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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

You could just disable cliffs during world generation. That's what I do. They're slightly helpful for biter defense, but otherwise they're just annoying.

There are also many mods that let you pump water from anywhere.

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I'm not a fan of custom modes and mods. I might go this way, if there's no other choice, however generally I prefer to play game as it was intended to be played by developers.

Intended or not, I've found playing with mods way, way more fun (and much less annoying) than playing vanilla Factorio (which I still love, but not nearly as much as modded Factorio).

After my first vanilla playthrough I loved the game, but found a bunch of things annoying or which I thought could be improved on. Soon after I found there were mods to satisfy every one of my wants and cure every one of the annoyances. I've played with mods ever since and love it.

Want longer reach? There are mods for that.

Want faster travel? There are mods for that.

Want more variety in vehicles? There are mods for that.

Want smarter/tougher/different enemies? There are mods for that.

Want a complete overhaul of how the game plays? There are a bunch mods for that.

...and thousands of other mods beyond these.

You're really missing out by avoiding mods.

I've played vanilla a couple of times, and recently started my first modded game, using Krastorio 2. That seemed to be the most recommended mod, and it's been great.

Pretty much every question of "wouldn't it be cool if..." or "wouldn't it make more sense if..." that I ever asked myself playing vanilla, Krastorio 2 answers with "yes". Yes, it would make more sense if the car didn't run on coal but required more advanced fuel. Yes, it would make more sense if there were more ways to generate power. Yes, it would make more sense if complex early game machinery required a bit more than some metal plates. And yes, it would be cool if your crashed spaceship had some useable components.

The one downside is that fighting creepers is too easy. The anti-material rifle has too much range, letting me snipe them from a position of invulnerability.

Also, there's way too much chemistry possible. I'm completely lost in it.

"The one downside is that fighting creepers is too easy. The anti-material rifle has too much range, letting me snipe them from a position of invulnerability."

Maybe you could increase their evolution rate, pollution, or give the Rampant mod a try.

I think the better approach is to refuse to use the anti-material rifle. I don't think more biters that are too easy to kill will make the game more fun, and if I increase their strength to the point that the anti-material rifle strategy doesn't work anymore, I don't think any other strategy will work either.

I'll have a look at the Rampant mod, though. That looks interesting.

I did a vanilla playthrough w/ no console commands to get my fair share of achievements.[1] That base is from beta, and doesn't really function correctly anymore.[2] At this point I feel pretty done with the base game, though I suspect I'll do another "from scratch" playthrough w/ the expac to celebrate its launch. I have something like ~1100 hours in the game, and it still brings me great joy. Vanilla certainly owes me _nothing._ However it's really the joy of finding mods and playing their scenarios (or creating my own scenarios) that keeps me coming back to the game. Ironically I'm currently working through Space Exploration with friends; I sure hope we finish before the expansion!

These days though I find the "burner" gameplay provides me very little enjoyment. I detest the "punching trees" phase of the game mostly because I've spent so many hours with my engineer at Max Power Level. (Maybe it'd be different if I had gotten bit by the speedrunning bug, and learned how to optimize that bit of the game.) Even my "most vanilla" playthroughs these days usually have at least:

- "far reach"

- a factory planner

- some kind of warehousing/loaders

- an /editor'd in crate of supplies to build power, some labs, and stamp down "the mall"

- some kitted out modular armor and a personal roboport (to do the more finnicky builds; though I've watched some speedruns and my base building micro has gotten a lot better.)

- LTN(!) - I love trains, and this mod's take on trains just gels with me.

[1]: The only ones I have left are to do a "lazy bastard" playthrough which requires enough consideration that I wanted to do it by itself in a challenge run, and the rest are all the top tier production based time sinks, which I'd rather do in a map tailor generated to be a megabase.

It's definitely intenfed by the developers to play however you have the most fun. That's why they included the option, just like the peaceful mode.

Factorio was clearly meant to be moddable and to be modded. The API is by no means a pure afterthought.

It's not a mod. It's a setting in base game.

I play vanilla except I always disable cliffs. That's it. I sometimes edit resource distribution if I wish to experiment with specific transports etc but cliffs always go away. I don't care what they intended as it is not fun for me.

There was a time before cliffs, and the game was fine. IIRC cliffs were also meant to give the explosive tree at least some non-warfare utility. They can be cool in the beginning, while later on they’re a chore in my experience.

but you're arguing against the intention as they put it in?

I really wish there was an option for "no cliffs within X distance" or something.

My "dream world" would have the starting area for maybe 100 blocks have some cliffs for early biter funneling and a bit of a challenge, then just flat world for 1000 blocks, and then back to cliffs.

Or make it so you can manually mine cliffs very slowly before explosives.

Pretty sure if you set the starting area to the max size it does exactly what you asked

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