Adds tough biter nests on top of each resource nest in the game that must be destroyed before the resource can be accessed. Inspired by the demolishers on vulcanus, this turns combat from something that interrupts you to something you willingly opt-in to.
The nests lay dormant until you build too close to the nests or try to mine the resources, then it awakens and starts sending out biters and launching projectiles to tear down your defenses. Each nest has different attacks, health, damages and resistances, and different strategies must be used to take each one out.
Awakened nests
Once the nest is activated, the player must kill the biters that come out while avoiding the projectile attacks from the nests. The nest will sacrifice their health to spawn until it is destroyed. If the player is defeated, the nest will return to dormancy.
Unique Stats For Each Resource Type
Stone biters have much more health than iron biters, but are slower. Coal biters do more damage, but are much weaker to fire and explosives. Uranium biters are TOUGH. Clearing a nest is designed to be a serious resource sink for players, and is almost impossible without tech and magazine upgrades. The first patch of iron, copper, stone, and coal will not have any nests on them.
Two Ways To Play!
You can either remove all normal biters in the game and only have resource biters, or have resource biters on top of the normal biters. Resource biters will not expand when pollution gets too high like normal nests.
Add To Existing Maps
Resource biters can be added to existing maps. After being added, all resource patches that do not have any player buildings on it will have resource biters added to it. Currently, the only option that can be changed after the map has been created is how much damage the nest takes when sending out waves of biters. Hosts of the map can type /remove_normal_nests in the console to remove all non-resource nests and prevent them from being created by map generation.
Resource Loot Options
Optional settings to allow biters to drop resources.
Planned Features:
The capture bot hasn't been tested yet on the new nests. I assume it will create a normal nest. In the future I would be interested in making special captive biter spawners for each resource type with unique effects.
Support for other mod's resources and biters.
The attacks of the biters and nests have been partially changed to use new attack types, such as copper using acid based attacks, but this is not fully fleshed out as vanilla factorio has only one wall type. Once the attack types have been updated, I'll recommend a few wall mods to take advantage of them.
Known Issues
- Playing in peaceful mode does not let biters spawn from the nests. Considering that the nests consume health to spawn biters, it can make them very difficult to beat.
- If playing with the setting to remove all normal biters, there can be a problem where if you die trying to kill a nest, and then ignore the biter stragglers, they can fall back on biter expansion logic and start creating normal biter nests.
- Artillery cannons will not be able to kill dormant nests in one hit, and they will regenerate all of their health before they can be hit again.
- If playing with normal biters enabled, occasionally dormant nests will spawn randomly across the map, even in the ocean. You can use the command /clean_up_biter_nests to remove all the nests that shouldn't be there.
Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements!
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