There Is No Spoon?

[Danke]

I want to get back into Factorio, with the sole purpose of getting the Spoon achievement.

Is it still possible to get in the current version?

Last time I tried, the game had just updated to a version that turned bugs into killing machines, even trying to play normally, without min maxing anything they were abusing me.

And I heard back then, that even without that update, the game had much more stuff than originally, so 8 hours was almost impossible.

[Warlord]

Originally posted by Danke～ です！:

I want to get back into Factorio, with the sole purpose of getting the Spoon achievement.

Is it still possible to get in the current version?

Last time I tried, the game had just updated to a version that turned bugs into killing machines, even trying to play normally, without min maxing anything they were abusing me.

And I heard back then, that even without that update, the game had much more stuff than originally, so 8 hours was almost impossible.

It is certainly doable. I did it pre-science changes before they went from 4 science to 6+1 within 5 hours. Now, I think the devs pointed out a speedrun team that did it in a bit over an hour and a half.

[Fel]

The harder bitters definitely made things a bit trickier for newer players trying to get the achievement.

You can increase the starting area and do whatever you want to the resource sliders without disabling that achievement.
You can also use the preview to make sure of where the resources are and where the initial nests will be, re-roll the seed until you get something that looks decent for you (plenty of trees between you and them, preferably not directly around your spawn helps a lot as well).

As long as you plan a bit you can definitely have flamthrower turrets and other defenses long before your pollution reaches the nearest nest, making enemies nearly a non-issue.

The main thing you need is to always be doing something and to not be afraid of going big.
Not mega-base type of big but going for full furnace lanes and multiple of those for each resource.



Speedruns are not necessarily representative in their "any%" category since they tend to disable bitters but they are a pretty good base to see just how much of everything you need (and yes, that's a whole lot of copper and steel they are smelting).
There is another category called "100%" which is about getting every single achievement in a single run, including the 90 minutes for a train and 20 million green circuits which takes well over half of their time after launching the rocket.
https://www.speedrun.com/factorio#100

You obviously don't need to be as crazy about efficiency as speed-runners but knowing roughly how much of everything you need and when to expand the production of each product is the key in lowering the time to launch the rocket.
The achievement is one of those that are there to show that you understand how everything works in the game, especially how to automate and how to ramp up production so it is by no mean an easy one to get.
After a few runs of practice where you figure things out you will probably notice that even without rushing since you are trying to figure out your plans you will already be fairly close to the 8 hours (you will most likely at least grab the "no time for chit chat" without even trying to for example).

(this is coming from someone that voluntarily has no achievement on his profile for the game so it might not sound very convincing)

[AlexMBrennan]

the game had much more stuff than originally, so 8 hours was almost impossible.

Like what? Artillery? Nuclear power? Because all of that stuff is optional - you don't have to research any of that to launch a satellite.

[Qosmius]

It is perfectly doable. Just need some bit of planning :)

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

There is a lot of science that is unnecessary that you can skip, like trains and tanks, and most military tech. You can also use as many players as you like, and any world generation settings you want. Just no mods.

Plan out what you need to do, and then set out to do it. I'm sure you will succeed. Get your friends together, and do it as a team, and it'll even happen faster.

I don't have it done myself, but I do have an old save where I have 90% of it done in 2 hours with 12 people that I never actually finished. I intended to complete that but just never got around to it. That was without planning. It's totally possible.

[Fel]

Not any world generation settings, the enemies have to be default or harder or the achievement is disabled right from the start.

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

Originally posted by Fel:

Not any world generation settings, the enemies have to be default or harder or the achievement is disabled right from the start.

That is not true. Some achievements get disabled at the start, but this is not one of them.

Edit: I'll be damned, this must have been changed at some point, because he's right. Now you have to have enemies of some kind, but you can dial them back as much as you like.

Edit 2: Just tested out what parts of enemies are required. Fel is only partly correct.

Enemy bases must be Default or harder. Peaceful must not be set. Anything else goes.

This means Starting Area Size can be as large as you like. Enemy Expansion can be off. Evolution can be off.

This effectively turns off almost all biter activity.

[Fel]

Before 0.16.3 the restriction was simply "no peaceful mode or disabled enemies", starting from that version the restriction was changed to disallow lowering enemies under the default values.

This was in 2017 so it's not that recent but maybe you remember from before that point.

The bug repport that provoked that change:
https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=51252

[Xandor]

I am currently doing an all achievement run in 1 game, I have 4 hours left and I only need to make 1300 utility science packs and make the rocket to complete the There is no Spoon achievement.

So it is very doable to do it in the current version, I have been lucky in this game and not been attacked by any enemies thanks to the large starting area and the RNG if they expand or not. So saved a lot of time thanks to that.

[Danke]

Ok. Let me recap so far. It is possible, albeit harder than originally. And as long as I don't touch enemy settings?

Can I change the world settings?

[Xandor]

You can turn off cliffs (they can get in the way) and you can max the starting area.
You can increase resources.

That is all I did, other similar settings probably work also but not the turning off enemies. (although if you play on island map you can make it so no enemies spawn with 75% island size and max starting area since the starting area cover the entire island then)

[Fel]

I'm not even sure it is harder than it used to be, at the very least getting your blue science up and running is much less of a chore, meaning that you get access to that tier of technologies earlier as well.
Military science is also arguably cheaper (gun turrets were replaced with walls), meaning that you can get access to those flamethrower turrets easily and since you are automating walls your defenses should be much easier to setup as well.

The only part that is a bit harder is that the bitter AI doesn't glitch them out when they transition from moving to assault near your defenses so you need slightly tougher defenses and a bit more repairs.

Not needing heavy oil for purple science means that you are not forced to use the advanced oil cracking right away, meaning that cracking and all that can be setup at your own pace when going for yellow science.

Yellow science can be a bit of a pain because it means even more low density structures and if you were not going for robots then the flying robot frames can be a lot of work as well.


Again though, that achievement is a way to prove that you understand the game well enough to be able to not waste too much time with any specific aspect of the game and that you know the various ratios well enough to use your resources somewhat efficiently.

Something that might help is knowing how many of each science pack you need, it helps figuring out just how much production you need for them.
Thankfully the wiki tells you the exact amount you need for the strictly required technologies all the way to rocket silo here:
https://wiki.factorio.com/Rocket_silo_(research)

This means that you only need about 12 red science per minute on average to get the all of them in time if you don't research anything else.
Of course you would probably aim for something like 30 per minutes (5 assembling machine 1 making them), or perhaps 60, allowing you to quickly clear the red science tier while you set your green science with a similar production rate.

The only trick is that you need to be constantly expanding your production, when you are not adding new recipes for your next tier of science packs you will want to be expanding your mining and smelting since you will end up needing a whole lot of iron, copper and steel plates.

[hedgester]

It is very possible. I did my first attempt at getting the achievement in about 5 hours. It helps to have blueprints for the science packs (except military science) and also smelting arrays in a blueprint book.

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

Originally posted by Danke～ です！:

Ok. Let me recap so far. It is possible, albeit harder than originally. And as long as I don't touch enemy settings?

Can I change the world settings?

As I pointed out, and you can even test, you can touch enemy settings.

You cannot turn nests down past default.
You cannot turn on peaceful.
You can turn off evolution.
You can turn off enemy expansion.
You can expand the starting area size to max.

When you start the game, just go into achievements and scroll to the bottom. There is no Spoon will be the last one there, and if it's still counting down, you're good to go.

Edit: This is trivially testable.

[Xandor]

Just finished my attempt at getting There is no Spoon, was first attempt at doing it and finished with 24 min remaining. With no blueprints and almost no planning before starting.
That was with an all achivement run so also did the other achivements like Getting on Track like a pro, Lazy Bastard, Logistic network embargo.
Lost a lot of time because I only used 1 belt with half red half green circuits for making blue circuits (my biggest bottleneck), could probably have finished it 1+ hours faster if I did circuits better.

So pretty easy to do There is no Spoon.