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Factorio - TV Tropes

  • ️Sun Aug 20 2017

Factorio (Video Game)

Factorio is a crowdfunded top-down two-dimensional Factory-Building Game (the Trope Maker, in fact). Developed and published by Czech studio Wube Software, the game officially left Early Access with version 1.0 on August 14, 2020. A Switch port of the game was revealed during the September 2022 Nintendo Direct, releasing on October 28th of the same year, thus marking the game's debut on a console.

The framing narrative is explained in the tutorial, but is largely irrelevant in the primary Freeplay mode. The plot goes like this: You are a survivor of a spaceship that has crashed on an alien world, only to find that the planet is populated by a number of enormous and highly aggressive insectoid species that become agitated by noise and air pollution. Utilizing local materials and your own knowledge, you start building vast factories and transport networks, establishing the industrial infrastructure necessary to launch a rocket and regain spaceflight capability.

The game has both single-player and Co-Op Multiplayer modes. A demo is available on the Factorio website, with the full game available on the website, and from Steam, GOG and the Humble Store for €35/$35 (originally €30/$30). Don't wait for a sale; the developers have a policy of never discounting the game.

In February 2021, the development team announced plans to release a large DLC add-on to the base game. The expansion was revealed in August 2023 to be titled Factorio: Space Age, based on the Space Exploration mod for the gamenote . The DLC was released on October 21st, 2024, and its price is equal to the base game's. The expansion sees the Engineer use space platforms to visit four new planets to refine new resources to unlock new science packs and items, and also enables the construction of elevated rails and production of higher-quality versions of items. The release of the expansion was accompanied by a major 2.0 update to the base game with new quality of life features and improvements to the engine.

The Nintendo Directs of September 2022 revealed that a Nintendo Switch Port of the game was in the works, which was released on October 28, 2022. At present, while the 2.0 update is planned to come to the Switch port, the Space Age expansion is not due to space and hardware limitations.

Factorio provides examples of:

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Tropes A-C 

  • 2-D Space: Space Age allows the player to construct space platforms. Aside from a few items being disallowed with a Hand Wave that the gravity is too low for them to be placed on the platform, most objects that can be built on the platforms function exactly the same as they do on the surface of a planet, meaning inserters will place items on conveyor belts and they will remain in place as they roll down the line until picked up. This is particularly egregious when it comes to disposing of unwanted items from platforms, which is necessary to keep production lines from stalling; simply placing an inserter so it deposits items on an empty space will cause the item they move to be let go off and it drifts off into the cosmos, even if the inserter is positioned at the front of your space station while it is under acceleration. Fluids, gases, heat, projectiles fired from weapons, all function the same way they do on a planet as well.
  • Ability Required to Proceed:
    • Completing the fourth mission of the tutorial demands you build a car, which requires engine units. The reason this is notable over other required technologies or items is because the engine unit is the first item the player will encounter that can't be built by hand — if you haven't already, this means you have no choice but to have assembly machines make engine units for you, and in turn this makes sure the player has at least attempted to build an automated production line before progressing them to the last mission.
    • In Space Age, large asteroids can only be reliably destroyed with explosives, necessitating the installation of rocket turrets on your space platform to travel to Aquilo, which in turn requires conquering Gleba first to produce agricultural science packs. Similarly, only railgun turrets can deal with the huge asteroids you'll encounter en route to the shattered planet beyond the edge of the solar system, and unlocking railgun tech requires dealing with Aquilo's tech tree first.
  • Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
    • You can craft things by hand while continuing to move around, and can even mine resources with your pickaxe and shoot at biters while the item continues to be crafted. Logically you would think that crafting circuit boards or robot arm inserters would require some precision and dexterity, but having to hold still while crafting them would just make the game slower, especially in the early game when you don't have automation yet. Relatedly, certain bread-and-butter items such as power lines can be crafted on the spot pretty trivially if you have all the necessary ingredients, even when it should realistically require a couple hours of work to make overhead power lines.
    • Steam is treated as a fluid, ergo it is transported via pipelines and can be stored in fluid tanks and transported in fluid train cars to be saved and used to power engines and turbines as needed later. Once produced, steam will remain at a consistent temperature, rather than cooling or condensing back into water, as logically it should. Needing to monitor steam temperature and drain away condensate would add a layer of complexity to the game's fluid and nuclear power generation mechanics (both of which are already pretty complicated) without really adding anything to the gameplay, so presumably this is the reason players don't need to worry about their steam cooling. This is actually averted with the Space Age expansion, where a new recipe does allow you to condense steam back into water, but it has to be processed at a chemical plant instead of occurring naturally.
    • A lot of things that you would think would require electric power — conveyor belts, splitters, water pumps, etc — don't need to be powered in-game, because doing so would add a layer of further complexity and annoyance: a demand of pumping water without electricity to get your first boilers going.
    • The flow of electricity is greatly simplified compared to real life; there's no transmission losses, no need to manage frequency or voltage, and no worries about overloads, heat, or short circuits causing damage. Simply connect components with power poles and they just work. Meanwhile the real-life convenient feature of electrical generation, where the generation rate automatically scales to match the load on the system, up to its capacity, is kept.
    • Logistics robots will continue to move very slowly once they run out of power. Of course, this is so that if a robot is caught outside a logistics network, it can eventually make its way back to your character or a roboport to recharge. Since the logical alternative is that powerless bots would just drop to the ground useless and either be destroyed or need to be picked up, this feature is not minded. Relatedly, Burner Inserters are capable of picking up coal to fuel themselves, even when from a logical standpoint they shouldn't be powered for not having coal in them.
    • Realistically, changing the output item of an Assembling Machine would be an incredibly time-consuming process involving bespoke parts for whatever is being made; for example, iron plates would need to be cast into their shape and then trimmed, while copper wire would be extruded from a wire-shaped hole. The game simplifies it to just clicking the button of whatever item is desired, which makes them more of a Matter Replicator than their Diesel Punk design suggests but is very convenient to play around.
    • The Kovarex process is a scientifically simplified version of the 'breeder reactor' process that is used in real life to enrich uranium to make it concentrated enough to be used as nuclear fuel. There's supposed to be a lot more going on to control and regulate the reaction process, but in Factorio this is simplified into an automated centrifuge process that takes two isotopes of uranium and processes it to make more fuel-grade isotopes, all so players wouldn't need to create a complicated and heavily wired setup to run a real-world-accurate breeder process.
    • The game only tracks air pollution produced by your buildings as they work; critically, if your buildings are destroyed by bugs, stuff like oil pipes and nuclear reactors won't spill their contents to cause more pollution. This is to stop a potential feedback loop of "bugs destroy your stuff, causing pollution, which irritates the bugs more and causes them to destroy more of your stuff".
    • The planets in Space Age are all much, much closer to one another than they would be in any real planetary system.note  Given the alternative would require waiting literal hours or even days in real time for your space platforms to travel between planets, therefore making space logistics completely impractical, this concession is perfectly understandable.
  • After the End: One of the planets the player can visit in Space Age, Fulgora, was once home to an advanced civilization that built enormous cities and learned to either protect from or even harness the lightning that bombards the planet every night. By the time the player arrives, all that's left is a wasteland strewn with the sprawling ruins of those cities that the player can salvage and recycle into usable materials.
  • Alien Sea: In Space Age, Fulgora has oceans of heavy oil that are thick enough to walk across, and Aquilo is a whole ocean planet of liquid ammonia, which is required for cryogenic research.
  • All There in the Script: The planet Factorio begins on is called Nauvis. Prior to Space Age, the only place one would see that name was inside the game's code and the map editor. With the DLC, the name is featured prominently to distinguish it from the other four planets.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • Offshore water pumps don't require power, never run dry, and you can even apply landfill over them to turn them into water wells tapping an underground water source.
    • Inserters are usually limited to moving items exclusively from one tile to the one on the other side, but Burner Inserters can also use their mechanical arm to refuel themselves if there's fuel available on the belt. Additionally, when placed they come with a few seconds of unexplainable fuel reserve so they can grab their first piece of fuel without needing to be kickstarted through manual fueling. Further, despite being a burner device it doesn't produce pollution, so if you go a while without electricity they won't affect your pollution output.
    • When a train runs out of fuel, it's automatically set to manual mode, ensuring it can be fueled up fully instead of just zooming off again once a single piece of coal is loaded into it.
    • Biters and Spitters will not intentionally attack anything that does not produce pollution or is under the combat category when traveling or guarding nests. This means you don't have to worry about your railroads, pipe networks or conveyor belts suddenly getting chewed up by a biter expansion force.
    • Biters and Spitters will eventually despawn if left alone long enough. This not only helps with CPU strain on sufficiently long, large games, but it also makes artillery turrets a much more reliable way to clear out enemies, since they only target immobile nests and worms.
    • Roboports start off with a minuscule auxiliary power charge to help define their logistics and construction zone before they start drawing power from your grid.
    • Underground Belts and Splitters can be directly placed over existing Belts, replacing them, thus making it easier to retrofit or expand existing infrastructure without needing to remove all of the old belts by hand. Running a belt over pre-existing belts will also automatically convert the section that overlaid the previous belt into an underground belt, if you have them in your inventory and the distance is short enough for it to reach.
    • Power Armor-mounted Personal Roboports automatically disable themselves and stop launching drones if the player is driving a vehicle or running at sufficient speed, to prevent drones from launching to do tasks the player passes along the way and then get left behind because they can't move fast enough to catch up.
    • Since the 2.0 update, fluids no longer lose pressure over large distances, improving their base output and cutting down the infrastructure needed to maintain larger setups.
    • If a Space Age space platform runs out of fuel between planets, it'll slowly drift to the closer one on its own. It can take a long time for it to finally arrive if this happens, but at least it will arrive eventually instead of being lost to the void.
    • Fulgora's lightning strikes cannot damage locomotives, rails, and associated equipment. Otherwise it would be impossible to transport scrap across the oil oceans.
    • In Space Age, Molten Iron and Molten Copper do not damage or melt the iron pipes you can send it through en-route to the smelter, thus saving you the need to make Steel or better piping to transfer molten liquids.
  • Anti-Structure: The artillery turret and wagon, added in 0.16, will only target spawners and worms, destroying them in one shot. You can manually set targets for them outside of their automatic attack range, but hitting a fast-moving bug with the slow-to-react artillery is more trouble than it's worth. They're also useful for besieging other players' bases in PvP, as their range allows them to sit out of radar vision range and snipe away at enemy defensive fortifications or turrets.
  • Arbitrary Equipment Restriction: Several in Space Age.
    • Only one cargo landing pad can be built on each planet, with no in-game reason given as to why; the devs have stated that it is to prevent using rockets, space platforms, and drop pods to completely dispense with any sort of ground-side logistics and just ship stuff "instantly" from one end of a huge base to another, via space. Considering that one can only put so many inserters next to a landing pad, especially if it's been upgraded with additional cargo depots, this can make importing items and distributing them throughout large bases complicated.
    • Cargo limitations for each item were clearly done with care for balance rather than logic. Thrusters, asteroid collectors, and production facilities, can all be fit onto a rocket in multiples, but an atomic bomb (which is small enough to fire from your handheld rocket launcher) is "too heavy" to be transported by rocket. Less egregiously, a rocket can carry up to a thousand plates of Iron or Copper, but only 50 power poles or wooden crates.
    • Space platform thrusters have an asymmetrical input layout for their two fuel types, and these thrusters are among the very few entities in the game that can't be flipped, forcing the construction of convoluted pipe networks to supply them. This was done by the devs to force players to come up with creative ship designs with different engine configurations.
    • Traveling between planets requires dropping all carried items except armor and weapons, but including any equipped ammo. This is meant to force players to build up new ammo assembly lines from scratch on each planet because, considering a rocket's cargo capacity of one ton, logically there should be plenty of room for ammo in the capsule alongside the player.
    • Several new liquids and gases cannot be barreled, in contrast to the base game where all liquids could be barreled. While this makes sense in some cases (trying to put molten lava or plasma with a temperature in the seven-digit range into a barrel would be a bad idea), in others it's purely to prevent a player from mass-exporting barreled product from one planet, and thus any recipes that need it have to be crafted on a specific planet.
  • Arbitrary Weapon Range:
    • The Player Character has one with how close they need to be to a tile to take, construct, or deconstruct something on it.
    • All guns have a range, but unfortunately, none but the humble grenade show it on screen. This often leads to large amounts of wasted tank cannon shells before players learn to estimate their tank's cannon range better.
    • A particularly strange example is the combat shotgun, which has a longer range (20 tiles) than the submachine gun (18 tiles) for reasons unknown.
    • The artillery turret/wagon also has a maximum range, but it's so huge that it's rarely an issue after you've expanded into a new region. There's also an infinitely repeatable research option that adds 100% of the standard range apiece.
    • The handheld flamethrower, the flamethrower turret, and both artillery pieces can't shoot at targets too close to them. Strangely, the tank-mounted flamer works differently (it seems to shoot burning gas instead of a liquid) and thus averts this.
    • In Space Age, all the turrets on space platforms should have a vastly increased, if not nearly unlimited effective range due to the absence of gravity and atmospheric effects on their projectiles, but they can shoot no farther than they would on a planet's surface.
  • Art Evolution: The initial release of the game had a very cartoony art style, such as the original model for the car being a Cadillac Eldorado with clown-car proportions. As development went on, the art style was refined into the Diesel Punk-esque aesthetic.
  • Artificial Brilliance: Turrets know exactly how many shots they need to neutralize any given target, and even multiple turrets firing on the same target will virtually never waste a single shot on overkill.
  • Artificial Stupidity: Logistics robots streamline construction and transportation of materials a lot, but are not very efficient at it.
    • Logistic robots will pick cargo even if there isn't room in the logistics network to store it, and then will hover in place since they have nowhere to go. This isn't limited to types of items, but quantities as well - if a requester chest is meant to stockpile 100 iron plates and is down to 99, a logistics robot will fly to a storage chest, pick up more than one plate, deliver one of them, and then if they're not able to take the leftovers to storage, they'll remain in place holding onto their cargo until you make room for them to unload it.
    • Construction bots will deconstruct and construct objects arbitrarily, instead of some sort of logical pattern like in a radius outward or top-to-bottom. This means that moving while letting bots construct things around you is hit-or-miss, because you'll move out of the radius of stuff they haven't built yet. If you order them to build a blueprint over top of pre-existing objects, necessitating the deconstruction of the latter, the issue compounds as the two sets of orders overlap: you'll end up with robots trying to place objects before the object in their way is cleared, and they'll hover in place waiting for the obstruction to be removed; and if there isn't storage space for what's being removed, robots will remove it and then hover in place. Bots will also always bring an object back to storage before using it for construction, so even if you're just moving something left one tile, every single object has to be picked up, stored, and then placed down again.
    • Large and behemoth biters and spitters will occasionally get stuck pathing through especially thick forests and rock clusters. If they can't figure a way through after a couple of seconds, they'll resort to attacking the offending tree/rock.
  • Ascended Glitch: Paving over an offshore pump's water source with landfill does not stop it from generating water. This was not only not fixed, but such a pump is renamed by the game into a "water well" to underscore that this is intended behavior.
  • Asteroids Monster: Pentapod Stompers and Strafers when killed unleash a small group of Wrigglers.
    • Larger asteroids split into smaller ones upon destruction.
  • Asteroid Thicket: Once you've gotten rockets up and into space, fighting your way through endless waves of asteroids becomes your primary threat in moving materials (or people!) from one planet to another. It's not all bad, though. You can outfit your space platforms with big grabby tentacles that can snatch smaller asteroids from the debris of larger destroyed asteroids, and crushers to refine those asteroid chunks into usable resources. The trick comes in finding a balance between a space platform's ability to defend itself from asteroids, ability to feed itself with captured asteroids, ability to counterthrust against the size of the platform that houses these facilities, and ability to actually power all of the above.
  • Attack! Attack! Attack!: Whenever alerted, creatures will always seek to do battle with the engineer or turrets, never once thinking about turning tail. They only stop when either they are killed, or whatever they're attacking is killed/destroyed.
  • Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!: One of the Attract Mode demos shows the player chasing a single Biter across the screen and out of the frame...only to come back into frame pursued by an entire swarm of them.
  • Attack Drone: The player can make capsules that release flying robot minions. Some follow the player, others stay put to distract enemies.
  • Attract Mode: The game's title screen shows demos of gameplay at various levels of completion, complexity, and efficiency.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • Using the train to plow through enemies. The train takes next to no damage and can easily squish the largest of bugs, but it's not always easy getting enemies to nicely line up along the railway tracks as they do in some of the trailers. The only real use for it is minimizing defenses on bridges. Well... that is, unless you do this.
    • Refined concrete provides the highest movement speed bonus to the Engineer of any tile, and as the name implies has an aesthetically pleasing look of smooth, cut bricks. However, manufacturing refined concrete requires twice the amount of normal concrete, a unit of steel, and eight iron bars, making it a substantial investment of iron product to mass produce. By contrast, normal concrete just needs stone brick and a single nugget of iron ore (and produces twice as much concrete as the stone brick required, to boot). This is averted in Space Age, where several items require Refined concrete including artillery, elevated rails, and many new production facilities exclusive to other planets, so the player has no choice but to mass produce it if they want to partake.
    • Nuclear bombs are great for annihilating the massive late-game biter nests and always a blast to use, but it needs a huge amount of the game's rarest resource (Uranium-235) plus a bunch of additional resource-intensive stuff to build even one. When you finally have one, actually using it has a good chance to get yourself killed if you fail to notice that the blast radius is significantly larger than the rocket launcher's maximum range. It's usually a lot safer, cheaper and easier to tackle these bases with turrets and a train pulling one or two artillery wagons plus ammo supply. Likewise, after the changes to the tech tree in the Space Age expansion, they are actually one of the few ways to demolish cliffs without travelling to another planet, as cliff explosives now require research with science packs acquired elsewhere. However this is a lot more expensive and dangerous compared to simply building around them, going under them with underground belts or going over them with elevated rails.
    • Uranium-enriched Rocket Fuel has tremendously densely-packed energy at 1.21 GJ per full tank, but the amount of power spent to refine the uranium and petrochemicals (and thus the solid fuel and then rocket fuel), in addition to the increased amount of pollution it releases into the environment when used, makes it less efficient than simply using regular rocket fuel; the final nail in the coffin is that unlike regular Rocket Fuel that can be loaded in bulk at 20 tanks per stack, nuclear rocket fuel takes up a full slot per single tank, making it less viable for long-distance vehicle fuel due to how much additional bulk in storage a stable stockpile requires.
    • The Space Age expansion adds Quality items, which have superior stats to their normal counterparts. This is achieved by putting Quality Modules in a machine, giving them a chance to output an item with higher quality. High quality items can be absurdly powerful, with huge boosts to production speed, power generation, storage space, fuel value, etc. However, actually implementing Quality in your factory is a horrible idea, because no matter how high the Quality chance a machine has, it is still only a chance, there's no way to ensure steady production of Quality raw materials no matter what combination of facilities you utilize. Machines will only utilize item with the same Quality level as their recipe, so having random Quality plates on a belt of Iron will eventually lead to back-up and your factory stalling. Quality is only useful in isolated, small production lines where you're trying to farm specific items in higher Quality, and you'll likely end up using the Recycler from Fulgora to "brute force" the mechanic by continuously recycling the lower-Quality items you don't need, which will result in thousands and thousands of wasted items eaten by the Recycler.
    • Tier 3 Productivity modules become this in the Space Age expansion. The other Tier 3 modules require an additional new resource produced on the new planets (save for Efficiency, as Spoilage can be acquired on Nauvis too). However, Productivity modules require Biter Eggs, and farming them is quite a bit more challenging, requiring you to research technology to capture Biter nests and then using Capture Bots to do so. Building Capture Bots and feeding captured nests to produce eggs requires Bioflux, which must be imported from Gleba, and then Biter Eggs are only produced by the captured nest for as long as they're fed, once the food runs out they stop producing eggs and eventually revert to an enemy structure that spawns biters again. This makes steady production of Tier 3 Productivity modules more difficult than the others, requiring micromanagement from the player and a steady supply of Bioflux from Gleba. By contrast, Tier 2 Production modules only require circuits as usual, and with sufficient Quality can give good bonuses to Production in their own right comparable to lower-quality Tier 3s.note 
  • Bag of Holding: Given both the large number of inventory slots and items stacking, it's not hard to fit an entire locomotive and several cargo wagons with plenty of space to spare. Research options and powered armor further extend your inventory so that you can easily carry hundreds of metal plates and chunks of coal, and still have room to carry enough inserters, furnaces, and assemblers to significantly expand your factory. However, travelling to space requires you to offload your entire inventory including ammo (only the equipped guns and armor are allowed). This is to prevent bypassing the rocket capacity mechanic that only allows a limited quantity of items to be taken into space with every launch.
  • Balance Buff: Efficiency modules, considered generally inferior to Speed and Productivity modules in the base game, are more useful in Space Age. Space platforms can be very energy hungry and power production is trickier (either you use solar, which has lower efficiency beyond Nauvis, or you use nuclear or fusion, which need fuel cells), so lowering their power consumption can be a huge benefit. Beacons now transmit their inserted module's effect at base 150% efficacy (higher for Quality beacons), allowing even a single low-tier Efficiency module to be of considerable benefit to multiple machines. Efficiency not only affects power consumption, but also Nutrient consumption, making them useful on Gleba so your Biochambers don't burn through your Nutrient supplies too quickly. Finally, all Tier 3 modules require a fourth item to produce now, and Efficiency's is Spoilage, which is far easier to farm than the tungsten, biter eggs, and superconductors needed for other Tier 3 modules, so it's fairly easy to unlock Tier 3 Efficiency modules with an early visit to Gleba and start mass production of them on Nauvis without needing to import materials from other planets.
  • Beam Spam: Defensive lines composed primarily of laser turrets will produce this every time a biter breaches the perimeter. Equipping multiple personal laser defence modules on the player character has a similar effect.
  • Beef Gate: Expansion on Vulcanus is limited only by Demolishers, gigantic lava worms that will mow down anything you build in their territory, and are also absolute juggernauts that require massive amounts of damage per second to outpace their incredibly fast Healing Factor, and on top of this can create swarms of lava cones around you and dust clouds that slow down vehicles and damage drones. Fortunately, once killed, their turf is is all yours to safely build upon.
  • BFG:
    • Nothing stops you from loading your personal rocket launcher with nuclear warheads. However, this is the very definition of Awesome, but Impractical, since you're pretty much guaranteed to kill yourself with it unless you have a power armor equipped with enough exoskeleton modules to outrun the blast.
    • The more powerful a turret, the bigger it is, although even the basic 2x2 gun and laser turrets are pretty huge already when compared to the presumably human-sized Player Character. The rocket turret occupies 3x3 tiles, the tesla turret 4x4, and the railgun turret has a massive 3x5 footprint. The latter is so enormous that, unlike any other turret, it can't fully rotate and is thus restricted to a fairly narrow firing arc.
  • Big Creepy-Crawlies: Nothing but. Even the "small" bugs are the size of a man. Big bugs are the size of a dump truck and can shrug off high-explosive rockets. Behemoth bugs are large enough to dwarf trees, boilers, and small power poles. Pentapod Strafers are larger than most buildings and Stompers are as big as the rocket silo!
  • Black Box: Science packs. It's unknown exactly what they are or why they require the components they do, or how they make your labs run and research new technology for you. All that is clear is that somehow you can combine an electric furnace, a production module, and 30 units of rails, to create a set of Production Science Packs. The best that can be said is that each type of science pack has a theme in its components, and the requirements for each technology usually line up with those components (e.g., Military Science Packs are made of combat-associated materials and are needed for combat-associated research).
  • Boss in Mook Clothing: Demolishers are absolutely giant worms, native to Vulcanus. Unlike Biters, Spitters, or Pentapods, Demolishers do not have nests to spawn from, but instead a single one patrols a set territory marked on the map. Demolishers are ungodly tough, and completely No-Sell lasers, fire and impact type damage, largely resist all other damage types except poison, and have a crazy powerful Healing Factor. They also instantly destroy any building or vehicle that is in their path. Finally their movement generates dust clouds that shorts out your armor, and creates lava plumes that you must dodge. Thankfully, once killed, they don't respawn.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • Walls. In the early game, they only cost you smelted stone bricks to produce, allowing you to block vital structures off from biters and keep turrets from being damaged while they shoot at said biters. Once you progress to flamethrower turrets, you can then transition to using walls to create hedgehog's teeth barriers and delaying mazes, allowing you to fence in and slow down biters and spitters while the flamethrowers light them up.
    • Steel Furnaces are one of the first Steel technologies you'll unlock, and they'll be the backbone of your production until the endgame when you begin transitioning to Electric Furnaces; they're small, easy to keep fueled, and easy to produce with a handful of Steel and Stone Brick. Electric Furnaces are only more effective once you have modules to increase their output and a large enough power grid to sustain them.
    • Coal is one of the game's most basic resources and will be useful throughout the game. Early on it's your best source of fuel for burner devices like furnaces and the only fuel source you can mine (trees need to be chopped down manually and you don't have oil production yet for solid fuel). Later on it's required to produce Plastic, which is required in some manner for a lot of end-game items, and once you unlock Coal Liquefaction it can be diverted to your oil supply to drastically boost its output. Patches of coal to mine also tend to be found more often and in more dense patches than other resources, so you can easily expand your supply lines to meet your factory's demand for it.
    • Efficiency Modules. Compared to getting products built at lightning speed, making higher quality items, or getting extra products for free, reducing a machine's power consumption seems boring. Unlike speed or productivity modules however, there is no downside to putting them in your machines, and they both directly and indirectly reduce pollution generation by reducing a machine's pollution output and reducing power grid strain respectively. Especially important for space platforms where adding power generation also adds weight to the platform and therefore reducing power consumption is a better choice. Efficiency modules also help reduce the nutrient hungry biochamber's consumption rate, so you don't need to dedicate as much nutrients to keep your biochambers running.
  • Car Fu: The car and tank will plow through anything in their way, though the car is damaged in the process. The train, on the other hand, will gleefully plow through an entire swarm of bugs - or you - without breaking a sweat.
    • Subsequently acknowledged with two achievements; one for being killed by a speeding train, and another for surviving 500 points of damage delivered in a single hit... which usually happens by standing in the path of a train.note 
  • Casual Interplanetary Travel: Developing, designing and constructing a fully autonomous space platform is no trivial task, but once complete it can serve as an interplanetary shuttle similar to a huge train without any further support or supervision on the player's part. It's also the means by which the player themself can easily and quickly travel between planets. That said, getting back on the platform from a newly settled planet is a different kettle of fish, since you basically need to start over from scratch until you can build and feed a new rocket silo.
  • Chain Lightning: Tesla weapons have a chance to chain their lightning discharge from one target to another one nearby, up to a maximum of 10 targets per shot, making them highly effective against swarms of weaker enemies.
  • Changing Gameplay Priorities: There are a number of distinct phases that the player tends to experience on starting a new game:
    • At the start, the player has nothing but a pistol, burner mining drill and stone furnace, and the gameplay feels a lot like a Survival Sandbox. Everything must be handcrafted and all the factory buildings are directly powered by burning wood or coal. Since the player has no mass production of belts or inserters yet, often these machines must be fueled and loaded with materials by hand, leading to a lot of running back and forth between mineral patches and various machines. If aliens are encountered, the player will likely have to see them off with their own personal weapons.
    • Once the player has electrical power, assemblers, and science labs unlocked, the game focuses much more on automation and expansion. They'll still have to manually build the factory, but once built it will automatically do whatever it's designed for as long as it's powered and the raw materials keep coming in—those themselves being automatically mined and delivered. Defense can now start to be automated, with belts delivering ammo from factories to automated turrets behind mass-produced walls. And the player can also start to go on the offensive with cars and tanks.
    • The next big gameplay change comes with the unlocking of logistics and construction robots, and the ability to save designs as blueprints. Now the player can just design a part of the factory once, and the bots will build it for them, as well as keep the player supplied with materials. The player doesn't like an old part of the factory? Bots will tear it down and build a new one with a better design. Accidentally build in the wrong spot? Cut, paste, copy. Want to upgrade or downgrade? Bots can do that for you. And with the construction of remote-controlled Spidertrons, construction, offense, and defense can all be done remotely.
    • Around this time, modules (which upgrade your machines to work faster, produce extra, or use less power) and beacons (which transmit module effects to nearby machines) can radically change a factory's layout. Before, the only way to produce things faster was to build more or higher-tier machines, leading to sprawling sub-factories dedicated to only a few items. With beacons and modules whose effects stack, each individual machine can now potentially work much faster and produce much more, leading to much more compact but much more resource-hungry factory layouts. This shift isn't mandatory, you can "beat" the game with out modules and beacons, but there's a lot of potential there.
    • In Space Age, the player must start building space platforms and travel to different planets to exploit their resources, while at the same time making sure that the factories on all the other planets and space platforms are still functioning correctly. This requires making sure that robust infrastructure is left in place for automated construction for any adjustments while the player is away, as well as defense where applicable. Space platforms must also be set up to deliver items between planets, as some items have restrictions where they can be crafted, but afterwards they can be used on other planets.
    • Each planet in Space Age has unique resources and resource limitations, as well as different enemies and environmental conditions, so the player must adapt their playstyle with every new planetfall. Moreover, to personally land on a planet the player must empty their inventory, though a limited number of items can be dropped from orbit with them. Depending on how well they've prepared, they may temporarily revert back to the early automation phase of the game, just this time with different machines and processes, until the factory gets fully spun up again with regular trips to the other planets.
    • Finally, once the player has "beaten" the game, the goal shifts from making a factory that is merely functional to making one that is very large, and (possibly) elegantly designed. Once the whole tech tree is completed, there is a set of technologies that are infinitely reserarchable, so many players just set the goal of hitting a specific, large, science per minute (SPM). 1000 SPM is a common goal, but much higher is still possible. The limit on factory size often comes down to the performance limitations of the player's computer rather than anything else—leading to lots of designs optimized for using fewer computer resources over every other consideration, in order to make the factory just that little bit bigger.
  • Collision Damage:
    • The car and especially the tank will deal damage to anything you run into, including your buildings and yourself if you aren't careful. This can be exploited with the tank by using its massive inertia to quickly clear a path through dense forests, and also to One-Hit Kill spawners if you bump into them at full speed.
    • With Space Age, this is the major threat posed by the Asteroid Thicket you need to punch through every time you travel between planets. If an asteroid collides with your platform, it deals damage equal to its remaining hitpoints to anything in its path until its health bar is depleted, and even medium asteroids have much more health than multiple layers of walls and turrets combined. An undamaged large or huge asteroid hitting your platform in line with the platform's central hub is almost guaranteed to end in the platform's destruction, so you better have solid defenses in place before you launch.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: A lot of this occurs. With a massive factory moving thousands of products a second, easy recognition helps a lot. Yellow, red, green, blue, purple, grey/black, and white are utilized all over to differentiate between things that would otherwise be hard to tell apart.
    • Many items use yellow for the lowest tier, red for the second, and blue or green for the third: conveyor belts, ballistic ammunition, assembly machines, and inserters. The latter adds grey as a "tier 0" burner inserter which is even slower than the basic yellow, and also has the green inserter beyond blue which moves just as quickly and can pick up multiple items at once. The blue and green inserters have variants colored purple and white, respectively, which add the functionality to filter the items they pick up.
    • While the player is free to recolor them as they like, by default trains and train stops are red, and the Engineer and their vehicles are yellow.
    • All uranium ore, centrifuges, and nuclear reactors glow green to signify their use of nuclear technology, and even depleted uranium ammunition, nuclear-enriched rocket fuel, and atomic rockets are coloured green. (In reality, uranium can come in many colours, and reactors would glow blue due to Cherenkov radiation, but the developers decided to make all the nuclear stuff green for player convenience.)
    • The three tiers of computer chips are colored green, red and blue. Modules are colored green for efficiency, red for productivity, blue for speed and white with red lights for quality. Space Age adds a fourth tier that use a different icon, but sticks to the color scheme by being purple.
    • The planets of the Space Age expansion are each associated with a color, which is reflected by their general aesthetic, the design of their uniqur buildings and resources, and their associated science pack. Vulcanus, the volcanic planet where you get the Huge Mining Drill and Foundry, is red and orange; Gleba, the agricultural planet with Tree Planters and the Biochamber, is green; Fulgora, with its lightning storms and alien ruins, is purple: and Aquilo, the oceanic ice planet where you get the Cryochamber, is dark blue.
    • All raw resources are different colors that show up on the map for quick recognition: silver-blue (iron), bronze-orange (copper), black (coal), dull beige (stone), green (uranium), and purple (oil). Space Age adds in sulfuric geysers (bright yellow), tungsten (purple), calcite (white), fluorine (light blue), and lithium brine (lime green).
    • All liquids are uniquely colored to allow for easy identification, and the game helpfully adds windows to every other pipe segment so you can actually see what's in there. Water is blue, crude oil is dark grey, heavy oil is reddish-brown, light oil is golden yellow, petroleum gas is purple, lubricant is green, sulfuric acid is lime-yellow, and steam is white. Space Age adds thruster fuel (bright orange), thruster oxidizer (bright blue), lava (bright orange), molten iron (blue), molten copper (dull orange), holmium solution (pink), electrolytes (purple), ammonia (dark blue), flourine (teal), lithium brine (white), and fluoroketone (aqua, with a red outline if it's hot).
    • The five types of logistics chests are colored red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Science packs are colored red, green, grey, blue, purple, yellow, and white, with Space Age adding orange, magenta, lime, dark blue and even darker blue.
    • Blueprints are colored blue, red, or green, depending if they're construction, deconstruction, or upgrade plans.
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Pointedly averted with the Space Age expansion. Each planet has unique mechanics that significantly change how you gather and refine resources, in addition to introducing new buildings you must integrate into your factory to produce new items unlocked on that planet, and unique types of environmental hazards. This means that veteran players can't simply reuse the same layouts they've gotten used to on Nauvis, and will have to come up with new factory designs to tackle each planet's challenges.
  • Cool Car: The handbuilt car is fast, agile, can run on anything that burns and can ram into trees without taking significant damage. The original sprite used to look vaguely like a Chevrolet Bel Air, or a squashed Cadillac.
  • Cool Train: The train engine is fairly snazzy in terms of appearance and it will become the backbone for any large factory once local mineral deposits are depleted. Late in the game it can even be weaponized by hooking up an artillery wagon and using it to blast away bug nests.
  • Creator Cameo: Of sorts. The Kovarex Enrichment Process tech is named after the online nickname of Michal Kovařík, the game's lead developer.
  • Creepy Cockroach: The aforementioned Big Creepy-Crawlies often resemble swarms of giant cockroaches.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: Compared to the other high-level weaponry you can unlock in Space Age, the handheld railgun and railgun turrets are practical for only two things - protecting your space platforms from huge asteroids, and destroying Demolishers on Vulcanus. While it can be satisfying to watch them effortlessly obliterate rows of bugs with a single shot, their very low rate of fire and limited turning radius makes them rather ineffective against large swarms. There's also the small issue of them also obliterating anything in their line of fire, your own structures included, thus the turrets have to be placed front and center where they will be vulnerable to attack, and the player has to be extremely careful of where they're pointing their railgun lest they end up doing more damage than the enemy would have done.
  • Cruelty Is the Only Option:
    • In versions up to 0.14, during peaceful mode, the bugs stay in their nests and never attack your factory. However, you still have to attack the nests in order to get alien artifacts necessary to craft top-tier items and to win the game. Some Game Mods avert this by adding other ways to make the artifacts. Averted as of 0.15, where alien artifacts were removed, so clearing nests is only necessary for expansion. In Space Age, destroying or capturing enemy nests is once again necessary to produce some of the late-game items including science packs, however there is a "no enemies" mode that keeps the spawners without them actually spawning anything (this mode does disable some achievements).

Tropes D-L 

  • Deadly Gas: Poison Capsules disperse a toxic blue gas that quickly saps away the health of biters, spitters, worms and players inside the area of effect. They are EXTREMELY effective at killing worms, on the account of their immobility, but cannot damage spawners themselves. Biters and Spitters can quickly exit the area of effect, but a synergistic slowdown capsule can keep them inside the area to slowly suffocate to death.
  • Death from Above: Late-game military research unlocks giant artillery pieces for bombarding biter nests at extreme range. Anyone looking for even worse methods of raining devastation down on the biters may find mods that introduce aircraft or even the GDI's Orbital Ion Cannon much to their liking.
  • Death World:
    • 0.15 adds a world-generation setting that is explicitly labeled as such, which increases the growth rate and aggression of the Biters and Spitters while making pollution spread further more easily.
    • All the new planets that were introduced with the Space Age expansion are various degrees of hostile to human life, with the starter planet Nauvis and its aggressive insectoid natives suddenly becoming downright homey by comparison.
      • Vulcanus is a Lethal Lava Land of jagged black rock and huge pools of molten lava. The game doesn't simulate ambient temperature, but given the planet's rabid volcanism and its proximity to the system's central star, it's bound to be unbearably hot. It's also home to a species of gargantuan, fiercely territorial centipedes/worms that make short work of anyone dumb enough to disturb them.
      • Fulgora is a vast collection of small island dotted across an endless ocean of heavy oil. The sky unleashes violent thunderstorms every night that pummel the ground with deadly lightning strikes, and the air is apparently cold enough that what little water there is to be found is always frozen. Fulgora used to host an advanced alien civilization a long time ago, but the fact that they're gone now and left nothing but crumbling ruins behind imply that either this world wasn't all that nice to them as well or its current state is a result of said civilization polluting themselves to extinction.
      • Gleba is a cross between a Bubblegloop Swamp and a Hungry Jungle full of vaguely crustacean alien monsters that don't take kindly to intruders.
      • Aquilo is an ocean planet, but one so far away from the sun (and thus so cold) that its seas consist of liquid ammonia, and the only solid surfaces are drifting icebergs.
  • Denser and Wackier: The Renai Transportation mod adds various ridiculous ways of transporting yourself and items across your factory, most notably inserters that throw items around like catapults (and hatches for your machines to catch them), bounce pads for said items to go even further, and train ramps for trains to jump over obstacles. It also lets you use your power lines as ziplines.
  • Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: Has the Trope Namer in-game, manufactured much in the same way as in the real world from a byproduct of enriching uranium for fission reactors.
  • Developer's Foresight:
    • Several achievements, like the ones requiring the player not to build any solar panels or laser turrets, cannot be gotten on a particular save if the bugs are set to "Peaceful".
      • Likewise, these achievements have an in-game notification that not only tells you when they've been achieved in that run, but when you've missed the marker for them to save you time on restarting.
    • If big rocks and trees are "mined" by hand, the game will not count the resources attained towards hand-produced items, as otherwise the "Lazy Bastard" achievement would be impossible to get.
    • Inserters placed by the waterside are able to grab any fish that swim into their grasp. Conversely, you can drop a stack of five fish (since you catch them in stacks of five) into water and this will release them.
    • If you get your hands on a production machine before you research the technology to craft it, like when playing a modded game or a scenario, it won't be as helpful as you think; because of how the tech tree is designed, the machine won't have any crafting recipes to assign it until you research one. This also extends to stack inserters, which have the same capacity as normal inserters until you research stack inserters yourself.
    • Space Age implements a Quality system that improves the capabilities of higher-quality products and items. In the lategame, access to the biotech of Gleba allows players to process Biter Eggs on Nauvis. When Quality Modules are added to the process equations, it becomes possible to create quality Biters by allowing quality Biter eggs to hatch, and have them spawn into quality Biter nests.
    • When dropping resources from a space platform in Space Age, you're expected to have a cargo bay for the delivery rocket to land in. But if you demolish the cargo bay after calling down a supply drop, the rocket will land in the approximate location the cargo bay was, and you can still grab its contents once it lands safely. If you don't have a cargo bay at all, you can still drop resources from a space platform, and they'll land in the vicinity of the initial landing zone you landed in when you first came to the planet.
  • Diesel Punk / Steampunk: The most common power source are enormous inline 3-cylinder steam engines. Factories are dirty and puff out steam and smoke, and almost everything runs on coal or oil.
  • Diminishing Returns for Balance: Beacons were changed in 2.0. Instead of applying 50% of their module's effects to nearby machines, they now apply 150% of their modules effects (at base common quality). However each beacon after the first that affects a machine will reduce the effects of all other beacons that are amplifying the machine in question.
  • Disk One Nuke: Grenades are unlocked relatively early on, are rather cheap (only costing 1 iron plate and 1 coal) and a single one of them can take out an entire wave of biters early on. By the time the player does reach the point that they need multiple grenades to take out a biter, they'll usually have gotten more powerful weapons unlocked.
    • The Flamethrower can (basically) instantly kill small and medium biters/spitters, melts big biters/spitters and can raze spawners and worms in seconds. Its only real shortcoming is its lack of range. Flame patches left on the ground can burn for quite a bit, depending on how long you spent firing at the ground. This lets you use it as area denial, or hit and run on enemy bases. Get in, spray a bit on worms and spawners, back out and watch them melt away. The flamethrower technology only requires automation, logistic and military science packs which can be acquired within the first 2 hours of the game.
  • Difficult, but Awesome: The nature of the game itself makes it easy to learn yet hard to truly master, and you'll constantly be rethinking your factory's layout, power grid, and infrastructure as you build bigger and bigger and look for ways to make things more efficient. Not for nothing do some players in the community joke about "The factory expanding to meet the needs of the expanding factory".
    • A thorough understanding of basic mathematics streamlines gameplay considerably, or just using a calculator. Different items take different amount of times to manufacture, so if you have an assembly machine making Copper Wire to make Electronic Circuits, it can be helpful to work out the ratio of Copper Wire produced versus Electronic Circuits produced, as it's possible you're not making wire fast enough to keep up with the circuits, or that you're producing surplus wire and could consider adding a second machine for circuits. Now also consider that there are three tiers of assembly machines with different crafting speed and modules also have an impact on crafting speed (and with productivity modules, their overall output will change beyond speed), and working out the ratio of machines becomes more confusing. Then remember that each type of belt can carry items per second and inserters move at a set speed per second and can pick up a certain amount of items with each movement, and it's possible that even if your machine ratios are perfect, you aren't supplying them properly and they're not producing as fast as you think. Multiply this over hundreds, thousands of machines throughout the factory that are all reliant on each other to produce something they need to produce something else, and it can get overwhelming if you don't understand how to manage it.
    • Combinator-based Logic Circuit Networks. It requires some knowledge of logic gates and combinator functions, and also needs you to invest materials into crafting the wiring and circuits needed, on top of laying out your base with a proper green/red wire circuit and setting the signals correctly. However, once you know how to do this, you can make smart systems integrated into your base - requester chests and filter inserters that can change their settings depending on the network signalling, and train stations that can intelligently page trains to come in to collect resources then ferry them to any given specific station; combined, you can have a logistics network that intelligently sends instructions to your supply base to produce and prepare ammunition, repair packs, spare bots, inserters, and buildings, then feeds them onto a train and sends them to an outpost base.
    • Figuring out the train system, in particular rail signals and advanced train automation, can be very tricky but makes the difference between a few tracks going from A to B and a well oiled megabase.
    • Flame turrets have good range and do good damage and consume any oil product the player might not have much use for. Unfortunately, they need pipe networks laid out to them from the oil refineries, their Painfully Slow Projectiles cause them to overshoot fast-moving enemies, and they have a fixed arc that restricts their ability to hit enemies. However, skilled players can make use for them in the lategame, when your petrochemical production should be able to support them, your upgrades have made them utterly devastating, and your wall defenses are sufficiently developed to keep Large and Behemoth biters at bay inside their firing arc, where they can roast them while they try to break through the walls.
    • Uranium ore requires acid being pumped into the drill to mine it, then sifting to separate U-238 from U-235, acquiring a sufficient amount of U-235 (which has a very low chance, so it can take a long time) to start the enrichment process, balancing its usage, and so on. However, in return you get the most energy-dense fuel in the game, the best ammo for your guns, and incredibly dense (gigajoules per tile occupied by your power plant) energy generation (and setting nuclear reactors up can qualify as this trope on its own)
  • Drone Deployer: Military research eventually unlocks capsules, throwable items similar to grenades that release a bunch of small robotic drones at the impact point. Effects vary between "stationary distraction" and "deadly swarm of Killer Robots that follows the player around". All these bots have limited life time before they self-destruct, and deploying 100 or more at the same time (equivalent to 20 capsules) unlocks the "Minions" achievement.
  • Early Game Hell: You start out the game with nothing but a burner drill, a single stone furnace, a pea-shooter pistol with 10 magazines, and a handful of iron plates salvaged from the wreck of the ship. It takes a long time to build up to electricity production and get research labs running, at which point you can research automation and other important technologies that will let you start building a proper factory. But by that time you're probably putting out enough pollution and/or taking up enough space that you have to deal with biter nests, who are liable to attack you from any angle (unless you had the foresight to scout out the nearest nests early) and will chew through your base very quickly. While it's certainly possible to have walls and turrets ready to fend them off, doing so takes up even more resources that could have been put towards building up your infrastructure, you'll have to reload the turrets manually, and you don't have the means to efficiently clear out the biter nests to stop the attacks. The short of it is that the opening hours of the game are slow and will have you struggling to defend your growing base. Once you unlock the car and/or the flamethrower and can build up a stockpile of ammo for either, you can go on the offensive against the biters and start clearing out their nests to give you some breathing room, and can rest assured that your factory will still be chugging along when you get back now that you don't need to refuel everything by hand.
    • While some mods aim to alleviate that somewhat, others — in particular large-scale overhauls — actually deliberately worsen it. Space Exploration extends the time spent on the pre-electric phase of the game noticeably and significantly delays access to some technologies, in particular locking logistic network demand chests behind technology only produced in space, forcing players to build a conveyor belt-based mall first. Industrial Revolution extends the pre-electric phase to such an extent that it takes players as long to get to electricity as it would to beat the vanilla game. Some mods actually manage to do both: Nullius starts the player with modular armor and construction bots, solar panels and accumulators, and there are no biter attacks to worry about, but the initial set of buildings is barely enough to get the starting base running (necessitating you to periodically repurpose them like with the Lazy Bastard achievement) and it will take a while before you can make more, and many of the early game recipes (particularly metallurgy, glass and PVC) are deliberately horrible, slow and making vast amounts of byproducts you have to stockpile before you research a way to dispose of them.
  • Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: A planet-specific example in Vulcanus from Space Age. It has no roving swarms of hostiles to defend your base from like on Nauvis or Gleba, nor do you have to worry about environmental hazards like the lightning on Fulgora. It only gets challenging when it comes time to expand, which means facing off against the formidable Demolishers.
  • Easy Logistics: Zigzagged.
    • Buildings have no maintenance, though it's averted in almost all other respects.
    • Gun turrets require an ammunition assembly line and a delivery system to actually bring ammo to turrets. You will probably want to add Roboport infrastructure so Construction Robots can continue to repair damaged turrets automatically and logistic robots can ferry bullets to the supply system.
    • Flamethrower turrets require liquid fuel instead of ammunition, and can run off of any type of oil, even crude pumped straight out of the ground. However what this means in practice is that you will either need a pipeline to run in the fuel, a delivery and collection system to bring in fuel barrels and return the empty barrels to a refilling station, or a dedicated fuel system for each outpost kept filled by trains with liquid wagons.
    • Mineral deposits eventually run out, requiring you to shift your extractors around or find whole new mineral fields. Likewise, Oil deposits will gradually deplete, reducing their production to a fairly low cap and pushing you to seek out new deposits. Mining Drill Productivity research improves the amount of ore you can wring out from deposits, but it takes a lot of research to get any substantial gains in yields.
    • The steam-powered generators require you to balance fuel supply and water intake in order to maximize power production. Want more boilers to make more steam for your generators? Better add more water pumps to the intake end.
    • Solar Panels allow you to generate power without burning fuel, but requires a lot more room for all those panels needed to match the power output of a 480-megawatt 2x2 uranium reactor. Furthermore they only work in the daytime, so you'll either need a large accumulator farm to store surplus solar power for night use or an auxiliary power generator to pick up the slack at night.
    • Pipelines need pumps to extend them if they cover a too large area. This was actually worse before 2.0, where liquids would lose pressure over distance, so long pipelines became less efficient, requiring workarounds such as pumping stations (not just a single pump but multiple depending on the required pressure), using trains with Storage Tank carriages, or barreling the liquids and moving them that way.
    • Steam counts as a liquid, but for various reasons its temperature remains constant no matter the pressure level inside the pipes channeling it. It can also be 'bottled' inside train fluid wagons for transport to outpost generators.
    • Trains are one of the fastest ways to transport materials and supplies in bulk, but you need to manufacture the rails, rail signals, and associated infrastructure to fuel the trains and load/unload their cargo. In addition, the rail network will need to be defended and requires lots of room for the rails to be laid. And they come with the risk of running you over if you aren't careful.
    • Once you build a "parts mall" that can fabricate any kind of Inserter, Belt, Assembler, Mining Drill, or Power Pole, logistics will become much easier in that you constantly have your mall of assemblers filling a set of chests with prefabricated infrastructure, ready for you to pick up and deploy, but it does require you to do quite a lot of research beforehand and set everything up first.
  • Easter Egg:
    • 0.15 adds several easter eggs: Applying a Landfill over the Offshore Pump turns it into a Water Well that continues to function by drawing water from the water table underground, applying a landfill over a fish will sometimes turn it into a Grass Fish.
    • It is possible to load a rocket with a car instead of a satellite. Doing so will allow the player to ride the rocket up into space, although this has no effect and teleports the player back to the ground when the rocket leaves. This is only relevant in the base game - in Space Age, entering rockets to travel to space platforms is part of normal gameplay and doesn't require the car. It is also possible to load a rocket with a fish, and there's a hidden achievement for doing this.
    • Version 1.0 allows you to send a stack of Space Science packs into orbit with as the payload of your rocket; doing this will net you a large amount of fish at a 1:1 ratio. Well, if you needed a lot of fish for mass-producing Spidertrons, this is how you get the fish. This no longer works in Space Age, but a recipe for breeding fish can be used instead.
  • Efficiency Limit: Efficiency modules cannot reduce a machine's energy consumption below 20% of its base consumption - but reduction is applied after energy use increase effects, so using efficiency modules of total reduction more than 80% can still make sense because the base 20% would be more than -80% of any increased value.
  • Enemy-Detecting Radar: Aside from making areas visible through remote view, radars will also show where enemies are coming from.
  • Energy Weapon: Laser turrets are a popular and effective line of defense, as they only consume electrical power and no ammo. Additionally, the Personal Laser Defense equipment allows you to turn yourself into a walking disco ball. However, both of these systems consume a lot of electrical power, and their damage output is rather low until they have been significantly upgraded.
    • Space Age adds the Tesla Turret and Tesla Gun. Both shoot a powerful lightning bolt that has a chance to fork and hit multiple targets each time it bounces.
  • Epic Tracking Shot: The 2020 trailer for the game is an especially long tracking shot that pans around a large chunk of the world. Starting in an almost-unscathed wilderness, the camera pans to follow the player as they chop down a tree and build a drill. The drill produces raw copper ore and the camera follows the production line as it turns copper into a magazine of bullets. The bullets get loaded into the turret defending a train station, just in time for it to arrive, unload its ore, and for the camera to follow its departure back to the mine it loaded from, where it then focuses on the boilers working away and their thick plumes of smoke... which agitate the nearest Biter den, who get provoked into swarming the main base. The swarm gets plowed through by a train, which the camera follows until a flock of drones get its attention, centering it back at the heart of the factory as the zoom slowly pans out to reveal the massive scope of the machine.
  • Eternal Engine: What you'll probably leave behind when you finally board your rocket and blast off into space - a vast, fully automated factory that covers several square kilometers and will continue to churn out megatons of industrial products until its raw material deposits run dry. Perhaps someday someone will discover your legacy, wonder at the sight and possibly marvel at your genius in constructing such a complex behemoth.
  • Excuse Plot: "Your spaceship crash-landed on an alien planet. Your only hope of escape is to construct a rocket that can get you home. Just mind the irascible Big Creepy-Crawlies in the area." That's all the reason you're given for building the largest, most heavily defended, generally most badass factory complex in gaming history, and frankly, it's all the motivation you should need.
  • Final Boss: Absent in the base game, but the Shattered Planet in Space Age serves as the game's final challenge. It's impossible to reach without railgun technology, meaning you have to have mastered all the other planets to even have a chance to approach it. It's also recommended to power the space platform in question with fusion reactors, which are another endgame technology. That said, the Shattered Planet is both a Skippable Boss (the stuff you can mine there serves no purpose other than making your research slightly more efficient) and a Hopeless Boss Fight (there's no way to actually reach the planet without ludicrous amounts of cheating, since even the best defenses will get overwhelmed by the asteroid Zerg Rush long before you get there).
  • Fragile Speedster: The car. It's the fastest non-railway vehicle in the game, and since patch 0.11 the car has included a roof-mounted machine gun. However, speed comes at the cost of armor, and bumping into something and being surrounded by biters is almost certainly a death sentence. It also lacks damage resistance against collisions, so ramming a boulder at full speed will do a number to it.
  • Friendly Fireproof: Averted, not only can you accidentally be set on fire by being in front of one of your flamethrower turrets but you can also light yourself up if you fire the personal flamethrower while running forwards. Also very commonly averted by players being run over by their own trains. In Space Age, railgun turrets also hit everything in a straight line, so it's not a good idea to build things or stand in front of them.
  • From Nobody to Nightmare: At the start of the game, you'll be mining ore by hand and running a few smelters and drill machines by manually supplying them with coal and wood, and defend yourself from the bugs using a simple pistol. You'll work your way up to massive factories the size of cities, powered by nuclear reactors and supplied by rail networks spanning hundreds of miles, and curb-stomp the bugs with remote-control Spider Tanks armed with rapid-fire rocket launchers and auto-targeting lasers.
  • Gaia's Vengeance / Green Aesop: Bugs are attracted by noise and air pollution, produced by almost all machinery, but particularly those that burn materials to generate power. Trees absorb pollution, meaning that building your own hidden factory will prevent bug attacks but create a very inefficient factory, whereas operating under a clear-cut philosophy, cutting down all nearby trees will make a very efficient factory that draws the attention of nearby bug nests. Even if you opt for the former, excessive pollution will eventually kill your pollution-absorbing buffer. Maintaining a careful balance of pollution, production, and protection is necessary to prevent your early factories from being overrun by bugs.
  • Game Mod:
    • Factorio natively supports mods (to the point that the base game itself loads through the mod loader), which can be managed via an in-game system that connects to the official Factorio servers to allow you to download and update mods. The selection available varies from simple mods to changed recipes or make minor adjustments to gameplay, such as the Long Reach, Arborium, and Autofill mods, to entire game-changing mods that add in new resources and enemies and/or make radical changes to the tech tree, such as the collections of mods collectively referred to as Bob's and Angel's Mods. Concepts and ideas from several mods have been adapted into official game mechanics.
    • The developers are also extremely supportive of the modding community, and commonly work with the community to find and fix bugs in the base game which are only normally exposed by mods.
    • The Switch port does not have mod support by default, due to certain security concerns with the potential for mods to break out of the sandbox.
    • Factorio: Space Age, the official expansion pack, was worked on by the designer of the fan mod Space Exploration, and where Space Exploration is a challenging mod that requires knowledge of advanced Combinator functions, Space Age is more approachable for newer players.
    • Complexity Addiction: Mods that scratch this itch (yes, even moreso than the base game), such as Angel's Mods, are very popular with the playerbase.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation:
    • Numerous objects cannot be crafted by hand, usually because they require some sort of liquid or chemical process. However, engine units are also grouped under this category, yet they are only made from steel, pipe, and gears. What really makes this stand out as an example of the trope is that many of the things you can build by hand are much larger and more complex and realistically shouldn't be able to be crafted by hand either, including things that use engine units as a component, like pipe pumps, cars, tanks, and train engines.
    • In Space Age, you're limited by how many items you can send up in a rocket, ostensibly by their weight, with some things being too heavy to send up at all. However, these limitations are more about gameplay balance than the actual size or weight of the object in question. For example, you could send up 25 rocket ammo for the rocket launcher, but a nuclear warhead that is fired from the same launcher as those rockets is too heavy to even send one. All armors are also heavy enough to only be able to send up one at a time, even though they obviously would have different weights and the lowest tier armors are little more than chestpieces.
  • Gimmick Level: All the places introduced with the Space Age expansion have their unique gimmicks that set them apart from the traditional Factorio experience on Nauvis.
    • Space platforms don't require power poles for energy transmission, but the player themself can't physically move around on them, the placement of chests is disabled, and no roboports can be installed, forcing the design of belt-only layouts. The output of solar panels is highly dependent on where the platform is currently located in the solar system. All but the most basic materials must be delivered from a nearby planet via carrier rockets, at least until you research advanced asteroid processing, but even then there are many things you can't produce in space.
    • Vulcanus doesn't have ore patches for basic materials like iron, copper, and stone. Instead the Foundry lets you refine the lava of the planet into these resources or by-products you would normally craft with them, with options to refine the lav into molten iron or molten copper and then into plates, or crafting the molten material directly into pipes, wires, gears, etc. There is no crude oil on Vulcanus, if you want it you'll have to use Coal Liquifaction to refine oil products from coal. And while there's no water on the planet, steam won't be hard to come by once you research Acid Neutralization, allowing you to get steam from the natural sulfuric acid geysers on the planet. Said process is also highly efficient at producing large amounts of steam, and the planet has the highest bonus for solar panels, so power generation is a non-issue.
    • Gleba focuses on agricultural production by harvesting and processing the local flora and fauna. This means most items on Gleba degrade over time and eventually turn into Spoilage, which is mostly useless; a sharp contrast from Nauvis and other planets, where items sit around waiting to be utilized once produced. The key production facility on Nauvis is the Biochamber, which doesn't need electricity to function like most buildings, but instead requires Nutrients, which are acquired by processing bioproducts in other ways. Iron and copper can't be mined directly except from a handful of rocks, but you can breed bacteria that degrade into ore for them. This means that your factory layout will need to be a bit more complex than usual, as you'll want constant throughput to replace spoiled products with fresh ones, and need systems to dispose of Spoilage and keep your Biochambers supplied with Nutrients. On the other hand, your reward for this complexity is functionally infinite resources, since trees can be replanted and harvested again eternally and bacteria and pentapod eggs can be bred in a self-sustaining loop.
    • Fulgora's only natural resource is heavy oil, which is pumped directly from oil "oceans" around the plateaus. Everything else is acquired by mining the ruins of an alien civilization that litter the planet, with large ruins that can be mined like rocks and patches of scrap that can be mined like an ore patch. The ruins produce a large variety of items with varying odds of yields, and this effectively "reverses" the standard tech tree to an extent, as you farm mid and high-tier items and use the Recycler to break them down to their base components to craft things you can't get from scrap already. You'll need fields of Recyclers to handle the massive amounts of scrap you mine, as you'll end up with a lot of superfluous resources that must be disposed of by more Recyclers or routed into your factory somehow, and recycling scrap is the only way to get Holmium Ore, a key resource that is required to manufacture most items and products on Fulgora. The planet is also prone to lighting storms every night that will strike you and your factory and cause severe damage, unless you build lightning conductors to draw the lightning safely. The lightning also produces a lot of electricity that can be stored in accumulators to power your base during the day; you'll need it, because water and steam are scarce and solar panels are highly inefficient, making power generation difficult unless you harness the storms.
    • Aquilo is so cold that any building not within two tiles of a heat source will freeze and become inactive, forcing players to devise entirely new layouts to integrate this mechanic, including covering everything in concrete to prevent said heat sources from melting the ice they're built on. Speaking of, the planet has very little in terms of native build area - just drifting icebergs here and there - so a lot of resources need to be routed into producing more artificial icebergs to expand on. And since Aquilo is so far from the sun and so inimical to normal production processes, just getting a basic power supply up and running can pose a major hurdle to unprepared players.
  • Glass Cannon: The Player Character becomes this in the late game. With the higher-tier weapons like uranium rounds and rocket launchers, not to mention nuclear missiles, you can mow down biter hordes and wipe out their nests, and can move fairly quick even without a vehicle. However, even with the best armor in the game, the highest-tier biters will still kill you in two or three hits without shield mods to defend yourself, but even with several of them they're more of a safety net, you still aren't durable enough for prolonged combat. Space Age adds an additional tier of armor with extra equipment slots and an infinite player health research that alleviates this somewhat.
  • Glowing Flora: Some of the fungi in Gleba glows at night.
  • Gray Is Useless: The game allows the player to construct devices, even when there isn't sufficient fuel or power to operate them. One could build a nuclear reactor if one has the materials, but it will sit there, grey and useless, until sufficient uranium is obtained to energize it. At that point, the reactor will glow neon green.
    • Zig-Zagged with Burner Inserters: Colored grey, they are the slowest inserters and need fuel rather than power and so become quickly outclassed by other options. However, because they don't consume electricity, they will never slow down from the factory losing power, and can always be used as a dependable way to feed fuel to your steam boilers if your power grid falters.
  • Guide Dang It!: The weight of a space platform is almost irrelevant. What affects a space platform's max speed the most is its width. Therefore, the thinner the ship, the faster it can move.
  • Herd-Hitting Attack: Flamethrower Turrets. Completely ineffective against individual enemies, but able to wipe out 95% of any alien attack wave (with the 5% they miss being whichever enemies were in the front).
  • Hero-Tracking Failure:
    • Zig-Zagged by Worms and Spitters targeting the player. They will attempt to predict the player's movements, but can usually be evaded by... zig-zag movement. Worms are deadly accurate in their predictions, able to always hit a player if they move in one direction without changing course, while spitters are a bit inaccurate, acting more like suppressive fire support and area denial by aiming in the player's general direction.
    • Played straight by Flamethrower Turrets, which do not predict enemy movements at all, allowing fast-moving enemies to dodge under their fire. However, in larger attacks, this is not generally a problem, because the Flamethrowers' failure to track the leading enemies just means that every other enemy behind them gets roasted.
  • Hoist by Their Own Petard:
    • Players are not immune to the secondary flames generated after they spray burning fuel over a biter nest. Don't try to run through until the flames die down, unless you like being well-done and crispy.
    • Getting run over by one's own trains is probably the leading cause of death among new players who don't expect the things to deal damage to their character. You even get an achievement for it.
      • Getting run over by a train is also the only way for a player in a well-defended factory to die. Luckily, it never stops being funny. Of particular note, is laying down a path to connect two existing rail lines and immediately getting run over by a random train that decided that the new patch is just the perfect way to get to where it was going.
    • The tank is not immune to its main gun's splash damage. Be careful where you aim those nuclear explosive shells, or you'll kill yourself faster than the biters can. Same goes for hand grenades, which have a maximum range but can also be tossed right at your own feet, and their blast radius has to be guessed by the player via trial and painful error.
    • Speaking of the tank: Ramming Always Works on anything, not just enemies. The tank has a very long stopping distance from full speed, and it's quite easy to accidentally plow through a bunch of assembly lines before the thing finally comes to a halt, leaving only a trail of destruction behind. Additionally, it's possible to run yourself over with the tank if you exit and move in the same direction it is moving without braking first. The car also damages your structures on impact, but doesn't have nearly as much momentum as the tank, so the damage potential is lower.
      • Ramming Always Works also applies to trains. While automatically-scheduled trains will never collide (unless signals are set up incorrectly), manually-driven trains can quite happily run into, and destroy without stopping, any other unsuspecting trains in their path.
    • Atomic bombs are nuclear fission warheads for your man-portable rocket launcher. They kill pretty much anything they hit instantly, and their blast radius exceeds their firing range. Not evacuating after launching a nuclear missile lets you check out the game-over screen.
    • Players who have updated to 1.0 have discovered that care must be taken when arming their Spidertrons with high-powered weapons (artillery shells and atomic rockets), as all the usual friendly fire issues apply with them.
    • In Space Age:
      • The railgun turret will blast anything, including players, that happens to be in its firing line when it attacks an enemy.
      • If there's no landing pad on a planetary surface and a space platform hub is ordered to send down resources or equipment, it will send down drop pods which will simply land in the vicinity of the player's first landing on the planet, or in the vicinity of the old landing pad if one was built and then removed or destroyed. Players should try not to be standing beneath one when it lands.
  • Homing Boulders: Averted as of 0.17. Spitter and Worm attacks follow ballistic arcs and, while they do try to predict your movement when they attack, they can be evaded.
  • Hope Spot: In the second campaign's first level, the player receives an emergency transmission from other survivors about 200km away. When he reaches that location by the second level, they are all dead and the base is in ruins.
  • Hyperactive Metabolism: Raw fish (found in lakes) is somehow used to instantly restore the player character's health. In Space Age, the exotic fruits on Gleba provide an instant temporary regeneration or speed boost.
  • Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt: Depends entirely on the players designs. Conveyor belts are one the most useful things in the game, for moving both resources and the player quickly across the map. That said, as a factory grows larger and more labyrinthine, it's inevitable that the player will end up trying to run against one at some point. Can be averted with a mid-game Modular Armor component which prevents belts from moving the player.
    • In the past, this could be weaponized against the aliens, as conveyor belts will also move biters, and it was possible to build early-game defenses by placing belts facing away from walls to push the enemies away. At some point, the developers wised up to this, and made aliens notice if they were being pushed around like this and start attacking the belts.
  • "Instant Death" Radius: In Space Age, your endgame space platform must have one of these if it is to have any chance of surviving a trip to the Shattered Planet, since the asteroid density out there is so high that you simply don't have the time to waste on shooting any asteroid more than once. At least 20 levels of research into damage and firing speed of each weapon type are recommended to accomplish this, but gun turrets in particular benefit from having even more than that.
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Pipes cannot be walked over. Improper placement of them will make it much harder to move through your factory. It is possible to minimize this issue by using pipes that are partially laid underground, although that costs more resources to produce.
  • In-Universe Game Clock: The game features a day/night cycle. Gameplay-wise, it only affects solar panel output and the distance the player can see. In Space Age, different planets have different day/night cycle lengths, and in addition to the effect on solar panels, Fulgora's lightning storms only happen at night.
  • The Juggernaut: Should you piss a Demolisher off, it will relentlessly plow through anything and everything to chase you out of its territory, and good luck stopping a colossal fire worm with an incredibly rapid Healing Factor.
  • Kill It with Fire: Post 0.13, the Flamethrower is the most efficient way to deal with both spawners and Worms. Pop in, spray maybe a tenth of a fuel canister onto the ground around them, then step back and watch the health bars shrink away. Flamethrower Turrets take the concept further by tapping directly into a pipe feed from your petrochemical production line, and can do tremendous secondary damage with the lingering flames. Using refined liquid fuel further improves the damage dealt by flame turrets. Flamethrowers were toned down a notch in 0.15, but in exchange the tank was also given a flamethrower, and flame turrets are still the game's most efficient area denial defensive weapons; furthermore, late-game Flamethrower research allows you to push their effective damage back into a deadly range for even Behemoth biters.
  • Laborious Laziness: The "Lazy Bastard" achievement is awarded for winning the game without hand-crafting any more than 111 items. Given this is a game that is all about factories and automation, you might think this isn't that big an ask, right? Turns out, 111 is a very tight limit — calculating all the items needed to get your first lab up and research Automation requires just over 100 items to achieve, and doing so has to be your first priority so you can get an Assembly Machine and have it start producing items for you. This also means the game's Slow-Paced Beginning of needing to mine resources by hand and run around keeping your burner devices supplied is much longer and slower than normal, since you can only craft the bare minimum required to get Automation and then let your single Assembly Machine manufacture types of components one at a time so you can build more Assembly Machines and actually get momentum going. Even then, you need to be careful to never build anything by hand the entire game, because you have less than a dozen items worth of leeway and a single mistake can ruin your attempt. And by extension, it also means you'll have to run back to your factory any time you need any sort of item you don't have on you, because you can't craft it yourself and will need to plop down an Assembly Machine to make it for you. All this means you will be spending a lot of extra time and energy just to avoid crafting a few more items by hand.
  • Landmine Goes Click: Mines are a researchable defense that deal a large amount of damage when triggered, but they require a short arming period. During the arming period, they are visible and vulnerable to getting shot at/attacked. Biters and spitters that survive the initial explosion are stunned, leaving them open to fire.
  • Lightning Bruiser: Higher-level biters move quite a bit faster than the player does, and hit like a truck. Luckily for the player, they get to become a Lightning Bruiser themselves using power armor and exoskeletons.
  • Lightning Gun: Electromagnetic research in Fulgora eventually unlocks Tesla weaponry, which fires electric arcs that bounce between enemies, providing great crowd control.
  • Literal-Minded: The construction robots will build whatever they're told to, even if the order is placed on the route of a moving train the player happens to sit in, or replacing landmines in the middle of a massive biter/spitter wave. They will gladly exit the train and spend the next half hour trying to get to the player with low battery or suicidally run into the thicket of an alien swarm.
  • Look Both Ways: Be careful when walking over a railway or the train may run you over and turn you into a fine mist.
  • Loophole Abuse: Various parts of different pieces of cliffs include unpathable areas, and when destroying cliffs their layout may change among these different types of cliff pieces. However, if there is something placed in the way of where the "new" cliff piece would be unpathable, that part of the cliff will be destroyed as well. The player can exploit this by placing belts along a cliff and then throwing a single cliff explosive at it, and the explosive will remove a much larger section of cliff than it normally would.

Tropes M-Z 

  • Macross Missile Massacre:
    • The Spidertron has four separate rocket launchers. They fire in a "chain" mode which means when one rocket launcher is reloading, it will cycle to the next automatically. Combined with the maximum fire rate technology boost, you're looking at over 17 rockets per second. And who said you could only have one active Spidertron at a time? Spidertrons do not require a driver to shoot hostiles. If you have the resources, you can command an army of missile spamming Spider Tanks.
    • In Space Age you'll need a lot of rocket turrets on your space platforms to make it past the large asteroids in the Asteroid Thicket between planets, and it only gets worse the farther away from the sun you get. Past Aquilo you'll likely be launching dozens of rockets per second at targets all around you in a desperate effort to prevent the platform's destruction.
  • Made of Iron: Vulcanus' Demolisher worms are unbelievably tanky. Their massive health pool, coupled with an insane Healing Factor, makes them Immune to Bullets and highly resistant against pretty much anything else except poison. They're so tough that the only decently safe way to take one down is with a nuclear missile to the face, and even that only works on the small ones. Medium Demolishers can already survive one direct nuke hit, and the big ones shrug them off with nary a scratch.
  • Magic Tool: The repair kit. A generic spanner and hammer, it can repair any machinery with surprising speed. However, they wear out quickly, so it's recommended to carry several at any given time. Construction robots can use repair kits to automatically repair damaged machinery within range of a roboport.
  • Magnetic Weapons: With Space Age installed, the final tier of weapons technology is the railgun, available in turreted and man-portable versions. Both use the game's most expensive non-nuclear ammunition to deal ludicrous amounts of damage to everything in a straight line... including you if you're dumb enough to stand in front of an active railgun turret. Speaking of the turret, it's not only mandatory for reaching the outermost planet, but it's also the game's biggest BFG (a whopping 3x5 tiles footprint), as well as its only Fixed Forward-Facing Weaponnote .
  • Midair Bobbing: Mech armor floats up and down when hovering still above obstacles.
  • Mighty Glacier: The tank, which is incredibly durable and deadly, but doesn't move much faster than walking speed.
  • Mini-Mecha: The final tier of Powered Armor is the Mech Suit, an all-enclosing exoskeleton that the Player Character pilots instead of wears. It still works mostly the same, though.
  • Modular Difficulty: The player is allowed to change the game's difficulty in multiple ways. It has an expensive mode for some recipes, and also there is a multiplier that can be applied just to how many science packs it takes to research technologies. The more expensive they are, the more pollution your factory will generate. Enemies can be adjusted so that they make new bases at different rates, or evolve faster or slower in response to three factors - time, factory pollution output, and destruction of their own structures. Or they can be turned off entirely. Resources can be made richer or more scarce. And terrain generation can be set up in a way that favors the player. The Rampant mod also has this in spades, allowing extremely granular control of enemy stats and aggressiveness, as well as giving the option to disable certain factions.
  • More Dakka:
    • The base gun turret is essentially a giant Gatling gun. Tech upgrades exist to give it even more dakka. You can even upgrade their ammo from standard bullets to armor-piercing rounds and even depleted uranium bullets.
    • The whole point of building a submachine gun. It uses the same ammo and deals the same per-shot damage as the basic pistol, but shoots several times faster for a massive damage boost.
    • The tank's main gun has two barrels and behaves more like a huge autocannon than a typical tank cannon. Research a few upgrades for it and it'll hurl two to three explosive shells per second at your enemies.
  • Necessary Drawback: Most modules confer a certain bonus at the expense of decreased performance in at least one other stat. For instance, productivity modules improve a machine's productivity but worsen its pollution output, increase its power consumption and decrease its speed. The better the module, the stronger all of its effects become. The only exception is the efficiency module, which simply decreases the machine's power consumption and polution production, with the drawback being the opportunity cost of not installing a productivity or speed module instead.
  • No Ending: Although there is a final goal to work towards, reaching it doesn't end the game, and you're free to continue expanding your factory as much as you want afterwards. Or at least as much as your frame rate will allow you to.
  • Non-Indicative Name:
    • Named "Diesel Locomotive" prior to version 0.15, the locomotive can be powered by everything except liquid diesel fuel, from freshly cut logs to coal to solid rocket fuel (as well as wooden boxes and small power poles prior to 0.17). It was renamed to simply "Locomotive" in 0.15
    • Before version 0.15, the "steam" engine could run off of any liquid, not just water, as long as it was sufficiently hot. You could power your base with boiling sulfuric acid if you so desired.
    • The Lazy Bastard achievement is awarded for winning the game without manually crafting anything other than the bare minimum required for setting up automation. Succeeding at it requires running around and manually feeding resources to machines a lot more than the normal game session.
  • Nerf:
    • Shortly after 0.15 was released, the Kovarex Process for nuclear centrifuges was made incompatible with Productivity-granting modules, as the way Productivity grants extra resources made it possible to gain free U-235 and U-238 from running centrifuges set to enrich uranium with Kovarex while crammed full of Productivity boosts from implanted Productivity-granting Modules. However, starting with 0.17.0, the Kovarex Process is once again compatible with Productivity Modules (after fixing the bug that gave it massive free resources).
    • Logistics Bots were made a little slower and a little more power-dependent throughout development, as well as more resource-intensive, as they basically allowed players to completely break free of the challenge of laying out production facilities and conveyor belts.
    • In 2.0, Personal Laser Defense modules had their damage cut to a third, while at the same time spawners had their health increased with evolution and given more resistance to lasers, to avoid them being completely trivialized in the late game.
  • No Fair Cheating: Playing with active mods of any kind, even if they're just cosmetic, disables Steam achievements but still lets you unlock them locally for your game copy. Doing anything with the developer console, however, disables achievements completely for that save.
  • No OSHA Compliance: Averted. Factory machinery can't harm the player...except for the train, which can kill the player if it hits you at full speed. If you wish, you can place concrete with black and yellow hazard stripes around the tracks to remind you to watch your step. In 0.15, the Nuclear Reactor is completely safe while operational and will not malfunction or melt down on its own.
    • In 0.16, the nuclear reactor was changed so that if it is destroyed while hot, it explodes rather violently.
  • No-Sell: Space Age asteroids have varying sets of near-immunities to certain damage types that require researching specific defense structures to overcome. All but the smallest asteroids are nearly immune to lasers, making laser turrets a waste of space and power on any mobile space platform. Large asteroids can only be damaged by explosives, making the rocket turret a mandatory part of the station's defenses, and huge asteroids have such a ridiculously high damage resistance that only the railgun turret has any real chance of destroying them quickly enough to prevent lethal Collision Damage.
  • Not the Intended Use:
    • Grenades are designed to be used against swarms of biters, but are also effective at quickly clearing out forests once you have an upgrade to explosive damage to let them destroy trees instantly, which they'll do over a fairly large area.
    • Poison capsules are intended to flush out worms from enemy nests, but they're also good for clearing forests, a bit more resource-costly than grenades but covering a larger area. They're also safer to use close to your factory as they won't damage your own structures like grenades will.
    • The tank is an all-purpose combat vehicle designed for prolonged frontline combat with enemies. It also makes a pretty efficient bulldozer if you want to plow a line of trees through a forest, as it'll crush them quickly and barely slow down for it. This is quite handy for clearing areas for train tracks without having to destroy too much of the forest, at least until the player gets bots, which will deconstruct anything in the way of track construction when ordered.
    • Disconnected cargo wagons placed in series with inserters in between is a good way to transport items quickly when belts are too slow but trains are overkill, since items inserted into one end of a wagon are instantly picked up by the inserters at the other end. Not only that, but because a wagon is longer than the two pieces of rail under it, and with its hitbox not actually blocking the tiles it overlaps, you can have four inserters between each wagon, which with the maximum stack size of 12 transfer roughly 110 items per second, which is much more than what two parallel express belts occupying the same space would carry.
      • Another example involving cargo wagons is for crafting a mall - unlike with chests, the player can have each slot in a wagon filtered to only accept a certain item, meaning that, if one places their assemblers correctly, they can have assemblers making inserters and other assemblers from the same chest that's being used to provide the equipment for the intermediate parts - this is particularly useful for mods that either add additional intermediate parts or require the previous version of an item, as demonstrated here.
    • Similarly, cars can be used as giant, mobile storage containers — they have much larger storage capacity and can be moved by belts, so as with cargo wagons, using cars on belts to transport large quantities of items can be more efficient than just using belts.
    • Tanker trains were intended to simplify transporting both crude oil and its refined products from outposts to factories. However, steam is considered a liquid and it doesn't cool down over time. Therefore it is possible to use tanker trains to transport steam from a nuclear power plant to an outpost in order to power the outpost as opposed to running a long power line.
    • Trains can be used to defend outposts, and if you commit to it, your main base. Because Biters don't attack anything that does not produce pollution, or is not in the military category, you can set up a railway that encircles what you want to defend, fill it all up with locomotive engines, and set it on an infinite loop and the biters will stupidly charge right into the train buzz saw that will mulch them in record time.
    • Similarly, liquid reservoirs filled with steam boiled by nuclear power plants are essentially cheaper accumulators with higher capacity.
    • Peace Poles: In early versions of the game, the bugs were programmed not to rebuild their nests where the player has buildings to prevent bugs from making a feedback loop of trying to re-establish a base in the middle of a megafactory. This led to players leaving a single power pole in the middle of an exterminated biter base to keep them from respawning. Later, the bug AI was revised so that a) there are a greater variety of places they will look to expand to, not just their previously established nests, and b) player-built structures only reduce the likelihood of nest settlement nearby, versus preventing it entirely. Bugs will now simply bypass player structures that don't pollute and settle wherever there is room, closing this loophole and mandating a strong defensive perimeter.
    • While steam turbines are designed to work with the 500°C steam produced through nuclear power, they can be connected to boilers to run on 165°C steam instead. However, in this case, they will only act as a pair of steam engines.
    • The primary purpose of artillery is to destroy enemy nests from a distance. Since shells carry a radar with them, revealing areas under their paths, they can be used as an effective, albeit expensive, method of exploration. Shooting a row of shells at the edge of an artillery's rangenote  can quickly reveal a large area.
    • There are several alternatives to walls that creative players have found:
      • Pipes are one of the first things a player can craft unless using certain overhaul mods, and are mainly meant for transporting fluid. However, because of how cheap they are, it's popular to use them as makeshift walls until you get production of actual walls up and running. The pipes are surprisingly effective at blocking biters, and they only require iron, which most players are already going to be smelting a lot of early on anyways. Contrast with walls, which not only require stone bricks (which aren't required until a little bit into the game), but take more resources for a single unit (1 iron plate - 1 iron ore - for a unit of pipe vs 5 stone bricks - 10 stone - for a unit of walls).
      • Stone Furnaces also make decent makeshift walls. Unlike actual walls they don't require you to smelt the stone into bricks first, meaning they take half the stone to build, and they take up a 2x2 meter square, compared to a wall segment's 1x1 meter size. To achieve a similar wall thickness you would need 40 stone instead of 5. Also, once the player upgrades to Steel Furnaces, they will be left with potentially hundreds of Stone Furnaces that have little use beyond crafting Boilers... which themselves are only needed in relatively small amounts once the player has solar or nuclear power.
    • Cars are primarily intended for rapid ground transportation. However, in the base game, if the player sets one up to be loaded into a rocket and then boards the car, they can also be used for space transportation. This no longer works in Space Age as riding rockets is part of standard gameplay.
    • Underground belts don't need to be placed in pairs, a single one will do. This can be exploited for splitting and organizing belts; if you place an underground belt perpendicular to a belt and orient it to carry items "above ground", then only the side of the belt that connects to the open half of the underground belt will feed onto it, while the other side of the belt stays put.
    • In Space Age, cliff explosives are locked behind research on another planet, while nukes are available on the initial planet. Cue players using the massive destructive power of the nuke to remove a few inconveniently-placed cliffs.
    • The nuclear reactor has an explosive meltdown if destroyed at 900 degrees or higher. While this can be catastrophic if Biters/Pentapods/Demolisher Worms manage to reach them, they can also be used as nuclear landmines. A variety of enemies will naturally attack them as polluting buildings and find themselves vaporized for their trouble. A clever player can place them in the path, guard them long enough to get them up to temperature, then stand back as their enemies defeat themselves. They can also be used in Space Age to destroy cliffs even earlier than Atomic Bombs, being cheaper on uranium but more expensive in raw materials.
    • Pumps are primarily meant for loading and unloading fluid wagons, and for boosting fluid speed/pressure to allow for longer pipe runs. However, they only allow flow in one direction, and if they are unpowered or disabled by a circuit condition, they don't allow flow in either direction. Thus, they can be used as stop-check valves to prevent backflow or close off parts of a fluid system.
    • Demolisher Worms on Vulcanus are meant as a challenge for players to overcome and as a barrier to infinite expansion without sufficient technology. They won't attack the player directly unless attacked, but will aggressively destroy any structure built in their territory. However, they also destroy any cliffs they run over... Meaning a clever player can manipulate one into leveling a large construction area by baiting a worm with a trail of cheap structures like pipes or belts that leads the worm over the offending cliff faces.
  • Nuke 'Em: Nuclear weapons are a fantastic way to easily clear up thick patches of biter spawners. Just make sure you're out of the blast range or you'll get vaporized instantly.
  • Obvious Rule Patch:
    • Most intermediate products are compatible with productivity modules, with one exception: fluid barrels. Naturally this is because a player could otherwise create an endless cycle of refilling and emptying barrels to get free liquid products.
    • In Space Age, because of the introduction of the recycler that returns 25% of the materials of an item, productivity has a cap of 300% such that you can't just use the output of the recycler to make more items than you started with.
    • In Space Age several limitations were put in place to prevent certian space platform playstyles:
      • You can build a space platform/ship that's infinitely wide, and extends infinitely "down" or "south" from the space platform hub, but can only go 200m "up" or "north" from the hub. This is because it was discovered in playtesting that people could "cheese" going to another planet by simply building a ship that extended so far in the "ahead" direction it reached the destination planet as soon as it began moving, instead of bothering with a "reasonable" setup for engines, fuel pumps, and turrets.
      • Space platform maximum speed is notably limited by platform width, and not platform mass and engine thrust as would be realistic. Also, thrusters have asymmetric input and output ports and cannot be flipped around. This was done by the devs to prevent the "optimal" ship design from becoming an arbitrarily wide, "boring" row of engines and force players to come up with creative designs.
      • Bots, containers, and trains cannot be used in space, forcing the player to solve belt and pipe transportation problems with a comparatively limited construction area available.
      • Burner devices, particularly furnaces and boilers, cannot be used in space, forcing the player to solve power problems with solar, nuclear, or fusion power, again as a space management (and for nuclear and fusion, logistical) challenge.
  • One Hit Poly Kill:
    • The tank's cannon shells can continue flying through bugs and buildings until they run out of damage to deal.
    • Space Age adds the railgun turret and handheld railgun. They deal a hilarious amount of damage, and the slug will pierce all targets until it reaches its max range. Keep in mind this also includes any buildings or fortifications, meaning that they have to be placed in the front in order to defend your space platform/base from asteroids/biters/pentapods,or they will demolish any defenses placed in their field of fire.
  • Painfully Slow Projectile:
    • The flamethrower turret's projectile is so slow that enemies will move out of the way before being hit, even if slowed down. However, when defending against larger waves of enemies, it will hit the ones that come after the ones targeted by the turret. It also leaves a splash that keeps burning for a short time, damaging any enemy arriving afterward.
    • The artillery not only shoots (relatively to its range) slow-moving projectiles, it takes a rather long time to aim. As it is primarily an Anti-Structure weapon, this is usually not a problem when assaulting enemy bases, but it is practically useless against mobile enemies.
    • The enemy spitters and worms have these as well. They try to predict where you will be when their projectile hits the ground, but it's slow enough that it is really easy to dodge, especially if you have exoskeleton equipment. The difficulty comes because, similarly to flamethrower turrets, enemy spits leave a puddle of acid behind that can not only damage you if you step in them, but also slow you down. If multiple enemies are shooting at you, eventually you will be surrounded with acid puddles, have nowhere to run, and get slowed down, making you an easier target.
  • Pipe Maze: Any system involving multiple fluids being pumped around will likely look like this, especially oil processing facilities.
  • Player Nudge:
    • One of the Attract Mode demos hints at one way to take out bug nests: getting a fleet of cars to run it over.
    • 2.0 introduced trigger technologies, which are not researched by science packs but by the player performing an action such as mining a certain resource or producing a certain item. The unlocked technology then hints at what the player can do with the newly acquired item.
  • Powered Armor: A late-game research allows you to craft Power Armor (and later, MK2 armor) which can be customised with modular equipment such as an exoskeleton for a higher run speed or a built-in shield generator. Or a portable roboport, personal laser defense cannon, and night-vision goggles. Space Age adds Mech Armor as the third tier, which, in addition to having more equipment slots, allows the player to fly with no additional effort.
  • Power Nullifier: Demolishers kick up dust clouds as they move, and emit a circular dust aura around their heads when agitated by the player and their buildings. Entering this dust cloud will short out your armor and its equipment grid. This can even disable the mech armor's jetpack ability, so take care not to get caught inside it. A side effect is that this dust cloud also damages bots over time, making combat bots tough to use at best and impractical at worst.
  • Purposely Overpowered:
    • In the base game, research that uses Space Science packs that can only be acquired via launching rockets, introduced in 0.16, allows a player to slowly-but-surely upgrade their weapon damage and mining productivity to the point that biters become trivial. At that point, the only subsequent goal that remains is to see how many rockets you can launch/how much science you can consume in research. Space Age adds more infinite researches using science packs from various planets that increase productivity of a particular item, making space exploration cheaper. The only post-game technology in the expansion is one that increases productivity of research itself.
    • In Space Age, each planet introduces new buildings that produce items faster and/or consume less resources, which are designed to make the player feel empowered when they bring them back to their existing factories and replace their old, less efficient production lines.
    • Biter nests are quite resistant to head-on attacks by mid-level players, requiring time-consuming tactics (turret-creep, drone-spam) to take them out. And then you unlock Artillery, which, functionally, lets you destroy any nest anywhere with a simple mouse click. With it, you can clear expanses of land many times larger in area than your current factory. At this point in the game, however, the resource intake of your factory has inevitably grown so high that you absolutely need all that cleared land just to make ends meet.
  • Rate-Limited Perpetual Resource: Most ore patches take so long to deplete as to be effectively infinite, with production limited less by the amount of ore available and more by how many mines will physically fit on the patch. Pumpjacks will produce fluids forever, though the rate at which they do so slows down over time until it's not practical. Fluid from lakes (water, lava, heavy oil or ammoniacal solution depending on the planet) is truly unlimited, as even a tiny lake completely surrounded by offshore pumps working 24/7 will never drain it. If you have sufficient tech and willingness to go extra mile, you can also produce infinite iron and copper from bacteria farming on Gleba or exploit infinitely responding asteroids for renewable production of base metals, calcite, coal and sulfur.
  • Recursive Ammo: Cluster grenades scatter several smaller grenades around along with their own explosion.
    • Despite visual appearances, the Atomic Bomb is basically a giant cluster bomb. Upon detonation, it doesn't do all its damage in one big explosion, but rather across two waves of 1000 explosions.
  • Refining Resources: A major part of gameplay. You take base materials — in the base game: lumber, stone, water, coal, iron and copper ore, crude oil, uranium — and use various machines to craft any number of materials, ranging from gun ammo to computer chips and machine parts.
  • Retraux: The graphics are very similar to early 2000s strategy games, in the style of Command and Conquer or Age of Empires, created by using highly detailed 3D models which are subsequently run through a program to make 2D sprites.
  • Ridiculously Fast Construction:
    • Assemblers can create gadgets in an amazingly short amount of time, such as creating a gear cog from plate iron in under a second. The player can hand-assemble a car with pre-made parts in about ten seconds. Speed Modules make assemblers even faster, at the cost of increased power consumption.
    • Actually placing buildings is instantaneous. The speed of laying down a line of transport belts depends on how fast you can move. Deconstructing buildings, however, takes time, different for each building. Except for construction robots, which can build and deconstruct instantaneously, but have a limited carrying capacity.
  • Robot Antennae: The logistic robots feature these.
  • Ruins for Ruins' Sake: Fulgora features the ruins of a long lost alien civilization scattered across the planet. These ruins can be mined for scrap to recycle.
  • Sand Worm: In Space Age, the main obstacle to your factory's expansion in Vulcanus are demolisher worms, highly territorial giant worms (the "small" ones are roughly the size of a train) that won't attack unless you build in their territory, in which case they will absolutely bulldoze through your factory.
  • Schizo Tech: Steam engines powered by coal are the primary source of electricity used to power automated assembly plants that build power armour and laser defence turrets.
  • Scenery Porn: Despite the graphics looking like they stepped out of 1995, there is a certain beauty to the planet. Version 0.15.0 introduced a "high definition" mode that cranks up the resolution on the majority of objects, allowing you to see individual gears turning inside machinery. Several patches across versions 0.16 and 0.17 further improved the quality of machines and added additional detail and animation to the natural world.
  • Scenery Gorn: Pollution does a number in the environment around the factory. Clear water bodies will turn a murky green, and trees will eventually wither after absorbing too much pollution.
  • Science Hero: The player character is an automation and logistics engineer, and while they certainly know their way around combat, their true strength lies in inventing and constructing a huge array of tools, machines, and gadgets to eventually turn local resources into a rocket capable of escaping the planet. It's telling that for most of the game, the majority of your efforts will go into setting up automated assembly lines for the various science packs to fuel your research until you finally gain your coveted space flight technology.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge:
    • Players can challenge themselves by enabling Expensive Technology mode, which makes things more expensive to craft in raw materials and increases the number of science packs needed to do research. Death World settings allow you to also race against biter expansion, aggression, and heightened evolution rate.
    • The map generator settings provide copious additional options to up the difficulty, from downsizing the relatively safe starting area, to reducing the frequency and yields of resource patches, to inflating the dimensions of biter bases to suicidal levels. And all of this can be combined with the examples mentioned above if you're feeling really masochistic.
    • There are achievements for winning the game without using certain technologies such as laser turrets, solar panels, or the logistic network.
    • One of the more amusing and silly self-imposed challenges invented by players is the Wheelchair Challenge, where they are not allowed to walk their player character around and must move by vehicles or by having conveyor belts push him around.
    • In Space Age, reaching the Shattered Planet. It's actually impossible without heavy cheating, but most players will attempt to make it as far as possible and back with ever-improving platform designs and repeatable weapons research.
  • Shattered World: End-game destination of Space Age is a promethium-heavy planet shattered into pieces.
  • Shipwreck Start: The game begins with the player having crash-landed on an alien world. From this humble beginning, the player must locate and exploit resources to develop food, water, machinery, robots, fuel, and other assets. The ultimate goal is to build an all-new spaceship in which to return home.
  • Shotguns Are Just Better: The standard shotgun has a very bad spread, making it less effective at range, but deals the most damage of all the weapons that the player can wield until they unlock the even more powerful combat shotgun, which gives a 20% damage bonus on top of any shell damage upgrades you've researched. Ironically it is not very efficient against biter swarms, but is very efficient at clearing spawners and trees.
  • Short-Range Shotgun: Averted, both types of shotgun have a maximum range of 20, which is two higher than the assault rifle.
  • Shout-Out:
    • The repair pack previously used an icon of the Eleventh Doctor's sonic screwdriver.
    • Certain buildings are assigned a name from a list of backer-chosen names, which has inevitably led to references such as "Lab AunOTauShi".
    • 0.16 features Nuclear Fuel (enrich Rocket Fuel with processed Uranium), which has a fuel value of 1.21 Gj. Great Scott!
    • Accordingly, the icon for the Portable Fusion Reactor module used in Power Armor looks very much like the Mr. Fusion used by the DeLorean.
    • The achievements provide a few:
  • Sickly Green Glow: Uranium ore glows green, as well as any active nuclear reactors and centrifuges.
  • Silicon-Based Life: Although not directly stated, the Demolisher worms on Vulcanus appear to be this. Aside from thriving on a world devoid of biological resources, destroying one leaves behind piles of rocks and minerals where its body used to be.
  • Simple, yet Awesome
    • Solid Fuel is the first item you can produce once you've researched Oil Processing, but is a practical and useful fuel for the rest of the game, as it provides three times the energy of Coal and gives your vehicles a bit of a speed and acceleration boost. Once you expand your petrochemical production and need to start balancing fluid ratios to crack oil into other forms, Solid Fuel becomes a simple way to use up any excess oil product generated to keep the pipes from backing up.
    • Solar power requires nothing but the resources to manufacture the panels, and the panels need no additional infrastructure to support them, though you'll want to set up some accumulators to power your factory through the night. It takes massive fields of solar power to rival the output of uranium power plants, but solar panels produce no pollution, are much lower-tier tech, require much fewer resources to set up (heat exchangers and turbines for the uranium plant to power use up absurd amounts of copper), and in terms of CPU strain if you're running a base that large, solar panels use less CPU power than a single inserter, in contrast to the complex fluid and heat mechanics of uranium.
  • Single-Biome Planet: The planets you can visit in Space Age are themed after one specific biome, each with its own unique resources and dangers:
    • Green Hill Zone: Nauvis, the starting planet, is a temperate locale consisting of plains, grasslands and forests, and it features all the basic resources you need to get your factory started.
    • Lethal Lava Land: Vulcanus is a volcanic planet consisting of volcanoes and ashy plains amidst rivers of lava. Metals can be refined from lava and sulfuric acid extracted from acid geysers.
    • Shifting Sand Land: Fulgora is a barren desert planet with patches of oil sands surrounding sandy plateaus, on which alien ruins can be discovered and recycled for scrap. The main threat on Fulgora are the lightning storms that happen at night, but they can also be utilized for free power.
    • Jungle Japes: Gleba is a moist, swampy planet covered in fungal jungles and wetlands. Agricultural produce can be grown and processed on Gleba, but they will quickly spoil if not used in time.
    • Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Aquilo is a freezing cold planet consisting mainly of icebergs surrounded by vast ammonia oceans. Buildings and machinery can only operate if heated and placed on concrete.
  • Smart People Build Robots: The player goes one step further and builds machines that build robots.
  • Snow Means Cold: Aquilo requires you to keep buildings heated, via Nuclear Reactors or Heating Towers, to keep them operational in the bitterly frigid wastes. If buildings aren't connected to a heat pipe or if the heat energy runs out, anything deprived instantly freezes over and gains a neat covering of snow that remains until you restore warmth.
  • Space Is Noisy: Sound can be heard in space.
  • Space Friction: Space platforms can travel only when their thrusters are working. Also, the amount of thrust you need to get them moving is partly dependent on their shape, particularly their width, which makes sense in-atmosphere but none whatsoever in the vacuum of space. This has led to the general recommendation to design long and narrow platforms over wide ones.
  • Speed Run Reward: A gold-ranked achievement can be earned by launching a rocket within 8 hours. The average gamer will take about three times as long, if not more, so you'll need to know exactly what to do in which order, and you'll have to get lucky as far as map generation is concerned so you can find good resource patches and few enemies close by. Space Age adds another one for finishing the expanded game within 40 hours.
  • Spider Tank: The 'Spidertron', an 8-limbed Mini-Mecha capable of climbing over obstacles and fording shallow water, equipped with 4 rapid-firing rocket launchers, can carry equipment modules similarly to a player's modular armor, and can be ridden or remote-controlled. It was introduced in FFF #120 as a prototype and then used as a running joke, until finally being added to the game in 1.0.
  • Sprint Shoes: Exoskeletons, which are slotted into Power Armor, make the player run faster. Multiple exoskeletons can be used at once, potentially allowing the player to outrun the car, as long as they have enough power. There's also placeable movement speed-boosters in the form of brick and concrete floors.
  • Starfish Aliens: The Pentapod enemies of Gleba. These five legged monsters range from small, biter-sized wrigglers, to strafers that launch their young as homing projectile weapons, to massive armored stompers whose individual legs are larger than your car. They're described as different stages of a single organism's life-cycle, and diagrams on the website's blog points to some truly bizarre anatomy. Their five-legged anatomy is also what makes them look so alien, since having an asymmetric body plan like this is extremely rare among Earth species. Fittingly, starfish are among the few known species to sport five limbs.
  • Stationary Enemy: Worms stay in the same place, attacking the players and their infrastructure when nearby.
  • Sticky Situation: Slowdown capsules disperse a yellow-orange adhesive that slows down biters and spitters by 75%, making them less threatening.
  • Stylistic Suck: The example builds shown in promotional artwork and title screen demos are deliberately designed as labyrinthine heaps of overlapping spaghetti; ranging from somewhat inefficient to potentially disastrous. This is harder in practice to set up than simple but viable production lines, and serves many purposes: creating a sense of mad-science whimsy; showcasing a large variety of game features in a single glance; avoiding spoiling any actually efficient solutions; and allowing the player to feel validated even if their own build is somewhat wishy-washy itself. Most notably, the base depicted in the box art (page image above) is completely incoherent and would not function at all in gameplay.
  • Tank Goodness: The tank vehicle was added in patch 0.11 as a more durable alternative to the car. Although much slower, it is pretty much indestructible, mowing over trees and small enemies without care. It mounts a main cannon that can over-penetrate several biters with one shell, can use an overclocked coaxial machine gun, and scythe through forests with its flame thrower. The tank can use depleted uranium or explosive ammo if armor-piercing isn't up to par. In addition, Ramming Always Works, and the tank can One-Hit Kill a spawner by running it over.
  • Technicolor Science: Researching new technology is, like almost everything else in Factorio, automated. The process begins by producing "science packs", where existing tech is supposedly taken apart and reverse-engineered somehow. These science packs are depicted as Gratuitous Laboratory Flasks, filled with liquid color-coded depending on the type of science the pack represents. Apparently, the components involved are ground and liquefied into colorful solutions of concentrated science. The science packs are then transported into labs where the new tech researches itself, with electrical sparks arcing around in the labs to show that science is being done, consuming the science packs in the process. The new tech is ready for use once enough science packs have been consumed, so adding more labs speeds up the process (provided your output of science packs can keep up with the increased demand).
  • Technology Porn: The game, in general, promotes this - research is painstakingly laid out so you need to develop everything and work your way up to faster tools and structures, and the graphics lovingly detail your buildings, allowing you to see the turning gears, swinging inserter arms, electrical heating coils, bubbling chemical plants and electrolyzers, components moving through your factory on belts, and nuclear facilities glowing green as centrifuges rotate gently. The fandom in turn has screenshots of lovingly built elaborate bases with belts and inserters and assemblers either lined up efficiently on material buses, or woven tightly to fit as much factory as possible into a compact space.
  • Tech Tree: A very large and complex one, though the game makes it easy to visualise the prerequisites and dependencies of any research item.
  • The Artifact:
    • The Steel Axe research: in early versions of the game you needed to craft axes that broke over time, and steel axes worked faster than iron ones. But the devs decided to ditch this mechanic so you don't have to craft axes anymore. The Steel Axe research simply gives you a "mining" speed boost (in this game mining also includes deconstructing buildings).
    • The Toolbelt research: initially the hotbar at the bottom of the screen was extra inventory space, and the research added another row of slots to it. Now the hotbar contains only shortcuts to items that are in your main inventory, and the Toolbelt research unlocks the Toolbelt equipment item, which can be crafted and slot into your Power Armor to give more inventory slots. You can equip several.
    • The Laser Shooting Speed research: in early versions of the game, laser turrets and personal laser defenses fired small laser bolts, which homed in on enemies; and this research increased their rate of fire. When lasers were changed to fire beams which dealt damage continuously, Laser Shooting Speed became just a straight beam DPS upgrade (at the cost of increased turret energy consumption).
    • The name used for enemies is "biters", when earlier in development they were the only kind of enemy to attack your base, plus stationary worms. Later the spitter was added as a ranged enemy, but "biter" is still used as a catch-all term because no other proper terminology aside from "enemies" or "aliens" has been established for the species.
    • Barrels. A means of turning fluids into solid items that can be transported via belt or train, these items were a necessity in early days before the Fluid Wagon was added to the game. Now that the Fluid Wagon exists, though, Barrels have become mostly obsolete with only some minor niche uses, such as letting fluids be transported by logistic bots, or letting the player carry Heavy Oil to a Coal Liquefaction plant to bootstrap the process. In Space Age they've been revived somewhat: they can be used to export fluoroketone from Aquilo so recipes that use it, and fusion power plants that need it as coolant, can be crafted on other planets, and they are now an intermediate product required for the manufacture of cliff explosives.
    • The fluid wagon's graphic makes it look like it has three storage tanks, even though it only requires one to craft and only has the capacity of one. When fluid wagons were introduced, they indeed contained three tanks, each of which could be filled with different fluids, with an option to merge the tanks together to form a single bigger storage unit. Soon the merging feature was removed and the capacity of the wagon was reduced, however the three-tank graphic remains, and so does the segmentation of the fluid wagon into three segments for the purpose of attaching pumps.
  • The Turret Master: The player. Because most of your hand-held weapons are ineffectual against massed bug swarms, turrets are key to defending your factories. Gun turrets are cheap and don't require electricity, but require an extensive logistics network to maintain their ammo supply in the long term. Laser turrets are expensive to craft, require huge amounts of electricity, and have poor damage without additional research, but don't need any conveyor systems for ammo. Flame turrets are powerful, but they require liquid fuel, and their minimum range and slow speed of the stream of flame means they need walls and 'dragon's teeth' barriers to be effective. Artillery turrets have phenomenal range and explosive splash damage, but can only automatically target spawners and worms, not the bugs themselves, and their shells are complex and do not stack in inventories. "Turret creep" is also a popular tactic for taking out the huge late-game biter bases: plonk down a Forward Operating Base near the enemy, set up a wall of turrets including supply infrastructure to tank the inevitable Zerg Rush, and whittle down the nests, ideally with artillery.
    • Space Age adds three more turrets to other worlds. Rocket Turrets fire hard-hitting explosives that crack or splash across Asteroids and alien shells alike, but require even more logistics than gun turrets. Tesla Turrets fire Chain Lightning which stuns bugs and sets them up for Flamethrower or Rocket damage, but fire slowly and consume many times more power than Lasers. And finally, Railgun Turrets hit everything down a straight line and can crack even the hardest targets, but need their own unique ammunition and have construction and power costs that match their firepower.
  • Uncommon Time: The music tracks "Pollution" and "Are We Alone" are in a nonstandard time signature, with Pollution being in 7/8 and Are We Alone having an even more complex time signature (one YouTube comment seems to think it's 21/8).
  • Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: The mechanics for nuclear power and how they generate heat. Assuming they are consistently fueled, nuclear reactors will slowly heat up and the heat flows down pipes connected to them and to heat exchangers. The heat pipes take longer to heat up the further down the line they are from the reactor, as it takes longer for the heat to build up, and this means in practice that there's a limit to how long your network of exchangers can be before they don't get hot enough to produce steam. Attaching new pipes to the network will cause a drop in temperature across the board as the heat is filtered into the new connections to heat them up as well. Assuming your exchangers aren't currently producing steam, the reactor and pipes will continue to grow hotter until they cap at 999.99 degrees; if the exchangers are in use, the temperature will stabilize at a baseline across the network.
  • Unintentionally Unwinnable:
    • Before version 0.13 without mods, there was no way to cross water even though it's possible to spawn on an island, forcing you to quit and start a new game. The Landfill was added in development to fix this issue.
    • If the map is of limited size, the total amount of ore is limited, making it possible to exhaust it completely before launching the rocket and making the map unwinnable. However, one has to deliberately try to do that by some combination of lowering the resource amount, deliberately wasting resources or turning on expensive and/or marathon mode. Later versions of the game allow for a functionally infinite map size, however, with resource deposits becoming richer and richer as you expand outwards.
    • If either of the map dimensions is set to 8 or less during the setup of a new game, the playthrough cannot be finished due to the Rocket Silo requiring a 9x9 space to build.
  • Units Not to Scale: Possibly. The top-down style makes it hard to tell how big things are; for example, defense walls look like they're about half the height of the player. It's nonetheless accurate to how they function in gameplay, with Spitters and Worms able to launch their projectiles right over the walls at targets behind them, so they're really just for obstructing enemy movement.
  • Universal Ammunition:
    • The game's ballistic weapons include pistols, shotguns, submachine guns, tank-mounted heavy machine guns, and oversized turret-mounted Gatling guns, all of which except the shotguns use the same ammo type (firearm magazines and their variations).
    • Mobile flamethrowers come in two distinct varieties - the infantry model shoots a stream of napalm, the tank-mounted one a burning gas cloud - but they also use the same ammo tanks.
    • Flamethrower turrets put a special spin on the trope by virtue of accepting at least three different fuel types as their ammunition (crude oil, light oil, heavy oil), with the latter two providing minor damage bonuses over crude.
  • Unwinnable by Design: The devs have generally gone out of their way to prevent "soft locking" or allowing the player to create a situation from which it is impossible to recover and rebuild some sort of base. However, there is one major exception: The planet Aquilio in Space Age. Every other planet contains the means to fully rebuild a base from scratch without any interplanetary logistics. Aquilio does not; there is no on-site means of producing several key resources. It is meant as a late-game challenge, so if the player fails to bring the right equipment or resources with them, and did not set up a means of remotely producing and delivering them, it is possible to wind up on Aquilio with a frozen base and no way to leave. This is unlikely, as the player will have to have visited all four of the other planets first and is likely to be fairly experienced at the game by this point, but it is still possible.
  • Utility Belt: The toolbelt is a set of inventory items accessible through hotkeys. In an older version, it was an extension of the inventory. In newer versions, it became simply shortcuts to items in the main inventory, with the main inventory becoming subsequently bigger. Space Age adds toolbelts as an equipment option for armor that adds more inventory slots.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: Factorio almost encourages you to play like a Captain Planet villain: clear-cut forests, use up natural resources, pollute the environment for a vaguely-explained reason...all in the name of making your factory bigger and better. Further reinforced when the developers (jokingly) stated "We see the biters as a production problem. The real enemy is, of course, trees."
    • Space Age lets you create biter nests from biter eggs. Normally, this is used to control Productivity 3 modules, overgrowth soil, promethium science packs and bio labs. However, you can put the biter nests in the middle of lakes surrounded by laser turrets to act as free pollution absorbers, culling the biters as they spawn.
  • Videogame Flamethrowers Suck: Thoroughly averted as of the 0.13 release. The flamethrower - and its turret equivalent - behave more like real-life flamethrowers, spurting a jet of napalm that creates short-lived patches of intense fire wherever it lands and dealing significant damage to anything around it. Bugs die en masse running through the flames. Spawners and worms can be rapidly killed by setting them on fire. The same release introduced the ability to set fire to trees and thus burn down forests, generating vast amounts of pollution that will provoke more enraged aliens to charge into your war crime of a weapon's sights. All in all, a good day to be one of said Captain Planet villains.
    • Played straighter with the Tank Flamethrower, which produces a short range cone of flames and acts more like a continuous damage shotgun.
  • Weak, but Skilled: The Engineer must become this to handle enemies in the later game. Even with the strongest armor packed full of shield modules, swarms of enemies can slaughter you in a few seconds, so you likely won't want to risk a straight-up fight. Instead, you'll learn to make use of hit-and-run tactics to take out a few key targets before retreating, exploit the terrain and trees to escape from larger enemies, pre-emptively build a defensive position of turrets and walls to fall back to, use poison capsules and the flamethrower to soften up enemies and create areas of denial, and so on.
  • Wetware CPU:
    • One of the rewards of conquering Gleba's challenges include the ability to capture Nauvis's Biter nests, and harvest their eggs. With these eggs you can make, among other things, an upgraded Laboratory that looks like a swollen, pulsating nest with needles and centrifuges sticking out of it, that processes Science Packs much more efficiently than your regular Laboratories can. Additionally, the visuals of a Biochamber, along with the materials of its construction, imply that a captive Pentapod is being exploited, somehow, to power and operate it.
    • The Space Age recipe for the Spidertron requires, of all things, a bunch of fresh fish. In the absence of any explanation for this particular ingredient, it can only be assumed that the biomass is converted into the robot's brain of sorts.
  • Wide-Open Sandbox: Although there is a goal — in the base game, build the rocket silo and launch the satellite; in Space Age, reach the edge of the solar system — you are not bound by any one set path to achieve that goal. And if you still feel restricted by even this bare minimum of a plot, the game doesn't end when you reach the goal. Instead, you can get a bunch of post-game science packs (space science in the base game, promethium science in Space Age), which can be used for researching an infinite amount of, but exponentially more and more expensive, technologies. At this point you can try to keep the production up with the cost of the technologies, giving you a challenge to increase your factory size and efficiency as much as possible, or you can just build anything you like, really.
  • You Are Already Dead:
    • The flamethrower's stream deals an additional 100 damage per second for 30 seconds to biters and spitters upon direct contact, meaning anything shot of a behemoth biter WILL die after a short bit. A couple of research levels into refined flammables will cause even behemoth biters to melt in seconds.
    • In Space Age, if a single big or even huge asteroid breaches your defenses in line with the platform's main hub, you get a couple of agonizing seconds to watch it plow through the platform unimpeded, knowing that you can do absolutely nothing to prevent the vessel's impending doom.
  • You Have Researched Breathing:
    • The player is an automation and logistics engineer on an alien planet trying to launch a rocket into space. They must first research how to build an assembly machine, and, subsequently, how to smelt steel.
    • Downplayed with the Kovarex Enrichment process: after automatically researching and effortlessly constructing one (or more likely dozens) of state-of-the-art nuclear centrifuges, the true challenge becomes how to automate taking the one newly enriched piece of Uranium off of the stack while loading the rest back into the machine. There are many solutions to this, but they're left entirely to the player's own ingenuity to figure out.
  • You Nuke 'Em: You can eventually research nuclear munitions for the handheld Rocket Launcher. But be wary, because like real life man-portable nukes the explosion range is greater than the firing range. You'll have to Outrun the Fireball.
    • Exaggerated with the mod-exclusive Thermonuclear Bombs, which are essentially nuclear fusion warheads several times more powerful than the standard nukes. Their blast radius is so huge that outrunning the explosion without speed-enhancing gear is next to impossible.
    • With the introduction of the Spidertron you get a robot with four quick-firing missile launchers you can arm with nothing but nukes, you can also equip it with shields and exoskeletons which will ensure that you'll be able to outrun and survive the nukes.
  • Zerg Rush:
    • The biters attack in groups that can range from easily-manageable herds in the early game to massive hordes in the late game that would make the bugs in Starship Troopers blush. In Space Age, the pentapods on Gleba act similarly.
    • Also in Space Age, the farther away from the sun you travel, and the faster your space platform is moving, the more asteroids spawn in its path. This can get dangerous already en route to Aquilo, but it gets absolutely ridiculous on the way to the Shattered Planet - make it past 200,000 to 300,000 kilometersnote  at a decent speed and the asteroids will start spawning in faster than most platforms can shoot them down even with legendary-quality turrets and a couple dozen levels of weapons research.