Hey yall

For some reason one of the train cars has a slight blue hue on it. Noticed it a while back but kept ignoring it. Thought maybe its because i was messing around locomotive colors way back. Today i tried to see if i can do this to other cars, found no way of doing it. Did i do it, if not why is it like that? Can i do this on other cars?

Its not an issue, If i take the car out and place it again it will look normal. but was just wondering.

Thanks
Cheers!

EDIT: Seems like the color was set way before version 2.0. I can copy the color of the blue colored car, using Shift Right-Left click. But can't copy locomotive color to cars using the same method anymore.

"okay bro the transport belt doestn even require power who caaaaaaares!444!" i do obsiously

I don't know why it's never occurred to me to put little radar outposts out before? Just a single solar panel is enough to let me know if the biters have expanded in to my pollution cloud.

Worked a few hours off the sprite and realized I got the mouth completely wrong.

Legs are still a bit funky too but the base forms are done so just have to refine the shapes.

So I thought I'd start using the landing pad unloading bays to replace the 40k of bots I had unloading all my deliveries. Watching Nauvis made my computer want to launch into orbit.

I discovered that you cannot load onto a landing pad or the unloading bays - I manufacture green/red/blue science on Nauvis. So to escape the potential 24ish belts needed to mess things up I decided I'd launch red/green/blue science into space then drop it down.

To do this each science pack needed a basic platform requesting x number of packs from Nauvis, then another basic platform requesting all 3 of the packs - this is needed otherwise they're not launched back down to the planet. Nauvis requests packs and they're launched. Problem solved.

However the real problem is now I can't have any of my other silos set to automatically request from platforms because my bots start to take red/green/blue science out of the landing pad! Red/green/blue science are directly fed into other silos.

Is there any circuit wizardry I can use to stop this from happening?

Update. Thanks for all the advice, I've gone with what many of you have advised and created a separate logistics network for my red/green/blue science production + the silos they feed into. A requester chest on the border in the main network requests all the rocket parts which feeds into a buffer chest in the science network. It works!

Thank you very much!

Part 1, Part 2

2.1 features inserter flipping and inserters always targeting the input side of a splitter. This lets us greatly simplify some of the previous approaches.

N: Small, cheap way to move deconstructed items back onto a bus/belt without full saturation. Replaces old 'B-D'.

F: No sideloading or splitters. Unchanged from last time.

O: Minimum inserters, but adds splitters and sideloading. Note the last inserter has input priority. Replaces old 'I'.

P: No sideloading or splitters in a thinner profile than F, but adds a fifth inserter. Replaces old 'H'.

Q, Q4: Very high throughput in a small profile, but more bot activity. The requester chests simply read the (filtered) storage chest and request the same thing. As bots move items from storage to requester, the signal decreases and the connected chests end up pretty close to even. Replaces old 'J-M'

As a reminder, bulk inserters and blue belts are a bit strange and require hand size of 11 and 7 for the upstream and downstream inserter targeting a particular lane. 12 and 7 was the norm at one point, but now that only works if both inserters target within the same transport line segment. Don't ask me why, it's just what I learned through testing.

See Part 2 for other belt speeds, inserter types, and inserter quality.

I keep loosing Construction Bots, that bravely try to repair a defense wall during an ongoing biter attack. Is there any way to avoid this? Any fancy kind of circuit logic that releases bots only a minute after the damage was detected? I have artillery outposts with one single Roboport. Putting the chest with the repair tools far away does not work, my bots are way too fast and the large groups of biters that come when I knock on a new nest takes its time...

With Tier 2 modules, the layout produces 350/min.
With Tier 3 modules, the exact same layout produces 550/min.
I built both factories using the same idea. But I built the one on Nauvis later, after unlocking the Biolab. Because of this, the design and layout of the Nauvis factory are much better and cleaner than on Vulcanus.

I built this based on that idea.
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1qyoflj/vulcanus_all_science_1617kmin/

With the advice from the sub, specifically playing my own way and learning the systems, I got a rocket off. I learned a lot, but probably my own piece of advice for newer players would be to not rush, you are rewarded when you take the time to do your own problem solving.

Thanks all, keen to get into Space Age and just mellow my way through.

What is this?

The idea behind the monthly community map is to share a map exchange string at the beginning of every month, and get as many people as we can to start a new world with it. Then at the end of the month (or even periodically if you'd prefer!) we share screenshots and saves of our factories so that we can see how different people approach the same spawn; how they set up their base, how they deal with aliens, and how they arrange their science, power, and everything else.

I hope it can highlight how many different ways there are to do things, inspire some new designs, and maybe seeing how veteran Factorio players tackle problems will help out new players facing the exact same problems. (Of course, there's also the fact that it'll be interesting to see all of the different possible factories - the good, the bad, and the ugly.)

Last Month's Results

August 2026 Results

The Community Map

It seems that the 2.1 map didn't quite offer the challenge that was promised. Well... I can fix that.

I was quite tempted to throw in some sort of difficulty/combat mod, but I figured I would show just a smidge of mercy this time around and leave the biters vanilla. No surprise death world map or anything either, I'm aiming firmly for "challenging but reasonable" rather than brutal engineer grinder. But rather than talk about it, I think it's easier if you can see for yourself.

DLC Requirements:

Elevated Rails: Optional

Quality: Disabled

Recycler: Optional

Space Age: Disabled

Required Mods:

Angel's Infinite Ores

Mining Drones

Spidertron Enhancements

Spidertron Patrols

The Exchange String:

>>>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<<<

Spawn area: https://i.imgur.com/CrF7ETR.png

Mod Sync: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tot0I-XzRFmk_MyVn4VINF7iEhhw80WY

Oh yeah, I also set a science cost multiplier of 2. Not anything wild, but enough to make you feel the sting of limited resources if you delay expanding for too long - thought you'd wanna know. Enjoy the island!

Exchange String Help

If anyone isn't sure how to use an exchange string, just go to new game like you're going to generate a new world, and at the bottom there's a button just above play labelled "Import map exchange string" - the icon looks like a little arrow going into a tray/bucket. Just copy the exchange string above and paste it into the box that comes up when you press that button. Press confirm, and that's it! You're good to go. Just generate the world and come back in a month to show us how your factory turned out!

If you run into any issues check to make sure that you copied the whole string, including the three greater than/lesser than signs at the beginning and end, and make sure that your Factorio is up to date with the most recent version installed. (As of the time of this post, the most recent version of Factorio is 2.1.17, which will not work with the most recent version of stable, 2.0.77.)

Want To Play With Others?

If you have an open public server, let me know in the comments below or send me a PM and I'll add your server here!

Feel Like Watching Someone Else?

If you are a streamer or let's player who will be recording yourself building a new factory on a community map, I'd be happy to add a link to your channel here!

Having Issues With The Sync File?

If you're uncertain how to use the sync file I provided above, here are step by step instructions:

1) First, of course, is to download the file. Make sure you know where this file is so you can move it later. (It will be in your browser's default download folder unless you've changed it.) 2) Locate where Factorio's save folder is on your computer. If you've installed Factorio at its default location (C:\Program Files\Factorio) then there will be a shortcut to your saves folder there called "saves". Double-click it to go to the saves folder. 3) Take the file you downloaded and move it into this folder.

That should be it! Now just launch Factorio and make sure you sync your mods to this save before playing. If you'd like to play on this save specifically (for example, if this month has some per-map settings you don't feel like messing with) then you'll notice when you load the map normally your player will be named "ChaosBeing" (since I'm the one who started the save, of course). To get around this, you can host it as a local multiplayer game and then save. You should now appear as your own character when you load the map from now on!

About Mods

Since mods can affect how a world spawns and ores are distributed, as well as add or change items and functionality, it's important to make sure that we're all playing the same game by the same rules. For example, if one person's playing vanilla and someone else is playing with Bob's mods, even if they use the same seed and map settings you still couldn't very well say they were playing the same game, and the way they'd play would differ enormously.

On the other hand, Quality of Life (QoL) mods should be perfectly fine. What do I consider a QoL mod? Any mod that doesn't A) add new items, B) change terrain, or C) make significant gameplay changes, like modifying recipes or enemies. Any mod that fits this definition should allow everyone to play the same game even when some people are playing with them and some people are not.

Even Distribution is a great example of a mod that, while very useful, does not inherently change the way the game is played. Then there are also mods like RadarPlus for RSO that do add new items, but still don't meaningfully change the way the game is played.

Below I've put together a short list of examples that I think are ok to use on any map. It's made up of a handful of optional mods that might seem ambiguous in how well they fit the definition above, so they're just here to act as guidance on what should be ok. Another good resource for Quality of Life mods is available on the Factorio Discord - check out Xorimuth's pinned post.

Optional Mod Examples

Note: I can't imagine any situation where this could be an issue, but if you're the author of one of the mods listed here (and can offer me some proof of this) and for whatever reason would like me to remove your mod from this post, I'd be happy to comply.

It's entirely possible some of these mods either don't work with the current version of Factorio, conflict with each other, or in some manner just don't work. I can't test them all, let alone every configuration of them, so you might want to back up your world before adding one of these.

Color Coding

fCPU

Nixie Tubes

Project Cybersyn - Logistics Train Dispatcher

RadarPlus For RSO

Squeak Through 2

Text Plates

Updated Construction Drones

Visible Planets in Space

Previous Threads

-- 2025 --

September 2025 - Results

October 2025 - Results

November 2025 - Results

December 2025 - Results

-- 2026 --

January-February 2026 - Results

March 2026 - Results

April 2026 - Results

May 2026 - Results

June-July 2026 - Results

August 2026 - Results

Time's Up

Hands off the keyboard! Another month has come to a close, and it's time to share whatever you've got done with the rest of us!

Did you finish everything you would have liked to this time around, or did you wind up still having a few big, unfinished plans? Run into any particular issues, or were you pumping out infinite science like nobody's business? Here's the place to share your stories, screenshots, saves, or whatever else you've got!

This Month

The first 2.1 map has come to a close! With all I'd heard about biter expansion going in I was expecting much more of a problem, but everything seemed to play out pretty... reasonably? Granted I didn't have much hands on time with this map - I used this month to finally finish off my Nullius playthrough. >_>

But that's why hearing about your experiences is all the more important! So far I've heard from a few people as the map was ongoing, but maybe your experience was different? Did you hit any odd snags or quirks? Perhaps the opposite; did you encounter changes that you particularly enjoyed? Was there anything about this map in particular that stood out to you? Whatever the case might be, I'd like to know!

While you're typing up your response, maybe with an image or two, let's talk about September's map. (It's September already!?)

Next Month

Since last month didn't offer as much challenge as I'd anticipated, I may have overcorrected. Not to an extreme extent! The challenge itself is still vanilla - with a few modded toys to boot - but I did want to crank things up a bit before we get to the end of the year maps.

I'll give away one mod, as I often do, just to leave you wondering what else may be included: Mining Drones

Why Mining Drones? No one particular reason really. ...Okay that just makes it sound like I have some detailed plot here, genuinely I just happened upon them and thought I hadn't used them in a while. They're fun, not too overpowered, and simplify setting up a new resource patch. What's not to like? As for the rest, you'll just have to wait and see!

Previous Threads

-- 2025 --

September 2025 - Results

October 2025 - Results

November 2025 - Results

December 2025 - Results

-- 2026 --

January-February 2026 - Results

March 2026 - Results

April 2026 - Results

May 2026 - Results

Jule-July 2026 - Results

August 2026 - Results

what can i change about my city block design to make it work better? i end up with deadlocks that don't seem to make sense a lot of the time, and i have a hunch it might be due to the extreme amount of chain signals i'm using. the trains will end up on either side of the paths (L and R), but even though they wouldnt crash they still refuse to move.

this is the first time i've made a city block, so i dont really know what to do or check for to make sure crashes or deadlocks dont happen.

i was thinking of using 1-2-1 RHD trains for this, but it might have to be smaller because of the left and right block borders being so small.

blueprint:
https://factorio-blueprints.com/blueprint/hex-city-block

edit: thanks yall for the tips! i think im just gonna redesign the whole thing with all the advice I got, starting with only using two lanes and making each side equally spaced to make more room for the trains to fit between blocks. i can update with a new blueprint once i'm done, but im not sure that this post will be relevant by then. thank you!

second edit: i have a revised design done now, it's a lot different and there are some flaws (eg. the stations take up way too much room, the rails are WAY too dense and there are too many of them overall), but it works for now i think. thank you to everyone who gave me advice! if anyone has any extra tips on the design i would appreciate it, but for now i think im just adding this to the people invested.

updated blueprint:
https://factorio-blueprints.com/blueprint/hex-block-v3

I wanted the clean hands and rush to space achievements and decided the best way to do it was to simply leave Nauvis ASAP, abandoning it entirely before coming back with artillery. Did that successfully - but at that point was already comfortably set up on Vulcanus, so I decided to see if I could win the game without coming back. You can see here that the natives moved back in pretty readily - with my original crash-landing site being within spitting distance of a new biter base.

They actually never attacked my former Nauvis base because I simply disconnected the power from most of it - except I had left the boilers running initially to allow for Uranium mining, so one biter did eventually go after the boilers until I cut that final power connection. You can see the destroyed section of the boiler array.

Otherwise, you can see my map, including the total of three oil pumpjacks I got in the upper right (hey, it was enough to get me off planet! They're down to 70% total yield now). You can also see on the kill screen the times I came back to the planet - once to unlock uranium and get "keeping my hands clean", second time to grab a bit more uranium after I unlocked my mech suit and needed more fission reactors.

Finally, you can see that I managed to win in 96:18 despite the handicap I set for myself - first time I actually beat Space Age - and it ends with my little Aquilo Hauler that made it to the system edge. Pretty proud of that one actually - I used no outside blueprints so that brick is all mine. It's almost all rare/epic parts that I scrounged off my Fulgora quality island and got me there pretty comfortably.

Next steps? Land on Nauvis, grab the cargo landing pad, move far enough away to find some rich, rich resources, and clear the area with a few thousand artillery shells. Time to move back in!

In actuality it took ~250h, a loooot of idle time when game was running in the background is artificially iflating IGT. At first very daunting, later on very satisfying, and run a bit out of steam in the end, with imo needless bloat of bio sciences. I really liked the clever voiding of material and how useless byproducts became bottlenecks later on. What I didn't like is how every upgrade of the machine was needing previous iteration, creating stupidly complicated supply chains, I don't think making flotation cell out of crushers and hydro plants added anything meaningful to the gameplay, except forcing you to do some stupid spaghetti, making them manually or later on turning your brain off when you have The Mall. It takes away from logistical challenge early which is soon null and void by existence of bots. Also physics science is just stupid. What the fuck is this recipe.

When you pass into the organic science the mod loses a bit of it's luster. It's a lot of copying very similar builds to increase troughtput. It's fun to do twice or thrice, not 7-8 times. But getting there is VERY fun. Unlocking new power source is always a mini celebration. In the endgame you can just spam nuclear with stirling engines for easy GWs.

I'm not a competent factorio player by any means, but I finished it (with over 1000 TRAINS, ll hail nuclear trains). As much as I enjoyed my time with it I dont think I'll ever play it again.

Also I hate the symbols for propene, methane etc. they are so similar, it's hard to tell what goes where.

Hi everyone,

I recently decided to finish off getting the last of the DLC achievements in the game (So far I have 82/88 - only missing the shattered planet, promethium and DLC speed running achievements). Thing is, the original save I got most of my DLC achievements on was eventually transitioned to a modded save, without backups.

I bit the bullet, but also didn't want to have to redo the early-game again, so I used one of my old pre 1.0 saves where I had already launched a rocket. So I could quickly get back into the new planets.

I've now tackled Gleba, Vulcanus and Fulgora, however, Nauvis is in a pretty rough state, having not really been touched since I first loaded the save back up. One big issue is that when I originally made the save used landfill everywhere, of which, I cannot pick back up.

My guess is this is due to 1.0 changing landfills properties or tile type to something that looks the same but behaves differently, given they added the force deconstruct mode.

So this is a 2 part question, firstly, is their a way to reconvert that landfill properly into the correct 2.1 version of landfill that can be used with blueprints and the deconstruction planner. WITHOUT commands (removing steam achievements).

And secondly, is it possible to completely delete Nauvis's surface from the save and restart their? Removing all the somewhat broken aspects of the save and shrinking the file size in the process. (If it is possible, will this also block achievements given its file modification)?

I hadn't seen much on this so was messing around with designing a pulsed system to try to get agricultural towers to harvest every n ticks.

It seems that when they receive a signal to harvest they don't immediately get a target tree - it needs to stay on for about 50-100 ticks to consistently get a harvest operation to start. Once a harvest operation starts it always finishes.

So if you want to send a pulse of 'harvest this plant', that pulse needs to stay on for a while.

It's kinda unique behaviour - I was expecting it to work more like an inserter where a single tick pulse is enough to trigger a full operation.

Did i do any good lol?

Full evolution in one post.

Made a droneless variant. Hook this settup to a heavy krued source, and it runns permanently.

I did cutt of the underground belt/pipe weave below, so it has to be conekted to work. Each part can be expanded to the north, so there are no bottlenecks to report.

The inserters aren't wrong. I use bobs adjustables for some quality of life.

C&C wanted.

Hello everyone! I’m a new Factorio player and I’ve only played for about 30 hours so far. This is my automated research setup, and I’m currently playing Tutorial 5 in Factorio: Space Age. :D

I’m really happy to share it with everyone! Hope you enjoy it! ❤️

In a recent Dosh stream he was saying that placing buildings matching to a blueprint would be much easier if all buildings worked like power poles. A specific example would be dragging an assembler and it only dropping on ghosted locations instead of anywhere it fits. So I thought about how to do it and how easy it would be to implement.

The amount of coding required is actually very small.
1. When a player places an entity over a matching ghost set a ghost placement flag. That type of placement is already checked for in order to set recipes or some rotation things.
2. The flag once set stays set as long as the player holds the mouse button.
3. When the flag is set do not place the entity the player is holding unless the location under it is a matching ghost. This is the only step that requires more than 1 line of added code. Ideally in this step the placed building would placed according to the ghost rotation and not the cursor rotation.

Optionally it could be added as an interface option so old players aren't confused by the new behavior. Also in step 1 above it would probably be good to exclude buildings that already have a drag placing behavior.

I'm testing wall defenses segments in the sandbox mode and i wanna know if theres a way to simulate biter attacks like in vanilla: ie spawners absorb pollution and produce biters that they then send to an amassing attack group, then at some point that group goes to attack you. In creative I can slap down some spawners via the Editor on their plot of land that I isolated with water except for my wall segment, but they don't seem to be amassing an attack force of biters, even as I stick some boilers around them to pump out pollution, or even when I use the Add Pollution command

Do spawners that've been added manually not use the same mechanics as those in a normal game? Or is there a certain amount of space in a certain direction needed for the nests to assemble an attack force in?

EDIT: went into Editor menu> Surface > Edit Map Gen Settings > Enemy and it seems like when you make a Sandbox Mode world Peaceful mode is turned on by default, it specifically says that enabling it means Biters will not actively attack or expand. Now it's off i can see them absorbing pollution like normal