me something other than a wall had been destroyed.

Later in the game, pressure from the biters created logistic challenges that kept the game interesting. Basically when you've mastered the ratios and the supply chains, and deployed logic to balance your fluids, and whatever-- the game can get a little grindy without some kind of hazard here and there. And keeping the weapons/repair supply chains satisfied at your outposts is a significant engineering challenge itself.

Some people I've seen complaining about the biters I think didn't play the tutorial/demo levels and were just caught completely by surprise by them and massively under-invested in defence/offence.

As you note-- there is peaceful mode. From reading the subreddit I understand some number of people run without the biters. I believe there are also settings you can adjust to make them less of a problem without turning them off completely.

I found that some of those stressed you experienced get better as I went on, because I learn how to fix them ("oh, this again?") and aren't too starved for the basic resources needed to do so. Some tools, like construction robots also make some annoying problems a LOT easier to deal with.

I felt I'd basically mastered the game once my solution to a problem in an area could be to sweep it with the demolition tool, remove everything, than rapidly churn out some novel blueprints, tile them all over the place... then be back up in running quickly and not feel like I was losing anything by wiping away the prior work.

I felt the same as you in the tutorials, wound up stopping around the 4th tutorial and dropping it for months, and disliking the biters immensely. I wanted to tinker, not fight.

A friend convinced me to give it another go later on in a multiplayer game and I got hooked.

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The biters are more enjoyable when you already know and understand the game systems.

I agree they're very stressful when you also don't really know what you're doing yet with the game. I would suggest leaving them off for a first game if you're feeling they're stressful.

I still prefer to play with them turned down, or to play a Rail World (where they exist, but don't expand back into cleared areas.), but I don't keep them off now.

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Anyway, in terms of progression, it's somewhat important to explain that you haven't learned all the types of automation in the game, and that also changes their impact.

There is also automated construction (and reconstruction) that eventually becomes possible. I don't have to piece back together some destroyed assembly line by hand because I missed an avenue for getting attacked, robots do it for me so long as I have repair packs or replacement materials in inventory they have access to.

The game at that point also supports things like copy/paste for entire designs and saving/importing blueprints. Have a great production setup and just need more of it? Copy-paste another row of it and hook up the inputs/outputs, not manually laying out 100 assembling machines, 200 inserters, etc.

I really didn't enjoy the game with the biters turned on, but absolutely loved it when I switched to peaceful mode. There are enough problems to sort out without them, like "why do I suddenly not have enough iron plates", or "why do I suddenly not have enough copper plates", or my personal favourite, "why do I suddenly not have enough iron plates again"!

"Why are my trains deadlocked", "Why is this tank empty", "Why are my trains deadlocked again"!

"Why did I install the Angles and Bob's mods", "How do I build a waste processing loop so my entire base doesn't lock up", "Why did my wife and kids leave me"

Biters are there to add pressure. After you get the swing of things in Peaceful mode, a Normal game is much more fun.

Then, give Death World a try. It's the most compelling challenge in video games I've ever found. Bring a friend or two and you're guaranteed to make memories.

Once I got the hang of a default world, Death World was an extremely satisfying challenge. It helps me to not get stuck trying to perfectly place my iron smelting line because I have to get it down now or else the biters will destroy everything.

I have 20 hours playing with biters, and 1600 on peaceful.