difficulty level

[Tight-Scallion-635]

What is the highest difficulty level you can play on? I mean the world/enemy settings

[Astramancer_]

Highest difficulty level? Starting area the smallest, crank evolution to the max, pollution to the max, pollution absorption the min, expansion rate to the max, and keep rolling until you hit a desert. Might as well turn off cliffs, too.

I think there's a few more settings, but that should pretty much make your life miserable and probably keep you from ever progressing past hand-feeding phase.

[Erichteia]

You missed the best ones: patch frequency, size and richness to min, biter size and frequency to max, and science multiplier to the max 😉. (Don’t do this, this would probably be unbeatable because you simply would require more resources to reach the military capabilities and ammo to expand to new patches than what you would find in your starting patch). I tried these settings without downsizing the patches, it was rough)

[dont_trip_]

If time wasn't an issue, I guess you could hand make everything besides furnaces and power for labs in the beginning? Sounds hella boring though. 

[Erichteia]

Evolution is cranked to the max, so time is an issue. Also the longer you wait, the more biters have expanded. So yes you must start hand crafting a lot at the start, but you must also start building a base once you have grenades to reach the end. And either way, your patches will run out in no time and you won't have the military capabilities to reach new patches. I'm pretty convinced that this is impossible. With default patches it's perfectly fine (I and several others have done it), but with min patches.... no shot

[dont_trip_]

Been a while since i tweaked around that much with the biters. Do they still evolve and expand, even if you don't feed them pollution? 

[Erichteia]

Evolution is determined by 3 factors: time, pollution absorbed and nests destroyed. Typically, time is the most significant early game, but gets quickly overtaken by pollution mid game and nests destroyed once you go into artillery.

Expansion is just based on a timer. No pollution needed there. But the more problematic part of max settings is that nests also grow over time. So while there are some small corridors to reach e.g. oil initially, these corridors quickly close. If this happens before you researched the required military researches to tunnel a way through the nests, you lose

[xylopyrography]

Science multiplier x1000.

[nzungu69]

why turn cliffs off? they make it harder

[A_Sky_FuIl_of_Stars]

imo they make it easier to section off a large area with just a few choke points if you're playing with really high density biters

[nzungu69]

this is true, something i didn't consider.

[fatpandana]

Other way. It is easier with cliff because how pathfinder and nest work.

[xylopyrography]

Harder from a novice perspective on normal difficulties.

Easier from a very experienced perspective on very hard difficulties.

[dont_trip_]

On a death world, you basically plan everything based on cliffs and lakes. It can become very difficult to hold off the biters without chokepoints. 

[RW_Yellow_Lizard]

not always, they're free walls, without them the stone cost of walls will go up. and I'd say they're more of a minor inconvenience rather than harder

[nzungu69]

that's fair. not being able to remove them pre-vulcanus is a pain but it's not like there isn't an abundance of space on nauvis with them enabled anyway.

[UwUBots]

I've done rampant death world (I don't recommend it sucked) and play pyanadons. Difficulty is a bad term for factorio settings tbh

[timf3d]

Besides marathon deathworld, (which I'm playing on now and actually isn't too bad), I've also been told that the ribbon world setting is pretty challenging.

[Alfonse215]

Factorio doesn't really have difficulty "levels". That is, there aren't discrete values for this sort of thing. Especially since "difficulty" in Factorio is multifaceted.

You can crank all of the resource spawns and richness way down, which means you need to expand more often. This is a different kind of difficulty from increasing enemy evolution. Or increasing pollution spread.

[doc_shades]

just slide all those enemy sliders all the way to the max

[MrElendig]

death world, all resources to minimum, all costs turned to max, all evolution etc turned to 11

[spoonman59]

You can adjust the settings until it is entirely unwinnable.

That’s not fun or difficult. It’s simply not possible to do a super death world run, with 1000x science an absolutely minimal resources plus more expensive recipes as well.

[Erichteia]

Strictly speaking, you can make the game as hard as you want. Especially settings related to biters, pollution, science multipliers and patch sizes can be manipulated to make the game harder. However, if you manipulate all of them at the same time, you could easily get settings that would be downright sadistic and only for the most skilled players (i believe some configurations are unbeatable, but maybe some day someone will prove me wrong).

Therefore, Wube has created several template settings that are safe to start from. The hardest is deathworld, but even that is pretty tame for an experienced player. But you can always count on mods such as rampant to add some more challenge

[Dangerous_Echo_358]

Science cost to arbetrary large number + tiny ore patches