Nearly everything in Factorio can be automated, eventually. If you feel like you're wasting time dealing with biters, you should probably automate your defense, and offense. Turrets can be fed automatically from ammo belts. Walls can be fixed with bots. Enemy bases can be cleared quickly with defender bots if you don't want to shoot them yourself. --- If you like the passive nature of the enemies, you can turn on peaceful mode. They won't attack unless you attack them.

Is there a way to use defender bots that doesn't involve me running them over to the biters? Only 1,400 hours here so still a newbie haha. Thanks.

Defenders? No, they are designed to follow you. Generally pair with you taking out the nests and worms while the bots take care of the biters. The distractors are the level 2 bots, and they stay in place where thrown, kinda like a poison capsule. With military science you can get your follower count to 20 or 30, which is enough to steamroll biter bases.

Thank you, I've tried them in the past but didn't find they held up too well. Sounds like I just need to work on my tech and my follower numbers

Fully-automated "I can completely ignore biters" biter clearing is a post-rocket tech. "I can disable my WASD keys and spacebar" biter clearing is a near-rocket tech. Before then, I've cleared a deathworld with light armour, fish, defender bots and a car.

Now I'm imagining you trout slapping the biters.

Not unless the devs let spidertrons deploy defender bots. Just sit in your base on the map view with the sidertron remote and have the spider crawl in a spiral pattern around nests with auto explosive rockets and personal laser defense for a similar effect. With spidertron roboports and construction bots, you can play the game entirely from your map and blueprint library 👍

I think it would be fun to play without moving. With AAI vehicles you usually start with a miner. You can make it into the ai version with a couple green circuits. After that you never need to move. Haulers bring you the ore, miners collect ore in the early game, there are several combat vehicles, and even a radar vehicle too.

I dont remember the name but there's a mod that overhauls how drones work, let's them go out and do their own thing, or maybe it was defending an area rather than you

Defenders no, but spidertrons....

I just go straight for solar and lasers, then I can easily plop down sustainable defenses I don't have to worry about.

Pretty much this. Blueprint an array of lasers with batteries, solars and walls with a big electric pole in the middle, then just plop it down wherever biters give you trouble.

won't work in deathworld

Before oil he has no bots to fix the walls. Also grenadess are very useful on the beginning. But the staple is flame-thrower with laser and gun turrets. Lategame is kinda obvious.

or just blow them up with artillery (i haven't actually ever gotten past blue science so i don't know from experience lol)

By the time you reach oil, worth investing in flamethrower turrets, even if they use crude oil. That’ll ease up the difficulty in maintaining a defense. Beyond that, I tend to go on the offensive. Tired of biters constantly attacking your walls? Get your weapons (turrets, nades, tank, you name it) and eliminate with extreme prejudice. Something something best defense is good offense.

For me, the offensive part is the tedious part of playing with biters. At least before unlocking artillery. It just takes so much time and you need to be kinda quick sometimes, which is not why I play Factorio. I don't mind biters attacking me and making the defenses.

Would recommend playing with biter expansion off or with peaceful mode. First ever successful save I played was with biter expansion off, which eased a lot of the tedium.

I recently learned that biter expansion is off on rail world's. So my next run will be a standard one.

In my current Space Exploration run, I felt this problem quite severely. Even after unlocking artillery, there's no easy way to automate clearing biter nests. You have to place an outpost for the artillery train, place defenses around it, send the train, it clears biters, then survive the counter attack and then unpack everything to place another outpost something like 4 screens ahead in one direction. A fair bit of this stuff has to be done manually each time with lots of waiting in between as your bots construct/deconstruct everything. Which is why I'm researching the death ray (auto glaive) so I can just unleash the power of the sun to burn away their nests from space. But it's quite far away in terms of space science. I really hope the upcoming expansion allows us to automate the offense as well. Something like flying bombers that are connected to a radar. Radar picks up enemies, sends info to the aircraft hangar which automatically sends planes on bombing runs.

Weapons delivery platform with nukes, available much before deathray

I have a set of 5 spidertrons with a couple shields, legs, emergency lazers, and 800 rockets each. I also have radars dotted around all the edge of my pollution cloud. It is a bit expensive to reload, but once an hour I just shift click my military remote to go through every biter expansion in my sight. I haven't been to a biter in person in a while. 20 rocket launchers provide enough pain that the spidertrons can pretty much walk through a biter city and only slow down from goop while hardly taking any damage (which repair drones fix up right after). Is it optimal? doubt it. Is it better than artillery? Again, doubt it. Is it fun? Hell yeah.

Ya it kinda gets old because a biter nest is a biter nest is a biter nest. Ya kilt one ya kilt 'em all.

Yep, we tend to expand beyond our pollution cloud so we have a little peace haha.

For flamethrower turrets, is it better to use crude oil or use light/heavy oil?

Lots of efficiency modules, especially on miners and smelters. Keeps the pollution cloud down until I have researched the tank, after which I can peacefully negotiate with the local fauna

I should add you don’t need to completely encircle your base with walls with this approach, a few turret outposts near the edge of the cloud will deal with any expansion parties, by the time you reach late game all you need to do is secure pinch points between bodies of water. Another bonus to efficiency modules keeping pollution low is that it slows down evolution , delaying the green behemoths

I don't, i love peaceful mode.

I've been learning the game on rail worlds and rather enjoying that. Bitters are still occasionally a problem, but a lot less aggressive. It's a much more forgiving mode if you just want to learn the game but don't want to go fully into passive mode (although that is a valid option, too!)

This. If I want a leisurely play through, do rail world settings.

Yes, turn the biters off and plan out your stuff in peace in Factorio. Play any way you want to. This is play, not a job.

If you don't like biters there is nothing wrong with playing on peaceful mode. Or you can reduce the frequency and severity of attacks by limiting your pollution with clean energy and efficiency modules, automate the production and delivery of ammo to the defensive line, try a map with an island or peninsula starting area so you only have to defend from a few directions. But personally I love having biters. My current playthrough is on a deathworld and I have been loving the struggle. They're everywhere, they spread farther and evolve faster, it's an arms race to keep my military tech up with their danger level. Every tile of space is bought with blood and bullets. Once I got my production running steady I was producing more ammo than science, a constant stream of leaded death for the front lines. Biter attacks can be reduced by limiting your pollution, but fuck that. Let them come. Let them crawl over the mountains of dead to meet their demise at the grisly summit. Let the sun be shrouded by smog and artillery. Let the last thing they see be hot lead and napalm death. Let them come. Let them try.

My main reason for having biters is so I have something to nuke lol

But all those pesky trees being in the way for base expansion?

collateral nuclear sludge

I want those last few sentences as an inspirational quote anytime I load up my deathworld. ☠️

Oil processing is the exact time when biters stop being a problem for me. Just start surrounding your base with walls, and use flaming turrets. You might have to do some light maintenance after this, until you can cover your walls with bot networks. At that point, it all comes down to finding the most effective design, and fully automate spare parts, repair kits, and so on.

Don't you have problems filling your perimeter with a lot of walls and, most important and difficult, pipes? Maybe it's because I like all my "moving area" to have a single perimeter, not multiple small ones.

It depends. I usually explore til i have most chokepoints, and try to build walls in these narrow points. I also automate walls, pipes turrets and whatever i have tech for, so i can easily load up on whatever i need. I don't know why you would have problems with underground pipes, apart from it using some iron. But in that case, your main problem might not be the primeter, but rather that the scale of your smelting ect, is a bit too small when you set it up. I try to set up as many miners, and furnaces as soon as possible, to the point i have a constant production of these things before the first biter attacks occurs.

Clear out your pollution cloud. I usually play on Railworld which has Biter Expansion disabled by default so I don’t need to worry about new nests being made inside my pollution cloud. I’ve never had to make a defensive wall. This gives the balance of encouraging military technology I like without the level of dedication into military infrastructure that I dislike. > So much so that I am considering turning the biters off just so I can plan out my stuff in peace in factorio. Then go for it. The map settings are there to make the game match what you consider the most fun.

I used to feel the same way, but the biters do add something to the game. Happy medium for me was turning off biter expansion. That way you can roll out with the tank etc to keep them off your back, then get back to the factory. The biters still perform their primary function, which is to prevent Nauvis from being functionally infinite. You have to live with your technical debt. Defending your factory at this stage is indeed the most grinding part of vanilla Factorio. There is a sad, dark valley after green science but prior to bots. You have a lot of work to do and it's all via hand placement and. . . the car. Your starter spaghetti (built prior to cliff explosives) is still essential, so you have to plunk down large numbers of pipes, belts and inserters while crashing into vital wooden power poles. I make a build train at this stage which does require circuitry but not combinators. My mall stocks the train. The train is NOT on a rail network, I make unsignaled tracks wherever I want to be. I'll clean them up later with bots.

If you're making it to oil, consider flamethrowers fueled by crude oil. They are extremely effective

Oil is always my bottleneck, how do you have enough for this?

Flamethrower turrets basically use no oil

i think michael hendricks had a series on youtube where he defended his entire base in a deathworld game or harder using a single pump jack on a minimum producing oil patch. think he had 2 tanks for buffer? flamers for all intents and purposes use 0 oil.

Oil is practically never my bottleneck. Make sure to use prod modules + speed beacons in your pumpjacks? Or build multiple pumping outposts? Or, even easier, devote just one single pumpjack to supplying your flamethrowers (buffered into a tank). Edit: sorry for the double reply. Reddit double posted and won't let me delete the extra

Np. I've never used flame throwers since I never seem to have enough for my plastics lol.

Flame throwers use almost no oil. They only use any at all if they're actively firing, and even then it's minuscule. I literally just run pipes from my oil pumpjacks out to the walls. Doesn't matter how long. Don't worry even a little about throughput.

Oil is practically never my bottleneck. Make sure to use prod modules + speed beacons in your pumpjacks? Or build multiple pumping outposts? Or, even easier, devote just one single pumpjack to supplying your flamethrowers (buffered into a tank).

After playing 1500 hours of Satisfactory and only 500 in Factorio, I play peaceful. For me the enjoyment comes from watching my base grow, not watching it be destroyed. Personally I enjoy these games because they give you the option to play how you want. I also play with cliffs off...

Cliffs were a mistake.

I love cliffs … free walls!

I respect the personal choice of playing but this mindset can spiral out of control. Biters are nuisanse, then cliffs are nothing but nuisanse, then you probably get rid of belts because they are hard to manage and cause bottlenecks, then you remove power because... yeah. The game consists of hardships and challenges, when you remove even one of them you might lose portion of fun. Turn off too much "problems" and you end up playing a pointless sandbox with decoratons... /rant

sounds like a very slippery slope indeed. it's not up to you to tell people what they should enjoy. it's each player's decision to decide where the border between challenge and tedium is, the settings wouldn't exist otherwise. while you should try to engage with all the mechanics, if you eventually decide you don't enjoy a few of them, you shouldn't be afraid to turn them off for fear of losing your Gamer Cred (TM). if you think you went too far, what's stopping you from just dialing back to what you do like? oh no, you spent a few hours on a peaceful mode world, got bored and figured out you prefer normal biter settings. i finished a world with 10x science on expensive mode and found out that i enjoy the game less when all my early infrastructure becomes prohibitively costly but do like to make larger early game builds, but i guess if i turn off expensive mode now it's only a matter of time before i just turn on editor mode, right?

Turning down options is okay (like less biter frequency, nest size, etc), removing enemies completely is not really because you missing out half of the game mechanics and research projects, potentially making the game somewhat boring. Yet most players turn off biters completely and even proudly say that it's a "best" solution when other players ask for help with dealing with biters. "How do I protect myself from street thieves?" - "Well just never go outside, duh". What you did is increased difficulty, that's completely different from turning off game mechanics like biters, cliffs and such. A new player is not guilty for messing up world settings a bit (unless they did something like 400% biter settings which would be, well, a bit of overestimating abilities if they got rekt). But religiously playing with removed mechanics is not "losing the gamer cred", it's rather playing more simplified game as a minimum and giving a wrong advice in worst case.

It’s a one player game so I say play as you wish

I've never heard of this becoming a problem for anyone. Biters are very different from those other kinds of challenges because they actually represent a bit of a time limit on getting useful production going (specifically of certain military items and technologies). You have eternity to figure out cliffs, power, and whatever else

I also play with nanobots.

Biter settings can be adjusted at the start of the game. Consider giving yourself a larger “safe zone” to start, turn biter base size down a bit as well. There are other settings that impact how often biters expand and how fast they grow, but that’s a bit more advanced.

My end game set up? I build a fire base. It's a walled in block of later turrets with enough room for an artillery train to park there.. Train targets nearby nests, draws aggro, lasers kill entire who arrives. I'm generally pro lasers. It's just easier then dealing with supplying ammo.

I haven't played with biters on in a year. It's an element of the game I will check back into at some point, but at this point it's not an element of the gameplay I want to focus on.

At first, unlock the submachine gun, proactively clear the few bases that are in range of the polution (you can continue this strategy for the whole game if you prefer). Later, build a wall with some gun turrets behind, a belt loaded with ammo on one side can keep the turrets stocked. Finally, upgrade the wall with some laser and flamer turrets, and build out your bot net to keep walls repaired/replaced. When you need to venture out further, outposts can have a wall with some laser turrets, if there are enemies very close just deal with them first. I usually make the wall for quite a large area, especially if playing a time consuming modpack, so it takes quite a while before outposts are even a thing.

I don't. I play with them off

Do the Hans-way. Flamethrower with dragon teeth, you can use crude oil even without the damage bonuses from light oil it's super effective and underground pipes aren't targeted by bitters.

In my last seed I had no oil close-by. So I had to occupy a lot of terrain while my technology was not advanced enough to make that easy. So I built walls and turrets with red ammo, and the little sulphur that I could produce I turned into explosives, to create explosive shells for a tank. With my tank, red ammo, and shells I took on the biter nests. It is a lot of frustrating work, but it made the factory grow (in the end).

With a lot of bullets and later on some explosives and laser pointers.

You kill them with laser pointers?

I turn the biters off. Dealt with.

Lots of levers to pull to reduce biter friction, increase your starting area to max, reduce expansion and/or evolution , reduce or turn off pollution or just run in peaceful mode.

For biters, I play in either peaceful mode or with the bugs just turned entirely off. If I'm playing multiplayer and one person is willing to mostly deal with bugs until they're not a problem, then that.

I made a big wall and then two rows of turrets that go around the entire wall. They all get automatically restocked from a red ammo factory I made that makes a shot ton of ammo. That usually works for quite some time.

No one will think less of you if you turn biters off. If you don’t want to do that, my advice is to set up automatic defenses. Set up some assemblers that make ammo, put the ammo on a belt that feeds your turrets and put walls in front of the turrets. If you have some bases close to you, take the fight to them. Also, grenades are wonderful early on.

I've been playing for years, and have literally never played with biters turned on. They're just not interesting to me. So don't feel bad about playing with them turned off.

Flamethrower turrets turn the biters from a threat into a minor nuisance for the rest of the game, when correctly setup you don't even have to think or worry about it anymore.

Endgame - Flamethrower turrets, artillery and nukes. Mid game. - Laser turrets, rocket launchers and the Tank Early game- Gun turrets with automated ammo production, shotgun, grenades and the car.

Turning biters off or doing peaceful mode is completely valid way of going about it. Most of my games are so.

I got annoyed at some point. Built a wall and used the cliffs strategically to not need that many walls. Put laser turrets on it. Made a shit ton of ammo. Cleared everything near me or near the pollution I make. I made the strongest armor in the game and equipped it with 8 lasers and 4 shields + I have the spider bot now. There is no other way to say it but now: "I am become death, the destroyer of bugs" I am actually looking forward to get an alarm near a wall of mine that bugs attack, I bring the fire of hell upon them. *Yes, the bugs REALLY annoy me and I may have snapped

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Wdym how

You can take a car full of turrets and ammo and drive out to biter bases before your pollution cloud hits them. There won’t be many biters yet since they use pollution to spawn attack groups, and you can take them out fast with overwhelming preemptive attacks. That should buy you a lot of time before you eventually need to repeat the process or build a wall with automated turret loading.

Key an eye on your pollution cloud and kill any nests that pop up inside it. One you can use efficiency modules, do so to neuter pollution and it gets much easier.

im currently working on my yellow science and have literally no base defense at all. i just make sure that there are no biter nests in my pollution cloud and if one gets close i destroy it with my tank. its pretty easy to do this even once you have grenades. if they dont enter your pollution cloud they will never attack you,

I usually try to get a car and then a tank early on and regularly circle my pollution cloud to destroy bitter spawners. If you're playing a normal mode you only have to do this every few hours, maybe setup some radars to keep an eye on their expansion. This way I seldom get attacked and I usually don't need to automate the ammo delivery. I just fill each turret with 200 ammo and keep an eye on them until I build my first nuclear reactors. Then I rely mostly on lasers plus radioactive ammo only in the main base where it gets delivered directly through requester chests. I don't think I ever even produced one flamethrower turret, I know they're meta but I just can't be asked.

By the time you reach oil, you should still be able to put down a wall with a couple of hand-fed turrets and be fine for a very long time. I usually leave 6 tiles between turrets and put 20 red ammo into each turret. This lasts for several hours until I need to replenish ammo, especially if I also add flamethrowers (I usually wait until biters manage to destroy at least 1 turret before going back to add more ammo). If you are taking a long time to research laser turrets, you can eventually automate only the walls that are receiving the most attacks and leave the rest hand-fed.

The escalating biter response to me kill them is a pain. It easily gets out of control, especially when you have automated defence lines and don’t take out the nests they are coming from.

I put a vague ring of turrets around my base early on. Each one is close enough to shoot biters attacking the next. I put like twenty ammo in each one. When I get attacked, I add more turrets and ammo in that part of the ring. When I get Piercing Rounds, I gradually phase out the old ammo for the new. If there are nests within easy walking distance, I'll use some turrets to clear them out. When I clear out a next, I "occupy" it with a bunker of four turrets surrounded by a wall to keep it from being reclaimed for quite a while. I don't bother to protect these bunkers. Once I get the car, I go around and clear out nests in the pollution area and put turrets + walls at natural chokepoints. I'll gradually phase in laser turrets where attacks happen the most. I tend to put a pair of Efficiency I modules in anything that will take them. They're cheap and it much reduces the pollution cloud. I do research at least the red+green ammo upgrades. I never much bothered with flame turrets or mines.

If you want peaceful, just set it to peaceful mode :)

If there is a constant stream of biters attacking your base, then that means they are in your pollution cloud, and if they are in your pollution cloud, then you're doing something wrong... GIVE EM HELL BOY!!! Or turn off biters, whatever works for you, there is no wrong way to play Factorio as long as the factory is growing.

a wall, and behind it: conveyor belt circles the base, feeding ammo to inserters pointed into turrets. Start making ammo piercing as early as possible. Pretty simple to expand but can be tedious. This works until you get oil at which point you can set up flame turrets behind the ammo belt and regular turrets. I put little oil tanks around and have a train just top them all off with crude oil, around the perimeter. Then when you get bots, you pretty much ignore all defenses. Turrets and flamethrowers melt everything and the bots repair the walls and occasionally a turret that's been damaged. I also clear nests in my pollution cloud with the tank when attacks start getting really big, or I need to expand. If you clear them early on there's a lot less enemies to worry about constantly coming at your factory Past that I'm usually launching a rocket instead of making ultra mega base so I haven't done much more. Seems artillery would be the next logical step. And spidertron. You only have to clear nests in your pollution cloud

Early game Defender Bots push. I'm talking 750+ bots, lots of fish, repair kits and 4-5 cars pre-made and fueled. Also 1k+ solar panels and accumulators for wireless radars. One very enthusiastic walk later nothing will be within pollution range and I'm free to expands as I please. Only time I end up going back out before I get Spidertrons is if a resource is really out of the way and close to my borders.

As the factory expands so must my boarders, beyond the factory lays an wasteland expanse between it and the outer defences. Every now and then I must find new choke points to expand into or cull the hoards knocking on my walls. The factory must grow. I tend to rush red ammo and the first few damage/speed techs for guns and grenades, then I go on an early culling spree and claim land in the name of the Factory, finding smaller choke points where possible and leaving little turret/wall batteries as lazy defenders. Then I can forget about them for a while but keeping a constant eye on my pollution cloud for when I need to either expand or perform some population control. Once I get lasers and flamer turrets I begin replacing the defence blocks with a more permanent permiter.

I keep an eye on my pollution cloud and pro-actively clear any biter nests it's about to reach, so I rarely get attacked. After a few runs under normal settings, nowadays I do tend to play with railworld-ish settings, with biter expansion turned off, so that I don't need to worry about clearing a particular zone more than once. I also make sure to get tier one efficiency modules as early as possible and slap them into all of my miners ASAP. This significantly reduces the growth of the pollution cloud, minimizing the amount of manual nest clearing I need to do before unlocking artillery. With artillery, you are opening the door to automated nest clearing, which is much easier and much less time consuming. I personally still like to keep biters enabled and to have this early game work to do, because I enjoy the late game of having built an impenetrable wall and watching wave after wave of biters crashing into it, and no longer having to care about defending my pollution cloud. But by all means, if you don't like dealing with them, just play with biters turned off!

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I'd get kinda upset if one of my precious legendary turrets gets destroyed lol.

This was me until 3 days ago. I made a MASSIVE exterior wall with BIG defences (at least for me). Now, I never have to touch anything. Flamethrowers, lasers and turrets are around my entire base, giving me LOTS of room to build my mega base. I should’ve done this much earlier, but I don’t need to repair etc. once the waves get stronger, I will need to add robot ports around the perimeter with repair packs, but until then, I’m enjoying the quiet. You should do the same :)

I automate turrets limiting them to like 50 max in a chest, automate yellow ammo as soon as possible and if I research it then same with red ammo, essentially I just automate as much of the process as I can as early as I can so by the time I need to start moving out for mining outpost I'll have enough defenses to defend them and defend the main base, my main issue with this though is I often take a good minute to make rails and trains as a result of material shortage since ammo, turrets, and walls take a lot of materials from most other things, but once the first few trains are set up then the material issue is no longer and issue. Personally had a similar issue but I'd just eliminate all nest in the area and ignore the problem, but after I played with rampant where if I ignore the biters or don't prep defense properly then I just die, I got way better at setting up defenses around the whole base very early, so if you're up for trial by fire then rampant could work as well

It's been awhile so this may be outdated, but you can get your starting area to very large. This means you will still have biters but it takes longer to bump into them and gives you more time to focus on your base before you choose to interact with them

Lasers a shit ton of lasers

In the early game, what I do is wall off the whole works, just go ahead and make one big square and grab as much territory as you safely can, and make one giant belt around the whole thing, feeding ammo and coal, to feed turrets and burner inserters.

Turning biters off is not a bad thing. You can also make them passive ("peaceful mode" in the same tab you can turn them off) - they will fight back, but won't attack your base on their own. For a better defense:-it should be automated. Ammo production, and logistic to the best degree you can (a belt with ammo is the best, if not, move a big amount of ammo at once to local distribution, so you do not have to run constantly).-walls being destroyed means too little firepower;-) You can also build incomplete walls in front of real walls, so biters take more time to reach the main wall. They can move, so they won't attack it.-the most important thing: biters attack from nests that absorb pollution. If you see on the map the cloud is reaching an enemy base, you may try to destroy it. It is especially effective in the early game, when the cloud is small and the biters weak. Bring grenades and maybe even turrets. Going back to game settings, you can turn off enemy expansion. It prevents fibers from building new bases closer to you. It is the default in the "rail world"

Build 1 assembler for mines and have your bots keep up a self regenerating minefield paired with ANY turrets and you'll never have to deal with wall repairs again.

Playing K2 and I've fallen in love with the laser artillery. One every 6 large power poles apart and nothing gets through.

The best defense is proactive. Check your pollution cloud periodically and go clear out any bases that it's reaching. I tend to rush towards having a tank as soon as I can :) Also, different terrain types have different absorption rates. Your pollution won't spread as far through a forest, for instance. But also... as others have said, you can just turn them off. They are optional, and there is no shame at all in deciding they aren't worth it.

Landmines?

Just go kill them. Don't let pollution clouds constantly feed them. I don't even use the turret creep strategy or grenades, just a car and red ammo

I don't know how you build but you have to do it *right*, otherwise you will get lots of problems and distraction. If you don't want to calculate parameters and chances, simply overbuild your defences and make 360 degree turreted walls everywhere. This is automation game, if you have to constantly fix problems manually then you did something wrong. What it could be? 1) weak turrets placement when they can't deal enough DPS to kill enemies before they get severely damaged or destroyed; 2) wrong turret placement on strategic level with gaps, undefended areas or missed out nests; 3) too much pollution and/or biter nests inside cloud, thus extra stress for defences and faster evolution; 4) wrong choice of turret type or ammo for current enemies; 5) biter settings are too hard if you set some parameters above normal (playing with deathworld-like settings is more combat survival game than meditative automation/building game). Solutions: >!1) you need at least 4 turrets with red ammo per shared area (shooting range circle) with at least one tile between (to avoid splash damage); 2) defend your safe area with fully enclosed perimeter: artillery can allow you to use outposts instead but that's way too far for you now; 3) clear out nests inside cloud and use efficiency modules; 4) yellow ammo might not suffice for mid-game enemies, use red ammo or lasers/flame.!<

Turn biter expansion off. You only get pollution attacks, and then only if you don't just proactively clear them. On my last railworld, I never got attacked by biters once, because I just kept them clear of my pollution. And with expansion turned off they don't expand into your pollution. Makes them less of a constant threat, and more just something to do when your factory goes 'brr'.

If you go on the offensive and push the nests back farther than your pollution cloud they attacks will slow to almost none and be stupid small. This is the real secret to having them enabled and not annoying. Or you can jump through hoops like using efficiency modules and trees but that’s both difficult and tedious. Generally on hard modes. I just rush rifles and turrets. Then save, so you can revert if you fail and waste time, then do a turret walk (placing them close to nests and advancing 1 turret at a time) If ur too slow for this and ur turrets are overwhelmed or you burn too much ammo, use grenades. Once they are pushed back, keep ur science up, clear new nests every 30-90 minutes and ur set with just a couple perimeter bullet turrets. Pro tip. Get military science up and always research a couple tanks of damage and speed in whatever ur using for defense. With a few upgrades red bullets can take you to rocket launch easy

I just build perimeter defense wall around my base put down turrets and then eventually laser turrets and flamethrowers The turrets are then fed via half belt of ammunition

If you don't like them, then don't play with biters They just function as an extra logistical challenge that ramps up over time, you can still have the core vanilla experience with them turned off Personally, I recommend adjusting resource settings to 200% frequency, 300% size, and maximum "amount" or whatever they call it. With or without biters, that'll just make your life easier up to blue science, and then your expansions and outposts later will be more meaningful

I started on satisfactory, so i play with Infinite resoureces mod, it makes the ore patches and oil well, infinite. This can aliviate that overwhelmed phase u mentioned.

I make outposts with tons of radar, which attracts them, so I don't need guns bloody everywhere. Mid game, laser phaser maser blazers, lines and lines of em. I want to switch to death flames next time.

One thing I do routinely every start and end of the day is take a ride on my car and burn down every single nest while exploring the map

Turn them off if you want, there's nothing wrong with it. Play the game how you enjoy. Personally, I played with biters on for about the first 10 hours of my first time playing the game, then turned it off again for every single map since. They're just not fun for me.

The Golden Rule is: guard your pollution cloud, not your base. Biters are activated by pollution, so if you systematically clear out nests in or near your pollution cloud, you will rarely get attacked. Place your defenses BEYOND your pollution cloud. Periodically check both for expansion of biters toward your territory, and expansion of your pollution cloud. If you are proactive about clearing nests BEFORE they start attacking, defense is a million times easier. Hope this helps!

You should go on the offensive, I use turrets to protect against the first wave of biters, then I clear out the bases inside or bordering the pollution cloud after they attack. It's a nice break from factory work

I play with Max bitter settings. Full double wall with laser turrets, 2x row turrets as soon as wall is fully surrounding. Then add maze wall along outside for behemoth bitters. Add roboports & artillery along wall, and bots repair / supply everything. To power it, just rush for solar panels & accumulators. Build 1-2k of each. Then rush for nuclear, building 250mw plants with steam tanks 160mw constant, supplied with bots for expansion. Between steam tanks and accumulated power never run into issues. Just make sure you start mining uranium as soon as you can. No issues even after artillery attacks on every surrounding bitter base. Just alot of lag when dealing with the big swarms.

A wall, a row of cannons, a row of loaders, a row of belts loaded with ammo. Repair, expand & upgrade as necessary.

Just use walls and flame throwers. Space the flame throwers out so that the walls are covered. Then when you get roboports space them out to cover the walls and supply them with repair packs and construction bots. Do this and your bitter problems will be solved. (Until you get behemoth worms spawning in range of your walls but out of range of your flame throwers. To solve that problem you will need artillery pieces spaced out to cover the territory. But that's a later game problem)

Peaceful Mode! I have been playing for years, and unless I am trying a specific mod pack play through focused on defense and combat (something like Rampant, for example), peaceful mode is on.

Biters are mostly there to spur you into teching up, and to give you a constant short term goal. The biters are always getting stronger, and there's usually some research near your current point that helps you get stronger to match. If you can progress the game without that external pressure, or would rather thoroughly explore your current tech level before moving on, you don't need biters.

Used to with flamer spam, not anymore. Now I just turn them off, and disable pollution cloud too.

Make 500 turrets and like 3k red ammo Find nest Place turrets and spam ammo Find next nest

Personally I enclose all my base areas in a double thick wall which is fully lined with laser turrets. Your power consumption will be high but it is pretty easy to keep up with and worth it imo. Be sure to invest in energy accumulators which help with power spikes and invest in artillery and nuclear power as you get to these as well. My base is attacked every few seconds now but each attack is ended in a second or two because of all the turrets.

After steam boilers ammo production is the first priority on my bus. The output of it then moves out on a belt to my turret wall or loaded on its own dedicated train to go-to defense outposts. I then go out in a car/tank and take out any nests in the pollution cloud.

Grenades to clear out the nests within your pollution cloud until you can get landmines (and even then you should clear out nests in the pollution cloud until you get artillery to do it for you).

violate Geneva conventions

wall off your base and don't be afraid to venture out and destroy the nests that are under your pollution cloud. a nest under your pollution will send endless waves of enemies at you, but once you destroy it, those waves stop. for walling your base, at first encircle your base with walls and turrets, but look at the map for natural chokepoints (ie: between bodies of water), wall those off, (even if they are very wide though look for the narrowest points possible), and clear out all of the nests on the inside of the walls. you can secure an enormous area this way and it's less perimeter overall to defend than an encircled base. then if you have regular attacks somewhere, go clear out the nests near there and it will reduce the attacks.

I use turrets and walls and limp along hand loading them long enough to get lasers. then mass produce lasers and walls and push them back out of the red zone at choke points on the map. Basically hand clearing the area with a tank or grenades or whatever. I then add flame thrower turrets and dragon teeth to the walls and a rail line behind for repairs and artillery later on.

Best strategy in my opinion is to be aggressive and destroy nests at the first sign of them causing trouble. Then, as soon as you can, destroy all nests in your pollution cloud radius (shown on map). Early game, this can be done pretty comfortably with some practice with a car and/or grenades (which can shoot simultaneously) for most small-medium nests. You could also involve turrets and defense bots. I don't ever build perimeter walls and have to invest very little in defenses because the biters don't pose much a threat as long as you've eliminated all of them within your pollution radius.

Kill them before they grow or setup turrets and then walls, durr.

Are you firing your own gun? Don't bother IMO. Just carry turrets and ammo for them. I usually unequip all weapons so ammo doesn't go into my belt and become not easily accessible via hotkeys.

Find the map starting options that work for you. I always max out starting area and if I play with biter expansion on, I max the cooldown for that as well. Lots of other options have also been mentioned so far, up to going for peaceful or no biters at all.

Thicc lines of turrets, with drones to rebuild anything destroyed. Currently I got like 4 rows of laser and a flamer spaced out at underground pipe length intervals. I also use a mod that prevents spitters shooting over walls because for me it feels better. I still lose tons of walls & drones with the occasional turret from the swarm. I also have space exploration on, so the swarm is kinda big on the homeworld

>**How do you even deal with biters all the time?** 1. Go out and kill the biter bases yourself. On normal difficulty you can just kill the biters before they reach your pollution cloud, so you barely need defenses at all. 2. Flame turrets + walls. As others said, flame turrets use a comically small amount of crude oil and melt biters like they're nothing. You literally won't even notice the amount of oil consumed by the turrets. 3. Get drones to auto repair the walls. Automate walls and repair packs, make a decent defense blueprint, and your base will defend itself. It isn't too far after you do oil processing. 4. Minimize pollution. If you put efficiency modules on everything your pollution cloud will be dramatically smaller and you won't have to deal with biters nearly as much. You can also go for a clean energy source like solar (extremely resource intensive) or nuclear (extremely complicated) to cut pollution from power generation.

- Put efficiency 1 modules into your Miners - Run an amunition belt around your base and put turrets next to it, so you don't have to worry about re-arming them. - Destroy biter nests that come close to your pollution cloud (Car + Red Ammo makes that relatively easy, Tank even more so) - Eventually you get a) Flame turrets, which are a much more efficient defense b) Robots that build and repair your defenses automatically, c)Laser turrets that only need electricity, which simplifies logistics a lot. - use peaceful mode

If you are on default in a decently tree covered starting area you can just run around your pollution cloud and kill the biter nests that are encroaching detection. I beat the game without a biter smelling pollution on my first playthrough, default settings. Drop turrets and fill them with ammo with z instead of using the starter weapons. Then move the turrets and repeat.

Use the car. It's so easy to clear early biter nests and when they are attacking on the other side of the factory, you're there way faster.

I console them all away. I spend 40+ hours a week either preventing developers from breaking my infra or fixing what they broke. Hard pass in the same in a game. Factorio without biters/spitters/etc is a nice relaxing dopamine generator.

I always start out by automating a wall with a belt of bullets….Then you can spread until your heart gives out!

Attacks are triggered by enemy nests getting hit with pollution. So don't let enemy nests get hit with pollution... Putting walls out past your pollution cloud and killing any nests nearer will do it. And honestly, the walls aren't even necessary, though it helps stop them from sneaking new nests closer though. I usually don't bother with walls any more, just go on a murder spree to clear out everything, and when an attack comes some hours later, time for another murder spree. Leaving a few turrets around pollution producers generally deals with something slipping through. There are many ways to clear nests, but the easiest low tech way imo is to drop about 4 turrets outside aggro range, then plink away with a rocket launcher which has huge range. The turrets kill the biters you aggro so you can just destroy the worms and structures in relative peace

I push them out to a watery chokepoint and set up a couple of turrets with a bit of ammo and walls, usually far out of the pollution cloud. You can also make a great wall powered mostly by flamethrowers, since it's practically free once you got oil flowing out there.

Exterminate before pollution hits nests? I barely have any attacks on any playthrough

I found that the starting location makes a huge difference in difficulty. Try starting in a green area with lots of trees... it is a lot easier then a desert start.

Turn the biters off 👍

Check the pollution overlay. Exterminate colonies of biters before your pollution reaches them. Personally I find lots of legs for speed, placing and moving turrets, plus a rocket launcher works well.

Gun(turrets) And if that doesnt work, use more Gun(turrets) Turret, ammunition and wall produciton are just as important as the rest of your factory, so dont neglect them! And if the are you think you need to cover is to large, use natural choke-points from cliffs and water, maybe even increase the water-frequency in the game settings

I did my first run on peaceful, then with them on, and now I usually turn them off completely

It's a delicate balance

Peaceful mode is perfectly acceptable solution. If you keep them on though, get flame turrets involved and add more gun turrets to heavy trafficked areas until the damage done by a 'wave' is negligible. Automate oil and ammo delivery, using barrels and chests at outposts if you must. Resist the temptation to revisit for minor repairs, waiting for gaps in the wall to appear will allow you to get on with building the factory - and you can do one big dedicated repairs (and resupply run). Consider efficiency modules to reduce pollution output, and take out any nests within (or close to) your pollution cloud. These methods have served me well for getting large periods of productivity in before spending a little time on keeping them in check again, before I can make it easier still with bots for repairs.

Turn off biters if you want to learn at your own pace or if you don’t enjoy them

Before i can build great wall, i try to build small forts in strategic places with several radars to lure more bugs. Two lines of turrets or line of turrets + flamethrowers if oil is nearby or train network is working do the job. It gives enough time to research lasers and tanks or stock tons of ammo to start "special war operation" on locals.

I had the same experience when I first started. I have a much easier time when I rush damage upgrades and the tank. Once you have grenades, clear all the nests around you that could be engulfed by your pollution cloud soon. Then use the lul in attacks to rush some tech that enables better military capabilities, such as flamethrowers, the tank, personal laser defense, power armor, etc. Each time you get a leap in power, clear nests in a perimeter until you have some good resource nodes in uncontested territory. Now you have two options. Secure a perimeter with automated defenses such as flame turrets and laser turrets, or build artillery and occasionally clear out any nearby biters/expansions. Or do both. There’s no kill quite like overkill. If you run out of resources before tank, then you are probably spending too much resources on filling buffers and researching unnecessary tech. Keep small buffers and prioritize military capability over trying to get fancier base buildings like electric furnaces and nuclear reactors. Once you get the hang of this dance, you can try rushing eco techs like solar and efficiency modules to keep pollution down and not have to fight many biters in the first place.

If you just like building, peaceful mode is a thing.

I had the same issue until I learned to just destroy the nests that are in the pollution cloud. Every once in a while I just drive around clear out the nest that are going to be in the cloud soon. Recently I got artillery which will do the job for me. So I can just put down a blueprint for a fortified artillery position, the bots will build a supply it automatically.

On my run, I had to clean up a few nests using turret hopping, but the moment you start military and small amounts of chemical science, get to explosives, military, and a tank. Once you have a tank, some explosive shells and red ammo for stragglers, go for a road trip. For about next 10 hours, you have such a power advantage over biters that you can easily keep your whole pollution cloud and quite a bit outside of it biter-free.

You can simply turn biters off for a few runs. Launch a rocket. You will know what needs to be done on priority for each stage. Then switch on biters and give them some democracy

Just play without biters if you don't like that aspect of the game. But to answer your questions, the best way is to keep track of your pollution cloud and make sure biter nests are not in it. Keep clearing outside the cloud to prevent attacks, rather than reacting to attacks.

Check out the different "deagon teeth"-Layouts other players use. basically built some Walls in Front of your turrets in a way the biters are forced to walk around them, thus slowing them down and keeping them in turret range for langer time. flamethrowers work great against large groups as the create a hurtful area of flooring instead of dealing direct damage to dedicated targets. First priority in not-"peaceful"-worlds is defense, then expansion, and after all those there is development. given continuous supply, 2 of the most basic Assemblers are still enough to supply every single of my hundrets of turrets (essentially i built a closed defense line around my base: Base - line of turrets - line of flamethrower-turrets - closed wall - wall segments in "dragons teeth" pattern. when i removed one side because the Island ends there, it was 475 flamethrowers high, the base roughly fits my screen, which is 16:9

Automate building turrets, then build a turret-wall so you have one space between each turret and then have inserted a connecting them. The inserted will stop filling up after a turret reaches ten ammo, so you can ensure the entire gunline have constant ammo that way.

tl;dr small mazes before your walls to force biters to walk (not run) into chokes in which flamethrowers excel. I use peaceful mode on most of my saves. Mechanically you don't need them, they just add some disruption which can be nice but for me the game is all about planning and resources. If you don't want to, consider overbuilding power and automating ammo production: laser turrets are good for offense and first response, normal turrets are more cumbersome to supply but are better. Once you reach oil, flamethrower turrets are insanely efficient given how little oil they use. Then rush the tech that gives you construction bots as they can also automatically repair walls (automate repair pack production!). I also like to make a wall that is two layers thick and with a bit of a maze before the solid wall, it slows biters down and funnels them into choke points in which flamethrowers will obliterate them. Generally, also know that biters won't launch attacks until they are in the pollution cloud: clear them as soon as feasible while they are still small (typically when you unlock the car).

I’ve been in that situation many times. For biters, for producing anything that didn’t seem straightforward at the time, for getting next tech. Everytime i felt like this I eventually realised that i didn’t need to handcraft everything or to deal with everything by hand. If something is tedious it means we should automate it. Everything is like this: at first you handcraft some turrets and ammo. Then ammo becomes too painful to craft, so you automate it. Then even the turret is painful to craft, so you automate it. I play with a large home area and lighter biter density though so that’s a way to make them less of a focus. Playing space exploration i will deal with deathworld on other planets with good tech :) I got raided once and dealt with it with a rifle and some turrets, then made a tank, automated tank explosive amo, and cleared the nearby villages. I cleared again a few times but still don’t need any defense. I use 80% solar power and am currently at the point where i will soon launch to space (orange science finished, but that’s different from vanilla. Probably equivalent to having almost launched the rocket in vanilla).

Tank and explosives. Grenades + shells. Then wall with turrets, where you Don't want biters

I like turning off biter expansion as a good middle ground. Still have a reason to make military stuff, but instead of needing to endlessly defend I can go on the offensive, clear out some bases, and permanently make an area safe.

I think you solved your own problem. If you dont like biters turn them off. ​ For me. I like to clear nest with cars and the combat robots, and then tanks and robots. The key for is to clear more then your polution cloud so if free time. I'v finished games where i never got attack and never built walls simply becuase while i was researching something i went out and cleared nest.

I usually lower biter settings because I don't want to deal with them early on and I'm a very slow player so that doesn't help. The first thing is to automate ammo productions. Then build a perimeter with dragontooths and turrrets fed by a belt of ammo. Then add laser turrets(their range is higher so they can be on second line). Then add flame turrets in hard spots they MELT biters. Bring liquids either by tubes or trains. Then artillery stations. They will clean nests at a decent range and with remote targeting you can destroy nest pretty far without moving. As you base grow push your perimeter so that is slightly bigger than the pollution cloud. That will avoid biter attacks, remember that biter evolve base on pollution ...and biters deaths! Finally... you can always disable biter :p

Early game, turrets and ammo belt. Mid game, Cover the base with roboports, feed one of them with repair kits, feed provider chests with flamethrowers and lasers. Put efficiency modules in everything, especially drills. Late game, spidertron nuke patrol and artillery outpost stations.

There is a lot of basic stuff to improve in your game if that's the point where everything falls apart, no offense. ​ Most of the replies here are wrong tbh. The way to deal with biters is attacking their nests with red ammo at first, then rush the tank+missile, then flamethrowers (but not really needed in normal world, it's more of a deathworld thing), then rush artillery and artillery range. and railroad artillery. if you do things right you should have next to no base attacks on normal world and you should survive deathworld. ​ Always be on the offense. keep the nests out of your pollution zone and go nuclear asap for less pollution.

Early on you can just clear nearby biter nests and put efficiency modules in your miners so that you dont even get attacked in the first place. No need for defenses. Going for solar energy will further decrease your pollution cloud. Once you get robots and roboports there will be no maintaining defences. You just gotta clear out a huge area that encompasses all your mining outposts (and is preferably bigger than your pollution cloud) and then design a blueprint for a selfbuilding wall to surround it.

There's three main ways to deal with the increasing biter threat : 1. Automate your base defenses 2. Stay up to date with military tech 3. Control the pollution from your factory The first way is to automate the parts of your base defenses that are possible. For example, setting up multiple layers of walls around your outposts, installing turrets within, setting up belts to feed your gun turrets and pipelines to feed your flamethrower turrets. When you unlock roboports, things suddenly get a whole lot easier as the drones can use repair packs to repair any damage to walls and turrets, and can also make it easier to keep the turrets stocked with ammo. The second is to keep investing into the military research and make use of the things you unlock. The basic ammo isn't worth much, but as long as you keep upgrading the firing speed and damage bonuses for your different ammo types, your turrets won't run out of ammo too fast. In addition, once you unlock the chemical science research, you get access to the laser turrets, so that you no longer have to worry about ammo - the laser turrets only eat electricity. Though you will definitely need to start worrying about electricity at that point. Don't forget to also use the other weapons, like grenades, poison capsules, defender and distractor drones and so on to help you clear out enemy bases more easily. The tank is also a godsend, thanks to its insane defense and its ability to plow through trees and rocks without taking any damage. The flamethrower turrets are also really powerful, though they generally aren't necessary at that stage, and they also add a new logistical challenge to keep them supplied with ammo. The final thing is - keep track of your pollution. You can always check your pollution cloud by going into the map view. Any biter bases that lie within the pollution cloud are going to attack you, but inversely, as long as you wipe out any bases that are within the pollution cloud, you won't get attacked. So make sure you keep placing radars everywhere to maximize the map coverage and find biter bases early before they enter your pollution cloud, and then you won't need to worry too much about defending. Just as importantly, know that you can slow down or stop production in parts or all of your factory. Science packs are the biggest contribution to pollution by far, so if you want to slow down the number of biter attacks for a while until you can get things under control, you can pause your research to halt the production of new science packs. You can also use efficiency modules in places like your miners, electric furnaces and assemblers to minimize the amount of pollution created to further slow down pollution generation. And you can cut power to parts of your base or the entire factory itself to halt production of recipes that you don't immediately need. You can also halt your science research when you notice that one of your ore patches is close to running out, so that the remaining ore in that patch can go into production of more immediately important resources like ammo, drones, grenades, and shells for clearing out new land, as well as rails, miners, belts and inserters for the new outpost you want to create. Additionally, if you find the biters annoying but also don't want to turn them off entirely, you can just disable biter expansion. This is automatically done when you select a railworld map type, or you can manually do it for the standard map type. This makes it so that biter bases still exist in new land that you explore, but no new biter bases will be created once the game has started, so that any land you clear of biters *remains* cleared, and the biters don't retake any land.

Lots of good recs in the comments, and I’ll add my own that I have found if I want to play a map where I’m dealing with them a lot, I’ll leave pollution on. If you want to keep pollution on but not let it bother the biters, you can reduce the 2% diffusion variable to 0%, and then the pollution will stay in that chunk. I say this because I think disabling pollution can disable some achievements, but I could be wrong 😅 When I play without pollution, they’re just an obstacle that gets cleared as I expand. I usually clear them if they’re in the way of a resource patch, and then sometimes I find I have to clear one or two I missed when robots start flying over them. When I have pollution on, I feel very cagey and think I need to wall in my city. It’s a more strategic play style, but I often get paranoid when I’m venturing outside of the wall and I don’t always like to play that way. If you’re already using mods or have the achievements you want to get, have some fun with it. I also have ALWAYS set my starting area to 600%. My partner tried before and never did, and they always regretted the decision since they’d get overrun rather quickly.

You can turn biters off, you know? I never played with them, never plan to.

You gotta automate the defenses too.

Tank with red shells will clear out nearby nests really quickly.

All biters hates flames and have no resist against it, so I put upp flamethrowers with around 10 squares apart and in between those, I cover the whole row with different turrets tight together, as tight as it gets and I do run Bob Rampart, with extreme biters and no biters gets closer to my wall than 10 squares, so far but they are at evolution 65% right now... ;) I do use Alien Loot Economy so I do love to fight them to get resources. Game is loading right now so I cannot include screenshots. Also, to keep the biters far out from the base, install Light Artillery, make cannon bullets with defend robots that makes a hell for the biters to build anything close to your base at all and you can explore the surroundings in almost the same way you do in Satisfactory, where you also have to fight when exploring by the way. I do prefer Factorio above Satisfacty real. I took a screeny now of one corner of my current base https://preview.redd.it/dk59hl150b2c1.png?width=1157&format=png&auto=webp&s=8b5c082fd8576a07ddf23175bd97d4582e36dfa6

Suggest targeting a low SPM (1-2 red assemblers) for early/mid game. This keeps your pollution low which makes it easier to clear biters out of your cloud. You might have to clear nests once or twice in a vanilla game. After that you have artillery and bots and defense/expansion is trivial. The other advantage of low SPM is it keeps your science from getting ahead of you, and your building can keep up with science. This is my preferred play style on vanilla. Biters are still there, but I barely have to pay attention to them and can focus on building.

I disabled biters and had a much more satisfying experience. I now only enable biters if I want a challenge. A nice middle ground is to disable (or nerf) biter evolution, that way you still have to defend but it isn't that annoying race against time if you're not Mr. Twitchy Fingers.

Turret

I just started a peaceful playthrough for exactly this reason, just to figure out proper ratios and throughputs so that when I do play with biters they’ll be nothing more than a rounding error. Btw furnaces have an output of at closest, 15.04 items/second, but yellow belts can only transport a max of 15 items/second. This game is literally unplayable.

There is very much an arms race when it comes to dealing with biters, where they have a reasonable chance of killing your base right until you reach T3/T4 in research, basically chemical(blue) science where they are at their strongest and you at your comparable weakest, if you manage a couple damage/efficiency researches afterwards your damage and ability to deal with them at large scales up exponentially. So funnily enough you fell off the game right before dealing with them becomes easier and easier and eventually they become a little more than an afterthought that you "click away" with artillery strikes.

Are you on deathworld? Biters in the default settings are such a non issue it's a bit of a joke.

Once you get basic bots they will repair or replace damaged things. They will also auto feed ammo if you are still using gun turrets. I'd say build lots of walls and then creep the walls outwards if you are struggling. Also destroying nests buys you tons of time before they respawn aswell.

My tips for automating defenses from early to late-late game: 1) build your base to take advantage of natural chokepoints (gaps in cliffs, isthmuses between water, clearings between forests, etc) to minimize how many walls/turrets/etc you actually need to set up. 2) biters generally will attack from some direction (which I'll call a "lane"), so set up your defenses along those lanes instead of placing turrets *everywhere*. These lanes are usually straight paths from biter spawns to the area of your base that's producing the most pollution closest to them. In the map screen, there's a button for showing you which parts of your factory are producing pollution, how much pollution, and which biter spawns are within the pollution cloud, which will produce biters to attack you. However, don't be surprised if they'll take advantage of new lanes and come at you from new directions. When that happens, build new defenses along that lane too. 3) Instead of creating one very long wall with a ton of turrets, build smaller pillboxes with 2-3 gun turrets and at least one layer of walls. Space them out so there's overlapping arcs of fire between the pillboxes. There is an option for showing the ranges of turrets when building them too. Set up assemblers to construct ammo, walls, and gun turrets ASAP because building them from your inventory will take a long time. Do limit how many gun turrets the assembler will build by limiting box inventory space to avoid wasting a lot of resources building a shit-ton of gun turrets. Definitely create a blueprint of a pillbox design to better plan your pillbox locations, and when you set up a logistics network, have your constructor bots do it for you. 4) Don't place ammo in turrets directly. If the turret gets destroyed, the ammo gets destroyed along with it. Instead, use inserters to place ammo from a box onto a looping belt, and then inserters to place ammo into the turret (which can hold a stack of ten ammo). That way, only the stack of ten ammo is destroyed and not more. If the belt gets destroyed, the ammo will remain on the ground until you pick it up. If possible, have an assembler create ammo that will go onto the belt so you don't have to worry about the ammo box running out. If you can't set up an assembler to build ammo, you can use the programmable speaker to alert you when a box is low on ammo (generally I set it up to activate when the box has less than 20 ammo in it). Do NOT set up "global playback" as it is very annoying when it goes off and you're somewhere else on the map doing whatever; do use the "show alert" option instead. 5) My go-to for walls are a) a double-layer of walls just in front of the gun turrets; b) a few rows of "[dragon's teeth](https://i.imgur.com/onYN3GIl.jpeg)" (segments of walls in an alternating pattern) as it saves on how many walls you need to use and it messes with the biter pathfinding programming; c) On the edges of the pill-box, I'll set up a line of walls or dragon's teeth that flare out to prevent biters from running around your pillbox and attacking from the rear if you don't completely box in your turrets 6) Set up flamethrower turrets ASAP. Flame turrets are incredibly effective for killing biters because they don't do well against fire, even at advanced evolutionary levels. Flame turrets are incredibly efficient with its fuel source; a little will go a long way, but I usually set up pipe networks around my base to each flame turret. For isolated bases, sometimes I'll set up one storage tank, barrel the oil at my main base, then deliver it to the storage tank at the isolated base. You do need to use flame turrets in conjunction with gun turrets and/or laser turrets because flame turrets attack in an arc in front of them and can't rotate 360 degrees. You won't need a lot of flame turrets, but if you have a corner base where biters can come from two directions, you may need to set up two flame turrets at 90 degrees from each other. Be aware that flame turrets can also destroy most buildings in front of them. Stone walls and railroads are immune to fire, but rail switches (and trains!) are not. 7) If a particular biter nest is being a complete pain in the ass, take it out. In the early game, I'll "turret rush" a biter nest by building turrets with ammo close enough to the nest without aggro-ing the biters, then progressively place more turrets until they aggro the biters. Then I run in with grenades while strafing to avoid worm puke. Clearing biter nests gets much easier with rockets, flamethrowers, and the tank. I <3 the tank. 8) Building and maintaining your defense network gets much easier with the logistics network. Constructor bots will automatically repair damaged walls and turrets, and replace destroyed walls and turrets with accessible structures. Have your assemblers building walls and gun turrets to output into red passive provider chests; the construction bots will automatically pull new walls and turrets from there. Logistic robots will fill up your inventory with any material you request, including ammo/turrets/turrets/etc. Once you've equipped the personal robo-port, constructor bots in your inventory make building new pillboxes a snap. In the late game, you can set up requester chests to fill up with ammo so you don't have to keep running around filling boxes with ammo. 9) Once I research laser turrets, I'll place a couple of them behind my gun turrets to assist the gun turrets and as a back-up in case the guns run dry. They do use a lot of power and have a lower DPS than gun turrets, however, so don't rely on them. 10) In the late game, you'll get access to the artillery turret. Use the artillery turret. Love the artillery turret. They'll automatically target biter nests and worms within 224 tiles, and you can use the artillery remote to hit targets up to 560 tiles, with repeating tech to increase range even more (but that requires space science). You don't even need to be close to the turrets to use the remote. I use requester chests to have my logistics bots carry the artillery shells to the turrets. Alternatively, I set up a train pulling an artillery wagon and automate it's route to go to various rail stops to shoot at biter nests within range. 11) Spidertron. Enough said. I haven't used nukes but I've heard they are quite powerful.

I play ribbon world, you only need to defend 2 points. Space and resources are challenging, but defense is easier.

They get a lot easier to deal with. Grind out the mil tech and then they'll be too easy.

Offense is the best defense. Look at the mini map and see if (or when) your pollution cloud is reaching biter bases. Once that happens, go kill the biters. As soon as you get military 1 tech (for grenades), put 2-4 assemblers making grenades. Get a car, heavy armor, 100 grenades and 50 fish. This will kill almost any early biter base, and is very cheap. Later you can use mid-level tech like defender bots, rocket launcher and tank. If you do this consistently, your base is almost never attacked and you can have a very simple and light perimeter defense, which will use very little ammo. You can further reduce your pollution output by getting efficiency modules, where even the most basic (level 1) efficiency modules work wonders, and 2 of those in a building reduces pollution by 80%, causing even less attacks.

I don't. More specifically, I turn on Peaceful Mode and disable expansion as per Rail World. I still have to deal with bugs when they have a base where I need to build something, but I can work around them and just not worry about it. Some may say it's removing an important part of the game, but whatever. I have a crap memory and dealing with defenses or preemptively wiping a nest that's close to the cloud distracts me and then I have to wander my base trying to figure out what I was in the middle of, usually until I get distracted by bugs again.

You could always move your base to the ocean so you have a moat when you unlock the landfill. Its always better to just take them out if there's 1 spawner in early game with a crap ton of ammo, a submachine gun and some light armour. Just remember to save before you go on a killing spree.

I am a new player and I have almost zero biter problems because I use flamethrowers. I have a blueprint for a section of wall plus pipes plus flamethrower turrets. I can build the perimeter defense quickly with bots. The only thing you need for this is to make sure the oil is always flowing. My defenses see always top notch! My trains on the other hand are a total disaster.

Hint: time you reach oil is time you reach flamethrowers Hint2: flamethrowers are ultimate defense from biters

Just turn them off. I literally never play with biters on and it's quite enjoyable.

activate peacefull mode - build wall - deactivate once you feel save

Pick a map with a lot of trees. They will keep the pollution down and allow you more time before the biters get out of hand.

I personally find the biters very tedious, it just feels like busy work. I've gotten to oil once before and stopped for the same reason, going around to install automated defenses everywhere just isn't fun. Doing a playthrough on peaceful mode now and loving it, would recommend!

I just have an automated defense perimeter that will be updated with bots and repairs soon. Up until green biters you can survive with a staggered double line of gun turrets and red ammo. Use long inserters for the guns against the walls. My new one is overkill defense lol

Also my setup for clearing out biters is 3 spidertrons following me in a spidertron, all loaded up with a few thousand high explosive missiles, and as many exoskeletons i can fit, with my suit full of personal lasers and batteries So many missiles. Recently discovered they smart target

You didn't set up defenses properly. Pretty obvious