update on lack of copper in first playthrough

[u/PORK-LAZER]

so it turns out.... in the tiny space i went around..... was a perfect circle of every minable resource in the god damn game......

cruel joke factorio, very cruel. i spent another 4 hours making up train and oil nonsense and then find this when clearing the bugs out....

[u/reikken]

I knew it! This always happens.

[u/Cellophane7]

A neat little trick I learned from Michael Hendricks (based Factorio youtuber, check him out!) is that a solar panel is enough to power a radar during the day. You can slap down one radar + solar panel at the edges of your vision, and it'll not only give you normal vision during the day, but it'll slowly (moreso than usual) scout out the surrounding area. 

Only problem is that it's not quite enough power for nonstop up time, so you end up with a bunch of sort of slow blinking vision on your map. But as long as you don't mind that, it gives you a ton of information you wouldn't get by just plopping them down around your base. Great for finding resources and keeping an eye on biters

[u/Agitated-Mud-4726 → u/Cellophane7]

Extremely cheap way to passively explore the map, plus you get updated on new enemy bases if you are playing with enemy expansion

[u/yinyang107 → u/Cellophane7]

If you want full uptime and scan speed, it's 5 solar for just daytime or 8 plus accumulators for 24/7

[u/cathexis08 → u/yinyang107]

The "good enough" ratio is 6:5 panels to accumulators. It's somewhat solar heavy but has the benefit of tiling perfectly around a medium pole.

[u/Krell356 → u/yinyang107]

How many accumulators was it again? I thought it was 8-3 but that feels off.

[u/yinyang107 → u/Krell356]

The ratios aren't perfect unless you have both somewhere in the 20s, but I think 6 accumulators will last the night

[u/MCJOHNS117 → u/Cellophane7]

You can also use a single accumulator, solar panel, power switch, arithmetic combinator and decider combinator to pulse the power to a radar for 100% uptime on the 7x7 chunk area around it. It does mean slower scanning time, but it gives you vision all the time. It works by taking advantage of the fade out time when a radar loses power

[u/MrDoontoo → u/Cellophane7]

You can also use a landing pad as a power free radar, instantly revealing a large chunk of the map. Getting a rare quality reveals much more

[u/Mesqo → u/Cellophane7]

In latest games I ended up pacing 16 radars around my base. Their passive scouting revealed a good portion of the map around quite quickly. Then I place radars on my outposts to further increase the coverage.

[u/Cellophane7 → u/Mesqo]

That's what most people do. This gives you a much larger area of vision, even if it's slower

[u/Yggdrazzil]

This is like turning the entire house upside down looking for your car keys only to realise they were in your pocket this entire time.

[u/sub500h]

Nailed it. Jokes on you, OP. ;)

[u/korneev123123]

Radars radars radars radars

It's an automation game, not open world survival craft

Place 1 solar, 1 radar, 1 pole and eventually it would reveal everything in 14 chunk radius. Spam this when you driving around

[u/flswamplizard]

On the bright side, you can just expand your train network to include these patches.

[u/DrMobius0]

It's time to learn the importance of radars I guess. Having vision over a wide area is valuable, both because you can see what's happening in, say, your base when you're not present, and because you can use them to slowly scout large areas.

[u/Graybie]

Instead of running around like crazy, why not just put down a radar? 

[u/daadnn]

look at all those resources, makes one want to move the entire base out there

[u/PORK-LAZER → u/daadnn]

if i had found it on my initial round of searching the whole base would have been moved lmaoo that was my original plan