I hate infinite ressources,

[Architeck]

it's like a cheat code, that suck, It's like playing a game and removing all its difficulty, I don't see the point.

[MechBFP]

Resources are essentially infinite anyway once you get the big miner+productivity bonuses, so why care? Oh no, you don’t have to go and replace your miners every 100 hours. Oh well.

[CrushedIce]

Well I dont see difficulty in building a new mining outpost. But if you like to do that more often, you can simply reduce the ore richness in the map gen settings.

[End of history]

There are still infinite resources though with the lava from Vulcanus, the ocean(s) of Aquillo or the plants of Gleba.

I also don't quite see the problem though. Even pre space age resources were technically infinite. The big mining drill makes it slightly more infinite though even on the finite ore patches.

[knighttemplar1960]

The limiting resource has always been UPS. In 1.1 my megabases would go up to 5k science per minute and I never got up to using even 1% of the total map.

Even for space age each planet has s special resource that can run out but you'll run out of UPS first or if you build a small enough base to avoid UPS issues you'll never run out of the special resource in your life time even running the game 24/7.

[Galileus]

You are literally saying making new outposts is the only difficult and challenging part of the game.

God, the heights of drama people will go to just to ensure everyone how terrible their lives have become over this insourmontable thing that happened to them!

[Evilsod]

Securing resources is only part of the challenge if you've made biters a credible threat to expansion.

[Fletch]

The factorio maps are theoretically infinite, hence so are all the resources. Its the games that do not have infinite resources (Captain of Industry comes to mind) that are a bigger issue. In those games, you can truly run out of a limited resource (and forced to abandon the run and start over) if you haven't unlocked the "infinite" equivalences in time -- maybe they've fixed those problems by now in CoI?

Those types of games force a certain build order to ensure you don't run out of a limited resource, or you are screwed.

Anyhow, with Factorio: its not like items just magically appear in your chests. The infinite raw resources (asterioids, lava, etc) must be processed first to turn them into something usable. Foundries: the bottleneck is disposing of rocks from the "infinite lava" -- so the challenge is not the easy/infinite lava, the challenge is the rock disposal side. Similarly: asteroids need basic circuits so you don't over-collect too many of the wrong type or you end up deadlocking the entire system and having to manually eject asteroids out of the collectors to unblock it.

Each of the "infinite resources" has their own unique challenges that need to be overcome before they truly are "infinite" in a sense that you do not have to hand fix things to ensure they work forever.

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by Fletch:

The factorio maps are theoretically infinite, hence so are all the resources. Its the games that do not have infinite resources (Captain of Industry comes to mind) that are a bigger issue. In those games, you can truly run out of a limited resource (and forced to abandon the run and start over) if you haven't unlocked the "infinite" equivalences in time -- maybe they've fixed those problems by now in CoI?

Those types of games force a certain build order to ensure you don't run out of a limited resource, or you are screwed.

Anyhow, with Factorio: its not like items just magically appear in your chests. The infinite raw resources (asterioids, lava, etc) must be processed first to turn them into something usable. Foundries: the bottleneck is disposing of rocks from the "infinite lava" -- so the challenge is not the easy/infinite lava, the challenge is the rock disposal side. Similarly: asteroids need basic circuits so you don't over-collect too many of the wrong type or you end up deadlocking the entire system and having to manually eject asteroids out of the collectors to unblock it.

Each of the "infinite resources" has their own unique challenges that need to be overcome before they truly are "infinite" in a sense that you do not have to hand fix things to ensure they work forever.

Well, no. The factorio map has a very finite edge, 1 million tiles in any direction from spawn. A 4 quadrillion tile area. It also has a very real limit on the total number of resources- Something like 20~ quadrillion for iron/copper/coal, and 8 quadrillion for stone/uranium, and a trillion oil wells.

The edge of the map has been reached. Someone has also travelled to one of the corners iirc. But, yes, computing power, SSD storage space, and RAM fall shy long before you would explore the whole thing, and long before you would exploit all it's resources. Buuuut you could beeline right for the edge, delete all the loaded chunks now that you're at the edge and make use of the patches of material out there that have multiple-billions-of-ore each and be set for your life time.

But, Even given a computer capable of maintaining a playable ups and loading the entire game world, Even without productivity increases, You would never strip the map of it's resources in your lifetime. Just looking at iron for convenience sake since it's the highest consumption, You need 8,143,417 a minute to maintain 50k spm. To run through 20 quadrillion iron (again, no productivity) at that pace would take 2,455,971,492.07 minutes. That's 40,932,858.2011 hours. 1705535.75838 days.

4672.7 years

Your hundred generations removed great grand child would still be playing on that map at 50kspm and have roughly 1/3rd of it's resources to go. It is very finite... But it is, for all intents and purposes based around the human condition, Effectively infinite even before productivity. You add productivity into the mix and... Heh.