All Master Class Blueprints are available on FactorioBin Overview and direct links to all Blueprints: nilaus.atlassian.net/l/cp/HBEUm524 (Pastebin links no longer work)
The research queue is locked by default so new players don't do too much research at once and get overwhelmed by all the new recipes. IIRC it was said in some FFF.
Actually found this helpful the first time i played since there is less opportunity to "waste" time by doing "unimportant" research. You don't really know what to get and if you have to think about each step individually you often change your mind and pick a different research next.
7:55 Didn't know that about red desert big stones, very cool! 8:25 This is the only point I really disagree with you on. I would highly recommend against peaceful mode for new players. Instead, if biters are a problem, I would recommend to crank up the starting area. That way they can reach mid game before having to worry about them, but they still represent some sort of challenge. 13:20 The technology "expensive" option does nothing at the moment. 13:30 Kovarex talked about the research queue in FFF-254, the reason for not enabling it initially is to give more importance to each research unlock. Rather than "I have oil, let me get all the oil stuff"; you have "Okay, oil is researched, let me get plastic. Okay, plastic is done, let me build plastic while sulfur is going. Okay, sulfur is done, let me build that". Very helpful for new players. I like your checklist for a new map, and that is pretty much the same checklist I use, just never enumerated it before :)
Yeah. And as new player you won't even find it annoying. I had no idea that there's even an option for that in my first more serious world and not even for second I complained about how I would like to queue research
@@MrOrzech1 Depends on the person really tough in general for new players yes I agree, queue was something I been wanting for a long time, gets tiring having to always stop what you are doing to then select what research you already know you want, and I even had the auto research mod on top, but sadly it chooses based on cost so not entirely useful workaround, it's mostly annoying that you can't enable it mid game with out messing achievements in case you forgot, I think Nilus just did a bad job differentiating if the advice was for new or for "veteran" players. As for the Bitters I have to disagree in a lot of ways especially on them being "some sort of challenge", and I think Canebro1 misunderstood (correct me if I am wrong), I think Nilus meant "annoying" as exactly that, just an annoyance not a challenge because that is what Bitters are sadly, unless you are really new or royally mess up they are not a threat at all, especially after unlocking flame turrets, they just become a boring chore, and some people might just not want the combat aspect at all. Hopefully the team releases some combat oriented DLC that adds some more enemy variety and smarter Bitters or make them work in a more threatening way, because atm mines and flame turrets completely shut them down.
Tip: Increment or decrement a seed you like by 1. It will change the world a little bit, usually keeping the terrain, but changing the biomes or sometimes patch generation. Similar seeds produce similar results. Like the terrain but the starter ore is behaving like Russian nesting dolls? Just add or subtract until you find some ore you lik!
I think not having research queue is just fine for new players, it is a good idea to take new technologies one at a time and payattention to what it unlocked. It is easy to blow through 8 technologies while you didn't pay attention and end up kind of lost.
Agreed. I think for new players, especially your first game or two, play with the queue disabled so you learn about each tech as you go. But I also do think it's annoying that advanced players cannot make that change and have it stick, and that there is no way to just change it to enable it in-game (without disabling achievements) - it should just be a setting you can change during the game.
In my first playthrough I did exactly that. Automated Red and Green Science to 1/s and grinded through all technologies available (didn't have research queue on, I just stood there and waited ^^) but it wasn't to bad afterwards. I just learned everything one by one, depending on what I wanted to add to my factory (for example Oil Processing). I can totally see the point though, because a little bit before all of the research was done I was worried about learning all the new stuff I just unlocked.
Thanks! The bit about fighting biters vs building factories is similar to my experience. I bought an earlier version of Factorio on Steam, 0.15?, and about 5 minutes into the tutorial while I was still figuring out movement and mining (not a hard core gamer) I got repeatedly jumped by biters and quit as I was looking for a factory building game not survival/horror. Tried again a year or so later and the new tutorial in 0.17 (even though it has design issues per the Factorio developers) was a much more gradual introduction that got me past the initial ambush stage and into the fun stuff then next thing I knew it was 3:00 AM and I had ~4 hours to get some sleep before work started followed by 3 weeks of obsession.
I like the feeling of taking over nature that cliffs give you. Much like how biters just become a minor annoyance in the lategame, cliffs are your midgame victory of finally not having to work around those damned rocks. On repeated playthroughs I could see myself disabling them, but for the first few it felt like a really satisfying constraint to overcome, different from landfilling water, where it's more about the scale of your production than its technological progress.
Terrain 'scale' is literal, it doesn't change the shape of the terrain features, just the size - ie like that feature was printed on a transparent sheet and you were expanding or shrinking it uniformly over the entire map. So what I would suggest is to reduce the scale to minimum to effectively get a zoomed-out overview, fiddle with the other slider to get it looking like you want, and then readjust the scale so it's the proper size. Makes it a bit easier to see what it's doing.
I personally like cliffs and water as an added challenge to constrain the factory. I rarely use cliff explosives or landfill, so instead I need to work around them. Similarly I try to avoid building over forests, although I do sometimes drive directly thru a forest with a tank to clear a route for trains.
For anyone reading: cliffs are deleted if they spawn on top of ore patches. Not sure why the preview shows the cliffs overlapping patches, but generating a few maps confirms what I thought that cliffs cannot generate on ore.
In terrain, scale is kind of strange because it's not just how large each body of water/trees will be, but it also determines the distance between bodies. So if you turn up Water Scale it will generate larger bodies of water that are further away from each other; so it creates large oceans that are very spread apart. If you turn down Water Scale, it generates smaller bodies of water, but with shorter distances between bodies; this has the effect of creating many small lakes that are very close together. I personally like turning the Water Scale and Coverage up somewhat, as it makes the map and building outposts more interesting, but there aren't so many patches of water that it's difficult to build a large, structured factory.
Well it's confusing if you read these parameters like "oh, the scale parameter affects the scale of the water body". But it gets much clearer if you tell yourself "Oh the scale parameter affects the scale of the noise map/texture". Look up "Perlin noise" on the net. Tell yourself the dark areas are bodies of water. The "Scale" scales the whole image from its center (what happens at around 5:24) and the "Coverage" makes the image darker or brighter (darker means the dark areas expands and brighter means they retract. Which roughly translates to more or less water surface per body)
@@grunthex3090 *It makes sense if you already understand it,* but if you don't, *don't bother **_looking it up_* because it will be a rabbit hole that results in confusion for a long period of time. If you really want to understand it though, I made an *interactive thing in Desmos to aid in understanding:* desmos.com/calculator/nhvhifipze *And here is my best explanation:* Think of mountains. Take a horizontal cross-section and if it is in the mountain it is land and if it is not, it is water. Raising the cross-section is increasing the coverage and lowering the coverage is lowing the cross-section. If the mountains were closer together and thinner (basically scaling them down on the x and z, but not vertically) then that is decreasing the scale. And increasing scale will make them farther apart (or stretching them out).
Just think of it like not a scale of a single body of water, but imagine you put all the water on a map, and then you make that map bigger or smaller (without changing the size of the "actual" map). If you realize this you can actually make the scale tiny to see more "preview" of where and how much water there will be on your map when you crank the scale back up. You can also clearly see how the scaling (and coverage) works when you use that smallest scale and slowly raise it up, or slowly change the coverage when you have a tiny scale: it will be very easily visible. The trees work the exact same way but it's harder to see since it's just green dots.
For the water scale option, think of the water as it's own map based on the seed, increasing the scale maintains shape but scales it so it might seem you have less water but it's the exact same ratios just with larger land areas and larger lakes and seas and such.
Actually, cliffs do not generate inside resource patches in the actual world-gen, despite what it shows in the map preview. (100% sure about starting patches, 70% sure about expansion patches)
Searching for a seed with no overlapping ores is a tedious task if you go with large patches of ore. Like all problems in this game, it can be overcome with engineering. When you reach that stage in base building where you want need to consume whole fields at a time. I recommend building buffers in to your mining setups using chests and inserters. A large enough buffer will ensure the mining will keep running at full speed even when your base demands little or no ore. This will make separating ores a piece of cake.
Nilaus explained the problem with bitters in a very simple way, they go from challenging to nuisance pretty fast. Krastorio tried to make them more useful with he whole biomass thing. But that also become useless fast. It's a shame that with 1.0 days away from release, biters' usefulness was never resolved.
I like it because it encourages me to split between expanding and defending, plus with certain mods (alien economy) it really encourages to me late game to set up for an "alien farm"
@@maximnikolaev6627 That's the thing, you need to put mods to make them be something. And even so, after a while you can automate those processes making alien hunting a chore.
@@MrWhiteVzla uhh... Everything in the game is acted like a chore? As soon as you know what you need to do to deal with it will be easily be a chore. Maybe for some people they don't want to be "distracted" by the aliens but to me it's a good distraction, maybe that's just me.
@@maximnikolaev6627 I disagree with that statement. There are lots of variables you need handle when building a factory regardless how much you know the game. The range from bottlenecks and efficiency to resource scarcity. It doesn't matter how much automation you create, there are still lots of things you need to track. My main gripe is that the biter "distraction" as you call it, goes from a challenge to something that's just being a nuance. Build a wall, expand the wall, kill the bitters. Sure, it's a nice resource dump if you want to burn some uranium rounds and artillery in the late game. But what else? It adds nothing to your science or to building the base. It's just a thing that makes the early game harder. If you like it, more power to you. But to me, they add nothing but an early hinderance.
research queue = I played first factory ever with it off, and learned some tech. Next playthrough I had it on, but wasn't super familiar with the order of operations. It was super easy to unlock 4 things without noticing and then forgetting to 'achieve' that thing that I had unlocked.
An honest plug here for supporting Nilaus (whom autocorrect just wanted to call “illusion” hah) via Patreon. The Discord is such an amazing community. It’s a beautiful resource for anything Factorio (and plenty of other topics but definitely heavily Factorio 🤣).
Cliffs are somewhat good for biter hunting, because they can, sometimes, provide natural defense for your base as the biters won't be chewing the cliffs trying to pass through, same idea as rivers that makes a natural defense as biters will move around it to attack. Trees are useful to prevent pollution spreading, also to deal with biters, but in a vanilla game they're just cheap fuel. But if all of the above seems like "meh" just turn off biters and be happy :)
the pollution setting can be changed to basically make it take longer or less time for the biters to get angry, but myself i like to turn diffusion down to 0 and leave all other enemy settings. that way the pollution doesn`t spread away from your factory, meaning biters will only get angry if you build on top of them or attack them. this makes early to mid game easy while still having the late game biter bases to have fun with, like running through a massive base with personal lasers destroying all in your path, or sitting back and firing artillery from afar and watching the fire turrets melt them as they approach.
I personally always turn on expansion, even on rail world. I tend to clean the base fast and when I want combat, I have to go to far away so it's nice to have them take back a little bit of terrain. It also force me to set up actual defence, rather than just cleaning up my pollution cloud. I just tune down how fast they expend, especially on railworld (30 min min, 90 min max). I have to try to limite the expansion range, to have denser bases. I always modify the absorption ration. I hate dead tree so I make the trees nearly invincible, in this regard at least. I recently turn the absorption down for bitter, it allows bigger attack and make the defence more relevant. Once you know what you want, it's setting that are worth looking for. I really like your list for a good map. It's one of the reason I have problem with RSO mod, not being able to check that. I also had struggle to understand what is a good map. Thanks to you, I now know !! ^^
These rules for a good map are very sensible - it's a shame that the Factorio folks don't actually implement them themselves. Having sufficient of all the starting resources (including water), relatively nearby Oil and visible uranium and expansion copper and iron, should all be part of the default map generation. Failing any of those makes the game almost unplayable for many biter settings. Cliffs through any of them and overlapping starting deposits is just annoying, but at least not fatal.
I am in the middle of my first playthrough (I'm guessing early-ish mid-game) and just did a random default map. My map fails 4/8 of your conditions, but I think that it is providing a fun experience to have both my second iron and oil far away. However, I got lucky (at least for starter and mid-game) because I have two big lakes on either side so bitters hardly ever get me. Also as long as cliffs are not too much of a nuisance, they become fun and reliving to blow up once you cliff-bombs. (Also there is currently a glitch that if you run your truck (aka vroom-vroom) into a cliff it stops without taking damage.)
One tip I have is to set up the other three tabs how you suggest and then generate maps until you reach the ore spawn criteria you laid out. Once you have that, you can use the terrain tab to customize the map for imperfections regarding trees, cliffs, desert, etc. as you like.
With Oil and Uranium I don't worry about it being close by. They don't generate a lot of pollution (especially if you use efficiency modules), so even if biters are in the area the pollution cloud is so small that they won't attack often or at all.
I got killed by this in my failed Death World attempt - oil was too far away and without it you can't have flamer turrets and without them the spitting biters destroy everything. It was very sad.
I personally prefer to have the coal patch be closer to both water and ore patches. Close to water means smoother power automation and closer to ore means less belts to transport to smelters (and less running back and forth in the beginning hand-feeding phase. Once set up with belts it's no longer an issue but it can be quite time consuming early on and harder to defend if playing with biters.
I'm about to start my first game and the 'research queue availability' actually threw me off so much in the default settings that I wasn't sure if it meant what I thought and came to watch your video :D
We don't have the same RSO then. I near always have overlaping patch on my starter area. Also, RSO prevent you to see the ore spawn on the preview, thus to ensure you have a good map in this regard. I really like the promise make by the RSO mod but after five games with it, I'm still not satisfy with the result, no matter what I try. They really need to put some setting example like : you want a railworld, put this setting, etc.
@@Teneombre I'm always on the newest experimental build of the game and the default and rail world preset's with RSO always seem to give decent ore spawns. it might just be that your on older version or your just getting really unlucky.
@@dimensional7915 I'm pretty sure they change something in RSO recently. I reload my map with different vanilla setting that should not impact the RSO spawn and everything was different. I may try, once again, to reset RSO setting and launch a new game but it will wait after my 1.0 run. Just for me to know, have you allowed multiple ore spawn ? It may explain why you have enought ressources
RSO is amazing but I feel like it's mostly for people that want rail worlds. You can tweak it to make lots of smaller patches similar to vanilla but then it's probably better to just use the vanilla generator. Where it shines is making it rewarding for expanding further into biter territory and having long train runs, as the further patches containt vastly more ore.
Not sure if its a hot topic or not but I'd like to see a ratio tutorial. How to calculate ratios. I read the cheatsheet but then I try applying it ingame and get totally different results. Just seeing a formula doesnt work for me, i need to see it in action to reproduce and learn.
I highly recommend the Factory Planner mod as it does all the calculations for you. It's not cheating as it does not change the game play at all or tell you how to lay things out. It just asks you to pick a product and how much of it you want, and it will tell you how many machines you need and how much of each input.
disjustice Unfortunately the Planner confused me, despite or perhaps because of being an experienced player. And it still hides to process, which OP specifically wanted to understand. As a beginner it makes far more sense to do it yourself instead of using a magical calculator.
well if you want to MAX ... belts and stuff like that ... then pay attention to times and how much they need ... like gears make 2 gears per iron ... and and take something like 4s and then you get things like belts that need gears and iron ... and again take some time to make ... so you must supply gears at a rate that keeps a full set of needs in the belt factory so you may need to make more than 1 gear place for a build to keep up .. but then if you had JIT inventory (loads of automation) you can toss out all those wasteful ratios and build exactly what you need with just what is needed instead of loading belts until they are stuffed .. but no one seems to like and try and actually use JUST the resources they need to make what they want ... and they just fill everything to max and hope they have enough ores ... you can literally finish the game with 2 maybe 3 patches of iron 2 patches of copper and one of everything else ... IF you go JIT ...
@@Yggdrasil42 I was just offering FP as a solution since it seemed like OP had trouble with the formulas. The formulas are pretty simple, but can be fiddly to calculate if you aren't putting them into a spreadsheet or something, which I've done in the past. Tools like FP or helmod just make it more convenient since you don't have to constantly alt-tab to a spreadsheet or look down at a calculator. And honestly once you've done the calculation for a few simple builds it's just an exercise in repetition to do it for larger builds. The challenge comes from how to design the build, lay everything out effectively, and still leave room for inputs and outputs. The math, IMHO is kinda trivial.
I am so conflicted about cliffs! On one hand I agree with Nilaus they are soooo annoying. On the other hand, it makes it that much more rewarding to get cliff explosives. When I Unlocked those bad boys I went on a base cleanup rampage that felt soooooo frign good!
Are these settings still valid for a brand new player in the current patch?? I want to start playing factorio but I always get stuck and confused on how to generate a good map
If you want to change settings midgame, mainly enemy expansion, peaceful or any stuff - I highly recommend "Change Map Settings" mod on the mod portal. Made by Bilka the talented wiki admin.
When I watch your YT content using my earphones I notice a resonance around 150 Hz. It get a bit annoying and I'm trying to not focus on it. Maybe your new room elevates these frequencies? Anyway, I still love the content!
that would be power humm for european power ... so if you are in europe it may be your system that is getting it ... and you would need a choke on your power line ... if it is in the recording then it is Nilaus's and HE needs a choke
So hard to find someone to explain what the setting and numbers mean. I feel when someone says skip or don't touch something, they themselves don't know either.
Do you know what these map options mean in terms of numbers? Such as how many coal tiles per million tile will I get with different settings, how much coal will be in an average coal tile, etc...
Not Nilaus, but here's a guide for doing so if you want to use it. It is a lot simpler than in most games. First, open Factorio. Then check the menu for a button that says mods. you should see a screen that has a list of all your mods that you have installed, which will be nothing except for "Base mod," which is the base game. click the install button. if you have a specific mod in mind, click the search button and type in the name of the mod. If you just want to look at available mods, just scroll through. when you have found one you want, click the "install" button. you can install as many mods as you want this way. Once you have done that, click "confirm." Your game should restart with the mod(s) you installed active. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask :)
There is a "Record replay information" checkbox under the advanced tab that you didn't go over. That must be a newer setting because I have not seen that before (haven't played a new game of factorio in months).
How big is the preview screen? If I want to know how much water I have to remove to build a certain sized base (lets say 550 in height for example), it'd be great to know to find out how much space you have more or less
meanwhile I made my railworld map so that enemies evolve the slowest, but frequency and size on maximum, and maximum starting area, so basically I'm in a "huge island" surrounded by a red sea.
I didn't change anything on my first map and didn't have any biter problems because i immediately kill their nest before they touch my pollution clouds, guess i got lucky
I don't overly get the hate for cliffs when you can just use cliff explosives to get rid of them? Also part of the reason I picked up factorio was watching your deathworld run, so if I turned off biters it would have ruined a lot of the reason I ended up wanting to play xD
@@canebro1 I turned them off my first game and it seemed like it was a little too simple. This second game I left them on and they didn't really feel like they were in the way until I was just getting sulphur up anyway... I guess it could have been a lucky seed
I like having resources on very low frequency and slightly lower richness and size. It forces you to rapidly expand, murder biters, upgrade your defenses, and use fun transportation systems like trains and boats ( using the cargo ships mod which I highly recommend!)
@@nickwilson3499 +1 for the cargo ships mod recommendation. With decent sized bodies of water, it adds a whole new dimension to the game. Maybe not on a first playthrough, I guess, but it's a great addition for a slightly more experienced engineer.
@@nickwilson3499 Agree. For rapid travel around the map and over water, I used to use the Attack Helicopter mod, but it's really overpowered so I don't enable it very often!
Actually, I was a bit surprised that this is part of the Masterclass series, and not the first episode of the 1.0 Beginner series in the works, but I'm sure Nilaus has a plan (or maybe he got distracted ;-)
Map gen won't change with 1.0, so Nilaus is claiming some territory :) If Wube is lucky, there will be a whole lot of new players searching for details on map generation, and guess who will come near the top of the list!
08:50 disagree, i wan a tower defence and base building game, nothing wrong with fucking up the base, i would just go for a new run. i set enemys to hard and learn.
I disagree with you about cliffs. They force you to either put in the work to remove them, or be more dynamic with your builds. I get tired of seeing the same meta base designs.
"Now we copy the link and past in this window and we should get... the same map, phew that was lucky" lol I'd gladly subscribe if you put 2-3 videos per week otherwise its too much content in my subs list to watch. So instead I'm adding playlists to watch when I'll have free time.
All Master Class Blueprints are available on FactorioBin
Overview and direct links to all Blueprints: nilaus.atlassian.net/l/cp/HBEUm524
(Pastebin links no longer work)
The research queue is locked by default so new players don't do too much research at once and get overwhelmed by all the new recipes. IIRC it was said in some FFF.
And there is conclusion in factorio.com/blog/post/fff-255 , thanks for the help @canebro1 :)
Actually found this helpful the first time i played since there is less opportunity to "waste" time by doing "unimportant" research.
You don't really know what to get and if you have to think about each step individually you often change your mind and pick a different research next.
That is so annoying if you reinstall factorio, all my hotkeys are locked and I need to go through the base game again
Hello everyone, is anyone can share the save file of an advanced installation?
@@mustafayuceldemir3498 Why would you even want that? You want someone else to figure out the game for you?
7:55 Didn't know that about red desert big stones, very cool!
8:25 This is the only point I really disagree with you on. I would highly recommend against peaceful mode for new players. Instead, if biters are a problem, I would recommend to crank up the starting area. That way they can reach mid game before having to worry about them, but they still represent some sort of challenge.
13:20 The technology "expensive" option does nothing at the moment.
13:30 Kovarex talked about the research queue in FFF-254, the reason for not enabling it initially is to give more importance to each research unlock. Rather than "I have oil, let me get all the oil stuff"; you have "Okay, oil is researched, let me get plastic. Okay, plastic is done, let me build plastic while sulfur is going. Okay, sulfur is done, let me build that". Very helpful for new players.
I like your checklist for a new map, and that is pretty much the same checklist I use, just never enumerated it before :)
Yeah. And as new player you won't even find it annoying. I had no idea that there's even an option for that in my first more serious world and not even for second I complained about how I would like to queue research
@@MrOrzech1 Depends on the person really tough in general for new players yes I agree, queue was something I been wanting for a long time, gets tiring having to always stop what you are doing to then select what research you already know you want, and I even had the auto research mod on top, but sadly it chooses based on cost so not entirely useful workaround, it's mostly annoying that you can't enable it mid game with out messing achievements in case you forgot, I think Nilus just did a bad job differentiating if the advice was for new or for "veteran" players.
As for the Bitters I have to disagree in a lot of ways especially on them being "some sort of challenge", and I think Canebro1 misunderstood (correct me if I am wrong), I think Nilus meant "annoying" as exactly that, just an annoyance not a challenge because that is what Bitters are sadly, unless you are really new or royally mess up they are not a threat at all, especially after unlocking flame turrets, they just become a boring chore, and some people might just not want the combat aspect at all.
Hopefully the team releases some combat oriented DLC that adds some more enemy variety and smarter Bitters or make them work in a more threatening way, because atm mines and flame turrets completely shut them down.
Tip: Increment or decrement a seed you like by 1. It will change the world a little bit, usually keeping the terrain, but changing the biomes or sometimes patch generation. Similar seeds produce similar results. Like the terrain but the starter ore is behaving like Russian nesting dolls? Just add or subtract until you find some ore you lik!
This is amazing thank you so much!
this should be a pinned comment
I think not having research queue is just fine for new players, it is a good idea to take new technologies one at a time and payattention to what it unlocked.
It is easy to blow through 8 technologies while you didn't pay attention and end up kind of lost.
Agreed. I think for new players, especially your first game or two, play with the queue disabled so you learn about each tech as you go. But I also do think it's annoying that advanced players cannot make that change and have it stick, and that there is no way to just change it to enable it in-game (without disabling achievements) - it should just be a setting you can change during the game.
In my first playthrough I did exactly that. Automated Red and Green Science to 1/s and grinded through all technologies available (didn't have research queue on, I just stood there and waited ^^) but it wasn't to bad afterwards. I just learned everything one by one, depending on what I wanted to add to my factory (for example Oil Processing). I can totally see the point though, because a little bit before all of the research was done I was worried about learning all the new stuff I just unlocked.
Thanks! The bit about fighting biters vs building factories is similar to my experience. I bought an earlier version of Factorio on Steam, 0.15?, and about 5 minutes into the tutorial while I was still figuring out movement and mining (not a hard core gamer) I got repeatedly jumped by biters and quit as I was looking for a factory building game not survival/horror. Tried again a year or so later and the new tutorial in 0.17 (even though it has design issues per the Factorio developers) was a much more gradual introduction that got me past the initial ambush stage and into the fun stuff then next thing I knew it was 3:00 AM and I had ~4 hours to get some sleep before work started followed by 3 weeks of obsession.
I like the feeling of taking over nature that cliffs give you. Much like how biters just become a minor annoyance in the lategame, cliffs are your midgame victory of finally not having to work around those damned rocks. On repeated playthroughs I could see myself disabling them, but for the first few it felt like a really satisfying constraint to overcome, different from landfilling water, where it's more about the scale of your production than its technological progress.
Terrain 'scale' is literal, it doesn't change the shape of the terrain features, just the size - ie like that feature was printed on a transparent sheet and you were expanding or shrinking it uniformly over the entire map. So what I would suggest is to reduce the scale to minimum to effectively get a zoomed-out overview, fiddle with the other slider to get it looking like you want, and then readjust the scale so it's the proper size. Makes it a bit easier to see what it's doing.
I personally like cliffs and water as an added challenge to constrain the factory. I rarely use cliff explosives or landfill, so instead I need to work around them. Similarly I try to avoid building over forests, although I do sometimes drive directly thru a forest with a tank to clear a route for trains.
If you want to clear forests for trains/ways I have one word for you: grenades!
@@amunak_ I've done that too. I learned that trick from KoS, and I think scared my friends when they first saw me use grenades
@@amunak_ furry
@@parryjohnson8604 P
For anyone reading: cliffs are deleted if they spawn on top of ore patches. Not sure why the preview shows the cliffs overlapping patches, but generating a few maps confirms what I thought that cliffs cannot generate on ore.
In terrain, scale is kind of strange because it's not just how large each body of water/trees will be, but it also determines the distance between bodies. So if you turn up Water Scale it will generate larger bodies of water that are further away from each other; so it creates large oceans that are very spread apart. If you turn down Water Scale, it generates smaller bodies of water, but with shorter distances between bodies; this has the effect of creating many small lakes that are very close together. I personally like turning the Water Scale and Coverage up somewhat, as it makes the map and building outposts more interesting, but there aren't so many patches of water that it's difficult to build a large, structured factory.
Well it's confusing if you read these parameters like "oh, the scale parameter affects the scale of the water body". But it gets much clearer if you tell yourself "Oh the scale parameter affects the scale of the noise map/texture".
Look up "Perlin noise" on the net. Tell yourself the dark areas are bodies of water. The "Scale" scales the whole image from its center (what happens at around 5:24) and the "Coverage" makes the image darker or brighter (darker means the dark areas expands and brighter means they retract. Which roughly translates to more or less water surface per body)
@@lekrashar As soon as you're looking up Perlin stuff, you're WAY more confusing than the original explanation...
@@grunthex3090 *It makes sense if you already understand it,* but if you don't, *don't bother **_looking it up_* because it will be a rabbit hole that results in confusion for a long period of time.
If you really want to understand it though,
I made an *interactive thing in Desmos to aid in understanding:* desmos.com/calculator/nhvhifipze
*And here is my best explanation:*
Think of mountains. Take a horizontal cross-section and if it is in the mountain it is land and if it is not, it is water. Raising the cross-section is increasing the coverage and lowering the coverage is lowing the cross-section. If the mountains were closer together and thinner (basically scaling them down on the x and z, but not vertically) then that is decreasing the scale. And increasing scale will make them farther apart (or stretching them out).
Just think of it like not a scale of a single body of water, but imagine you put all the water on a map, and then you make that map bigger or smaller (without changing the size of the "actual" map). If you realize this you can actually make the scale tiny to see more "preview" of where and how much water there will be on your map when you crank the scale back up. You can also clearly see how the scaling (and coverage) works when you use that smallest scale and slowly raise it up, or slowly change the coverage when you have a tiny scale: it will be very easily visible.
The trees work the exact same way but it's harder to see since it's just green dots.
Bespoke: you should look it up because learning is fun
I've got like 600 hours in Factorio but I've *never* considered how deserts affect difficulty due to pollution spread. Great info!
Those guides are perfect for the (hopefully) many new players that will join the Factorio community soon with the official launch of the game.
For the water scale option, think of the water as it's own map based on the seed, increasing the scale maintains shape but scales it so it might seem you have less water but it's the exact same ratios just with larger land areas and larger lakes and seas and such.
Actually, cliffs do not generate inside resource patches in the actual world-gen, despite what it shows in the map preview. (100% sure about starting patches, 70% sure about expansion patches)
Many years later and still super helpful. Thanks for all the guides!
Searching for a seed with no overlapping ores is a tedious task if you go with large patches of ore.
Like all problems in this game, it can be overcome with engineering. When you reach that stage in base building where you want need to consume whole fields at a time. I recommend building buffers in to your mining setups using chests and inserters. A large enough buffer will ensure the mining will keep running at full speed even when your base demands little or no ore.
This will make separating ores a piece of cake.
Nilaus explained the problem with bitters in a very simple way, they go from challenging to nuisance pretty fast. Krastorio tried to make them more useful with he whole biomass thing. But that also become useless fast. It's a shame that with 1.0 days away from release, biters' usefulness was never resolved.
Yeah, biters fell like an awkward addition to the game. I just turn them off and make the game all about factory building.
I like it because it encourages me to split between expanding and defending, plus with certain mods (alien economy) it really encourages to me late game to set up for an "alien farm"
@@maximnikolaev6627 That's the thing, you need to put mods to make them be something. And even so, after a while you can automate those processes making alien hunting a chore.
@@MrWhiteVzla uhh... Everything in the game is acted like a chore? As soon as you know what you need to do to deal with it will be easily be a chore. Maybe for some people they don't want to be "distracted" by the aliens but to me it's a good distraction, maybe that's just me.
@@maximnikolaev6627 I disagree with that statement. There are lots of variables you need handle when building a factory regardless how much you know the game. The range from bottlenecks and efficiency to resource scarcity. It doesn't matter how much automation you create, there are still lots of things you need to track.
My main gripe is that the biter "distraction" as you call it, goes from a challenge to something that's just being a nuance. Build a wall, expand the wall, kill the bitters. Sure, it's a nice resource dump if you want to burn some uranium rounds and artillery in the late game. But what else? It adds nothing to your science or to building the base. It's just a thing that makes the early game harder.
If you like it, more power to you. But to me, they add nothing but an early hinderance.
research queue = I played first factory ever with it off, and learned some tech. Next playthrough I had it on, but wasn't super familiar with the order of operations. It was super easy to unlock 4 things without noticing and then forgetting to 'achieve' that thing that I had unlocked.
An honest plug here for supporting Nilaus (whom autocorrect just wanted to call “illusion” hah) via Patreon. The Discord is such an amazing community. It’s a beautiful resource for anything Factorio (and plenty of other topics but definitely heavily Factorio 🤣).
Cliffs are somewhat good for biter hunting, because they can, sometimes, provide natural defense for your base as the biters won't be chewing the cliffs trying to pass through, same idea as rivers that makes a natural defense as biters will move around it to attack.
Trees are useful to prevent pollution spreading, also to deal with biters, but in a vanilla game they're just cheap fuel.
But if all of the above seems like "meh" just turn off biters and be happy :)
the pollution setting can be changed to basically make it take longer or less time for the biters to get angry, but myself i like to turn diffusion down to 0 and leave all other enemy settings. that way the pollution doesn`t spread away from your factory, meaning biters will only get angry if you build on top of them or attack them. this makes early to mid game easy while still having the late game biter bases to have fun with, like running through a massive base with personal lasers destroying all in your path, or sitting back and firing artillery from afar and watching the fire turrets melt them as they approach.
I personally always turn on expansion, even on rail world. I tend to clean the base fast and when I want combat, I have to go to far away so it's nice to have them take back a little bit of terrain. It also force me to set up actual defence, rather than just cleaning up my pollution cloud. I just tune down how fast they expend, especially on railworld (30 min min, 90 min max). I have to try to limite the expansion range, to have denser bases.
I always modify the absorption ration. I hate dead tree so I make the trees nearly invincible, in this regard at least. I recently turn the absorption down for bitter, it allows bigger attack and make the defence more relevant. Once you know what you want, it's setting that are worth looking for.
I really like your list for a good map. It's one of the reason I have problem with RSO mod, not being able to check that. I also had struggle to understand what is a good map. Thanks to you, I now know !! ^^
These rules for a good map are very sensible - it's a shame that the Factorio folks don't actually implement them themselves. Having sufficient of all the starting resources (including water), relatively nearby Oil and visible uranium and expansion copper and iron, should all be part of the default map generation. Failing any of those makes the game almost unplayable for many biter settings. Cliffs through any of them and overlapping starting deposits is just annoying, but at least not fatal.
I am in the middle of my first playthrough (I'm guessing early-ish mid-game) and just did a random default map. My map fails 4/8 of your conditions, but I think that it is providing a fun experience to have both my second iron and oil far away. However, I got lucky (at least for starter and mid-game) because I have two big lakes on either side so bitters hardly ever get me. Also as long as cliffs are not too much of a nuisance, they become fun and reliving to blow up once you cliff-bombs. (Also there is currently a glitch that if you run your truck (aka vroom-vroom) into a cliff it stops without taking damage.)
I have close to 200h in this games I didn't know half of this ... thank you so much !
One tip I have is to set up the other three tabs how you suggest and then generate maps until you reach the ore spawn criteria you laid out. Once you have that, you can use the terrain tab to customize the map for imperfections regarding trees, cliffs, desert, etc. as you like.
With Oil and Uranium I don't worry about it being close by. They don't generate a lot of pollution (especially if you use efficiency modules), so even if biters are in the area the pollution cloud is so small that they won't attack often or at all.
I got killed by this in my failed Death World attempt - oil was too far away and without it you can't have flamer turrets and without them the spitting biters destroy everything. It was very sad.
16:45 *CORRECTION* : even if in the preview it shows cliffs crossing patches, once the map is generated, the patches erases cliffs
I personally prefer to have the coal patch be closer to both water and ore patches. Close to water means smoother power automation and closer to ore means less belts to transport to smelters (and less running back and forth in the beginning hand-feeding phase. Once set up with belts it's no longer an issue but it can be quite time consuming early on and harder to defend if playing with biters.
"What makes a god map?"
That's deep dude.
I'm about to start my first game and the 'research queue availability' actually threw me off so much in the default settings that I wasn't sure if it meant what I thought and came to watch your video :D
resource spawner overhaul gives you the option to make trees not spawn on ore patches and also makes patches basically never overlap
We don't have the same RSO then. I near always have overlaping patch on my starter area. Also, RSO prevent you to see the ore spawn on the preview, thus to ensure you have a good map in this regard. I really like the promise make by the RSO mod but after five games with it, I'm still not satisfy with the result, no matter what I try. They really need to put some setting example like : you want a railworld, put this setting, etc.
@@Teneombre I'm always on the newest experimental build of the game and the default and rail world preset's with RSO always seem to give decent ore spawns. it might just be that your on older version or your just getting really unlucky.
@@dimensional7915 I'm pretty sure they change something in RSO recently. I reload my map with different vanilla setting that should not impact the RSO spawn and everything was different. I may try, once again, to reset RSO setting and launch a new game but it will wait after my 1.0 run. Just for me to know, have you allowed multiple ore spawn ? It may explain why you have enought ressources
@@Teneombre I haven't touched any of the rso settings other then the one that removes trees from ore patches
RSO is amazing but I feel like it's mostly for people that want rail worlds. You can tweak it to make lots of smaller patches similar to vanilla but then it's probably better to just use the vanilla generator.
Where it shines is making it rewarding for expanding further into biter territory and having long train runs, as the further patches containt vastly more ore.
Not sure if its a hot topic or not but I'd like to see a ratio tutorial. How to calculate ratios. I read the cheatsheet but then I try applying it ingame and get totally different results. Just seeing a formula doesnt work for me, i need to see it in action to reproduce and learn.
I highly recommend the Factory Planner mod as it does all the calculations for you. It's not cheating as it does not change the game play at all or tell you how to lay things out. It just asks you to pick a product and how much of it you want, and it will tell you how many machines you need and how much of each input.
disjustice Unfortunately the Planner confused me, despite or perhaps because of being an experienced player. And it still hides to process, which OP specifically wanted to understand. As a beginner it makes far more sense to do it yourself instead of using a magical calculator.
well if you want to MAX ... belts and stuff like that ... then pay attention to times and how much they need ... like gears make 2 gears per iron ... and and take something like 4s and then you get things like belts that need gears and iron ... and again take some time to make ... so you must supply gears at a rate that keeps a full set of needs in the belt factory so you may need to make more than 1 gear place for a build to keep up .. but then if you had JIT inventory (loads of automation) you can toss out all those wasteful ratios and build exactly what you need with just what is needed instead of loading belts until they are stuffed .. but no one seems to like and try and actually use JUST the resources they need to make what they want ... and they just fill everything to max and hope they have enough ores ... you can literally finish the game with 2 maybe 3 patches of iron 2 patches of copper and one of everything else ... IF you go JIT ...
@@Yggdrasil42 I was just offering FP as a solution since it seemed like OP had trouble with the formulas. The formulas are pretty simple, but can be fiddly to calculate if you aren't putting them into a spreadsheet or something, which I've done in the past. Tools like FP or helmod just make it more convenient since you don't have to constantly alt-tab to a spreadsheet or look down at a calculator. And honestly once you've done the calculation for a few simple builds it's just an exercise in repetition to do it for larger builds.
The challenge comes from how to design the build, lay everything out effectively, and still leave room for inputs and outputs. The math, IMHO is kinda trivial.
There is a mod that let you have a preset for island world where it is several islands
"Cliffs".. do yourself a favor and disable that stupid feature.. cliffs are stupid". Best comment ever
oil and uranium patches are not generated within the starting area, the biters wont attack as frequently but youll need to expand further earlier
Do we have access to his blueprints for the masterclass bundled up, or is it divided between each masterclass?
Just go in discord, he has links of them from pastebin but not an unified one with all of them.
I am so conflicted about cliffs!
On one hand I agree with Nilaus they are soooo annoying.
On the other hand, it makes it that much more rewarding to get cliff explosives. When I Unlocked those bad boys I went on a base cleanup rampage that felt soooooo frign good!
It helped a lot, thanks for the information, for the video, helped a lot :D
Are these settings still valid for a brand new player in the current patch?? I want to start playing factorio but I always get stuck and confused on how to generate a good map
If you want to change settings midgame, mainly enemy expansion, peaceful or any stuff - I highly recommend "Change Map Settings" mod on the mod portal. Made by Bilka the talented wiki admin.
thank you! your channel is awesome.
When I watch your YT content using my earphones I notice a resonance around 150 Hz. It get a bit annoying and I'm trying to not focus on it. Maybe your new room elevates these frequencies?
Anyway, I still love the content!
that would be power humm for european power ... so if you are in europe it may be your system that is getting it ... and you would need a choke on your power line ... if it is in the recording then it is Nilaus's and HE needs a choke
So hard to find someone to explain what the setting and numbers mean. I feel when someone says skip or don't touch something, they themselves don't know either.
Do you know what these map options mean in terms of numbers? Such as how many coal tiles per million tile will I get with different settings, how much coal will be in an average coal tile, etc...
6:12 glad im not the only one that insta disables those things
How can i set custom values for the ore frequency sliders? I want to go lower than 17%
only 3 more days till release!
@Nilaus Could you please explain how to add mods in a video? I don't know yet how to do this.
Not Nilaus, but here's a guide for doing so if you want to use it. It is a lot simpler than in most games.
First, open Factorio. Then check the menu for a button that says mods. you should see a screen that has a list of all your mods that you have installed, which will be nothing except for "Base mod," which is the base game. click the install button. if you have a specific mod in mind, click the search button and type in the name of the mod. If you just want to look at available mods, just scroll through. when you have found one you want, click the "install" button. you can install as many mods as you want this way. Once you have done that, click "confirm." Your game should restart with the mod(s) you installed active. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask :)
@@ryan3212 god I have endless respect for any devs who make their game with easy modding being a high priority
Nice overview ... thanks !
I play all default and first map generate hahah, finish in 88h, maybe i start again with more easy settings and no enemys
Is it possible to Change enemy settings in later Game???
There is a "Record replay information" checkbox under the advanced tab that you didn't go over. That must be a newer setting because I have not seen that before (haven't played a new game of factorio in months).
How big is the preview screen? If I want to know how much water I have to remove to build a certain sized base (lets say 550 in height for example), it'd be great to know to find out how much space you have more or less
cliffs are fun.
What about the record replay function? Does it have any downsides?
How do you get the text on the ground in your intro? I want to find a way to do that.
Mod: Text plates
meanwhile I made my railworld map so that enemies evolve the slowest, but frequency and size on maximum, and maximum starting area, so basically I'm in a "huge island" surrounded by a red sea.
i used a preset i made and im new so i suck and i got pissed off when i got killed in a world i was doing slightly good in
I would do a lot different because I like the expansive play style (spread out)
Wait does disabling the expansion not disable achievements?
nope
I didn't change anything on my first map and didn't have any biter problems because i immediately kill their nest before they touch my pollution clouds, guess i got lucky
Im curious on how many hours you have on factorio, care to tell me?
The best map is when you make the resources to max, no cliffs, no enemy's and research to always.
That is what I use.
I don't overly get the hate for cliffs when you can just use cliff explosives to get rid of them?
Also part of the reason I picked up factorio was watching your deathworld run, so if I turned off biters it would have ruined a lot of the reason I ended up wanting to play xD
cliffs are usually in the way long before you can research oil and get explosives made
I found cliffs fun for 1-2 runs, then they got annoying. Mostly because I wanted a structured base, and fly directly in the face of that.
@@canebro1 I turned them off my first game and it seemed like it was a little too simple. This second game I left them on and they didn't really feel like they were in the way until I was just getting sulphur up anyway...
I guess it could have been a lucky seed
The research queue is soo weird.. I hope that they will fix it
what do you mean by wierd?
@@wolfy1398 why it is disabled. Really annoying
@@pjotor80 oh, well i read that the dev disabled it at the start to no overwhelm new players with too much stuff
@@wolfy1398 yeah i know. But I still find it annoying. It should be a global preference, like if you change it one time, it stays that way
@@pjotor80 yea you are right
after 2000 hours i still dont like the resource gen settings. i never find something im happy with. trried rso too but still nope
I like having resources on very low frequency and slightly lower richness and size. It forces you to rapidly expand, murder biters, upgrade your defenses, and use fun transportation systems like trains and boats ( using the cargo ships mod which I highly recommend!)
@@nickwilson3499 +1 for the cargo ships mod recommendation. With decent sized bodies of water, it adds a whole new dimension to the game. Maybe not on a first playthrough, I guess, but it's a great addition for a slightly more experienced engineer.
Jonathan Richards I also like adding the hover car mod or whatever it’s called because using the boats is extremely slow
@@nickwilson3499 Agree. For rapid travel around the map and over water, I used to use the Attack Helicopter mod, but it's really overpowered so I don't enable it very often!
the worst nightmare of factorio: trees and cliffs
considering tree filter pollution ... they have a good side as well ... unlike cliffs that take explosives to move them out of the way
If you get lucky cliffs are usefull for defence expacly when using mods as Rampant or big biters.
It is such a coincidence that 1.0 is releasing in a few days and you cover map gen. You clearly did not plan it this way
Actually, I was a bit surprised that this is part of the Masterclass series, and not the first episode of the 1.0 Beginner series in the works, but I'm sure Nilaus has a plan (or maybe he got distracted ;-)
Map gen won't change with 1.0, so Nilaus is claiming some territory :) If Wube is lucky, there will be a whole lot of new players searching for details on map generation, and guess who will come near the top of the list!
Timestamps seems wrong
08:50 disagree, i wan a tower defence and base building game, nothing wrong with fucking up the base, i would just go for a new run. i set enemys to hard and learn.
I always turn off cliffs lol.
I do every ore at maximum (Resources, size and richness).
I disagree with you about cliffs. They force you to either put in the work to remove them, or be more dynamic with your builds. I get tired of seeing the same meta base designs.
"Now we copy the link and past in this window and we should get... the same map, phew that was lucky" lol
I'd gladly subscribe if you put 2-3 videos per week otherwise its too much content in my subs list to watch. So instead I'm adding playlists to watch when I'll have free time.
This guy here talks like he got bullied by cliffs in highschool. Just disabled em.
First.
The first will be the last..
First fool
3rd
Bad video for new players. Well I guess that's why it's called master class.