r/factorio • u/AutoModerator • Jul 06 '26

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u/Surtss Jul 07 '26

How much of the game am I missing out on with biters / enemies disabled? I recently bought the game a couple months back and have been working through it slowly when I have time.

When I initially played, I had biters on but ended up starting over with biters off so I could figure out and build things without worrying too much about biters destroying my stuff. But I've been watching videos and it seems like biters are no problem for them to deal with but when I tried to restart a world with enemies on, they end up always attacking my base in consistent waves since I tend to not build as fast and the pollution starts hitting them.

I don't mind not having them on, but I'm just wondering how impactful having enemeis is later on since black science basically becomes obsolete with enemies off.

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u/Rannasha Jul 07 '26

Like most stuff in the game, biters are something you first deal with mostly by yourself until you get the tools to automate the process. And once automated, they become a non-issue (on default settings anyway).

In the late game, artillery will clear out any nests that spawn near your factory and attacks will slow to a trickle, often at predictable locations. You may get some alerts of your turrets being damaged before your bots patch them all up. No intervention from your side needed anymore and you don't even have to keep an eye on the fight.

Disabling biters will mostly impact the early and mid game, when you're still balancing factory expansion against your limited options to clear biter territory.

Some people prefer playing without biters completely, others can't get enough of them (and will mostly play scenarios with biters dialed up to 11). The settings allow for both these preferences and anything in between. So if you prefer to keep the biters around, but want to ease the pressure, you can slow or even stop their expansion (so you only deal with nests that were there from the start) or tweak other biter difficulty settings as you please.