As "a bit" of a perfectionist (maybe even mild undiagnosed OCD), it always annoyed me how forests, cliffs and irregular ore patches in fixed positions pushed me towards messy factory layouts. I wanted a clear area to start with and create my own resources in the map editor. I also didn't like biters appearing before I set up proper perimeter and while I still had to improvise my defenses.
Safe Start and Ore Eraser came to the rescue! But I regularly came up with new strategies requiring a fresh start and had to keep clearing the ores on every new map. I also disliked how the barriers of Safe Start were permanent and made defenses obsolete, making the game too easy for my taste. So I decided to learn how to make my own mods so I could keep enemies away for a while but allow them in once I was prepared, hence the decaying barrier in this mod. And while I was modifying the spawn area, I thought I could just as well remove the ores in the same process too instead of manually.
Another thing I did on every map was covering the whole safe zone in light dirt for a consistent look. This can be done in the vanilla map editor, but was a manual task. With my new mod already combing through the spawn area modifying things, why not let it take care of that too? With the spaceship wreck removed, it's easy to lose track of the actual spawnpoint, so I wanted to mark that with another tile type. But then there were the decorative elements that served no purpose but to give the world a more diverse (also known as messy) look. I found Lawn Mower to deal with that, but again: manually, every single time I decided to start over because I learned something new. As my own mod already came so far, that should be another job for it.
At this point I was happy with it, but it took a lot of work. I figured that if I made it a little more flexible with settings instead of hardcoded values, it may be useful to others as well and provide a better return of value for the time I put in. So here it is: my very first Factorio mod available to the public! I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. And if not, learning how to add settings was still fun for me, and maybe it will come in handy if I decide to start another game yet again.
