BlockFactory:Enemies

The steppe is not empty. Dust creatures live in burrows away from the spawn, and ancient War Golems sleep in the rubble of ruins. The creatures leave you alone until your factory gets loud. Then they come for the machines that make the noise. Running machines make noise, and over time the whole world grows more restless, which brings bigger creatures. If you know Factorio: noise is pollution, unrest is evolution.

Dust creatures

Three kinds of creature come out of the burrows. Which ones you meet depends on the world's unrest.

	Dust Crawler	Dust Spitter	Dust Brute
Appears from	start	20 % unrest	50 % unrest
Health	20	15	150
Attack on players	bite, 6 damage, close range	spit, 5 damage, from up to 12 blocks	smash, 25 damage
Damage to buildings	6 per second	4 per second	20 per second
Top speed	7 blocks/s	5 blocks/s	4 blocks/s
Chases players up to	16 blocks	18 blocks	14 blocks

A Crawler is weak on its own, but a group of them hurts early on. The Spitter keeps its distance and stops to spit. A Brute hits hard and takes a lot of fire.

Creatures only attack what players have built. They leave terrain, ore fields, the bunker and landmarks alone, and they cannot climb over walls.

Nests

Creatures live in Dust Burrows. There are no nests within 500 blocks of the world's center by default. Further out they become more common, and from about 800 blocks on large burrows appear as well. Nests never sit on water, mountains, ore fields, ruins, trees or rocks. Server operators can change the density and the nest-free radius with the world settings NestDensity and NestFreeRadius (see World Settings).

	Dust Burrow	Large Dust Burrow
Size	3 × 3	5 × 5
Health	250	500
Healing	1 health per second	1 health per second
Guards	3 Dust Crawlers	4 Dust Crawlers
Extra guards from 20 % unrest	1 Dust Spitter	2 Dust Spitters
Extra guards from 50 % unrest	–	1 Dust Brute
Noise it takes in	60 per minute	120 per minute

• Guards stay near the nest and attack players who come close. Killed guards come back after 60 seconds while the nest stands. Nests and their guards appear as creatures when a player is within about 96 blocks.
• Healing: a damaged nest heals slowly. Finish it in one go, or it is back to full in a few minutes.
• Destroying a nest, with weapons, towers or explosives, ends its attacks for good, but raises the unrest a little.
• Nests you have come close to, and nests a powered Rangertower spots, are marked on your map.

Spreading

A nest that keeps hearing noise founds a new small nest now and then: every time it has taken in 1,500 noise, it tries to place one 48 to 79 blocks away. New nests only appear on free ground outside the nest-free radius, never within about 48 blocks of a building and never within 32 blocks of another nest. A world can hold at most 64 of these new nests.

Attack groups

Every nest in a noisy chunk takes in noise from it and saves it up, at most 200. Once it has enough, it sends out a group:

1. The group sets off towards the loudest place within 1,000 blocks of the nest, measured by the noise made there recently (not where the noise ended up after spreading; a source that falls silent is forgotten after about two minutes). There it picks a building, preferring one that makes noise.
2. It marches at 80 % of the speed of its slowest member. Whatever stands in its way, such as a wall, it attacks until it breaks through.
3. At the target it attacks until the building is destroyed. Then it looks for a loud building within 64 blocks, then for any building within 32 blocks. If there is none, the group is done.

Each creature costs the nest noise: a Crawler 4, a Spitter 12, a Brute 50. A nest needs at least 12 saved noise to send a group, and the same nest sends at most one group every 90 seconds. The group's size depends on the saved noise and on the unrest:

• At least 3 creatures. At most 5 when the unrest is 0; the limit rises with the unrest up to 12 at 50 %.
• From 20 % unrest every third creature is a Spitter, and from 50 % every sixth is a Brute, as long as the nest can pay for them.

Groups march and fight even when no player is near, and your towers shoot at them all the same. When a player comes within about 96 blocks, the group appears as creatures that also fight players.

When a building is destroyed, its contents fall out; the building itself is lost. When the first group of a world sets off, nearby players see a short scene, and it can be watched again at the bunker terminal. The warning "Your factory is under attack!" goes off when creatures damage buildings or a group sets off towards your factory (see Defense).

War Golems

Every ruin in the steppe has a guardian: a War Golem lying in a pile of rubble. When a player comes within about 48 blocks for the first time, the rubble rises and the golem wakes up.

	War Golem	Elder War Golem
Where	ruins less than 800 blocks from the world's center	ruins 800 blocks or further out
Health	500	1,000
Attack on players	25 damage	40 damage
Damage to buildings	25 per second	40 per second
Healing	2 health per second	2 health per second
Drops	1 Research Capsule	2 Research Capsules

• Golems are territorial. They attack players within 4 blocks, chase them up to 14 blocks and then return to their ruin.
• They attack buildings within 16 blocks of themselves, but they never march on your factory.
• A defeated golem stays defeated and its ruin is free. Your map shows guarded and freed ruins.
• Redeem the capsules at the Outlander Test Site for alternative recipes.
• Towers within range shoot at golems too, so a tower near a ruin is one way to wear a golem down.

Noise

Noise is counted per chunk (32 × 32 blocks), in units per minute.

• Machines make noise only while they work. An idle machine is silent. Belts, Grabbers, chests and power poles never make noise.
• Noise spreads. Every second, a chunk with more than 15 noise passes 2 % of it to each of its four neighbours.
• The ground absorbs noise: every chunk swallows 10 noise per minute.
• Trees absorb noise: every tree in a chunk swallows another 2 per minute. Clear a forest and your factory can be heard further away.
• Nests absorb noise from their own chunk and turn it into attack groups (see above).

What makes noise

Source	Noise per minute
Coal Plant	40
Rune Tank, while driving	40
Water Boiler	30
Steam or Golem Locomotive, while moving	30
Armored Car, while driving	30
Outlander Test Site, while testing	20
Steam Buggy, while driving	20
Wooden Drill	12
Auto Drill, Stone Golems Refinery	10
SlaughterHouse	6
Blast Furnace, Steam Generator, Fabricator T1	4
Fabricator T2	3
Brick Furnace, Tree Farm	2
every shot from a hand weapon	2 (once)

Buildings not listed run silently. The noise column of Buildings lists every building.

Seeing the noise

• Type /maplayers to open the map layers and switch on Noise. Louder chunks are tinted on the world map. Map layers apply to everyone in the world.
• The Statistics page of the Field Manual shows the total noise, the number of noisy chunks and how much new noise your factory makes per minute, next to the unrest.

Unrest

Unrest is one value for the whole world, from 0 to 100 %. It never goes down. It grows from three things:

Cause	How much
Time	a little every second, about 1.4 % per hour at the start
Noise	a little for every unit of noise made anywhere in the world
Destroyed nests	0.2 % per nest

Every increase shrinks as the unrest rises: it creeps towards 100 % but never reaches it.

Unrest	Effect
0 %	groups of 3 to 5 Dust Crawlers
20 %	Dust Spitters join groups and guard nests
50 %	Dust Brutes join groups and guard large nests; groups can have up to 12 creatures

In multiplayer, noise and unrest belong to the whole world. A loud team wakes the nests for its neighbours too. The unrest signal brings the value into a signal network.

Peaceful mode

A server operator can turn on peaceful mode with the world setting Peaceful (see World Settings). In a peaceful world:

• nests send no attack groups and do not spread,
• nests have no guards,
• War Golems do not wake up and do not attack buildings, so they drop no Research Capsules.

Noise and unrest are still counted. The setting is read when the world starts.

Keeping it quiet

• Build away from nests. Expand towards empty steppe first.
• Keep the trees. A belt of forest between your factory and the nests swallows noise.
• Mind the loud machines. Coal Plants and Water Boilers are the loudest; put them on the side away from the nests.
• Defend the loud places. Groups aim for the noisiest spot, so put towers and walls there.
• Clear nearby nests early. A destroyed nest sends no more groups, and noisy nests spread.

See also

• Defense
• Weapons and Armor
• Death and Respawn
• The World