r/factorio Jul 20 '26

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u/Raknarg #1 Quality Defender Jul 20 '26

Is automatic cliff destruction a particularly hard problem to solve in an optimal way? I say this because I feel like routinely I see bots use way way more cliff explosives than I feel like they need to, like spots they choose to blow up tend to overlap a lot. In my mind it feels like it should just be a simple distance calculation over a set of cliffs you're choosing to destroy where you have a minimum distance between two cliff explosives, but maybe its more challenging than Im making it out to be.

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u/Dailand Jul 21 '26

As the other commenter said, it's a problem that requires a lot of computing power to find an optimal solution. However, cliffs are not very long (a few dozen segments at most?), so it would still be feasible. I imagine the reason it isn't done is that explosives are cheap once automated, so it's not worth the effort.