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

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

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

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

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

  3. A command which will create a biter spawner.

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  • It's been a while since I played, but from what I recall of the mechanics, killing them and letting pollution get near them causes more aliens to spawn.
    – agent86
    Commented Apr 3, 2015 at 16:50
  • @agent86 Aliens find places to attack by following pollution gradients, and pollution generation increases “evolution”, but I haven't heard of anything affecting expansions — hence this question.
    – Kevin Reid
    Commented Apr 3, 2015 at 17:28
  • For anyone finding this in the future, this question is now moot. As of version 0.15, purple science no longer requires you to gather Alien Artifacts. You can play the game without biters at all now if you want to. To disable biters completely, when generating a new map, go to Resource Settings and find Enemy Bases at the bottom of this list and set the size setting to "None".
    – Useless Code
    Commented Sep 5, 2017 at 8:20

1 Answer 1

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In 0.12.20:

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

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

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

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