With that said, I always thought it would be a bit interesting in Factorio if the bugs were at first neutral towards the player and only got hostile after the player started polluting too much or chopped down too many trees.
Aside from chopping too many trees, that’s already how the game works. I don’t remember where exactly it is but there’s a button somewhere around the minimap or map UI to toggle whether you see a bunch of things on the map like robots, player names, your power lines, trains, and of course pollution.
The pollution toggle is pretty helpful for figuring out where alien bases are beyond the reach of your radars because they absorb pollution and organize attacks after they go above a certain threshold. Since they absorb it, if you see a gap or dip in the pollution for a particular area, there’s likely a base there.
You could theoretically make the chopping trees prompting attacks part work too by making a mod where each tree cut down produces a small burst of pollution, assuming of course that a mod like that doesn’t already exist.
Edit: when you set up a new save in the world settings you can adjust some of these thresholds and values. You can make the aliens more or less likely to attack, the terrain absorb more or less pollution naturally, the pollution spread more quickly or more slowly, etc.
Edit 2: just remembered that you can check every machine and they’ll tell you how much pollution it produces as well. There’s even a few mods that include machines with negative pollution production. I used those mods at one point in a previous save to make a fairly large base that didn’t have any turrets despite a significant alien presence on all sides of my base. I simply made sure that no pollution ever could spread beyond my metaphoric wall and had several hundred hours of play without a single attack.
The bugs always attack first in my worlds and they never stop. They virtually force me to send them into extension as a matter of self preservation.
They attack first because you are polluting their home though.
TheFactorymademedoit
I am polluting their home to produce more weapons to exterminate them
That’s pretty much how the game is designed.
With that said, I always thought it would be a bit interesting in Factorio if the bugs were at first neutral towards the player and only got hostile after the player started polluting too much or chopped down too many trees.
Aside from chopping too many trees, that’s already how the game works. I don’t remember where exactly it is but there’s a button somewhere around the minimap or map UI to toggle whether you see a bunch of things on the map like robots, player names, your power lines, trains, and of course pollution.
The pollution toggle is pretty helpful for figuring out where alien bases are beyond the reach of your radars because they absorb pollution and organize attacks after they go above a certain threshold. Since they absorb it, if you see a gap or dip in the pollution for a particular area, there’s likely a base there.
You could theoretically make the chopping trees prompting attacks part work too by making a mod where each tree cut down produces a small burst of pollution, assuming of course that a mod like that doesn’t already exist.
Edit: when you set up a new save in the world settings you can adjust some of these thresholds and values. You can make the aliens more or less likely to attack, the terrain absorb more or less pollution naturally, the pollution spread more quickly or more slowly, etc.
Edit 2: just remembered that you can check every machine and they’ll tell you how much pollution it produces as well. There’s even a few mods that include machines with negative pollution production. I used those mods at one point in a previous save to make a fairly large base that didn’t have any turrets despite a significant alien presence on all sides of my base. I simply made sure that no pollution ever could spread beyond my metaphoric wall and had several hundred hours of play without a single attack.
Don’t the trees already help by absorbing some amount of pollution? If tree is gone, it stops absorbing, thus pollution rises.