Bulldozer Equipment

Introduction ============

BulldozerEquipment is a mod for Factorio. It adds an equipment component that automatically orders the deconstruction of all nearby trees, rocks, and cliffs, and orders nearby water to be filled with landfill.

The primary intended use case is to equip the lead tanks of a RoboTank formation with the equipment so that they will order a path to be cleared. The robots that do the actual clearing can be carried by the player, the RoboTanks, or both. It allows the formation to roll though virtually any obstacle, provided it has enough resources (cliff explosives and landfill) and armor and armament to deal with hostiles.

Among other things, this equipment allows attacking while moving south with a RoboTank squad, which is otherwise nearly impossible to due the compressed screen size in that direction and the toolbars blocking access to the world in that direction.

As a secondary function, the bulldozer equipment automatically converts all wood, coal, and stone in the main or trash inventories into landfill at a cost of one stack per landfill.

Usage =====

First, research Bulldozer Equipment. Its main prerequisite is Utility (yellow) Science.

Create the Bulldozer Equipment item and put it into the equipment grid of a player character or a vehicle (a car or tank). Ensure the grid can supply the required 50 kW of power, although this only drains while moving.

Clearing obstacles

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If you now approach some trees or rocks, they will be automatically marked for destruction, and if you approach water, it will be marked for landfilling. Cliffs will also be automatically marked for destruction once Cliff Explosives have been researched.

Landfill creation

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When the bulldozer is in a player character's equipment grid, periodically (by default, once per second), one stack of wood, coal, or stone will be turned into landfill. When it is in a vehicle equipment grid, the same thing happens, but *only while the vehicle is moving* (this is primarily meant as a performance optimization).

This feature means you don't have to stop to tediously empty all of the vehicles' inventories of the trash they have collected. It also provides the minor benefit of supplying a little extra landfill, although typically far below the replacement level when doing significant filling of water.

Controlling enablement

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On a per-player basis, the bulldozer functions can be enabled or disabled using any of:

• A shortcut button on the toolbar.
• A keybinding that is not bound by default.
• A checkbox in the mod settings menu.

This setting affects both the player character and any vehicles whose "last user" is that player. Vehicles that are not associated with a player (which is unusual, but can happen in modded games) do not perform any bulldozer functions.

There are also more fine-grained settings in the mod settings menu to control exactly which functions are performed, for example whether to remove trees, whether to landfill water, and which resources (if any) to turn into landfill.

Balance considerations ======================

The basic function of ordering obstacle destruction is purely a user interface enhancement, so does not raise significant balance issues.

Creating landfill from wood and coal is something a few other mods also provide. In my games, by the time I'm dealing with behemoth biters, wood and coal are so worthless that I just put them into wooden boxes and then shoot the boxes to destroy the items (whereas I can right-click spam the landfill button to eliminate stone). Having *some* use for wood and coal is a very minor player buff.

Performance considerations ==========================

For both player characters and vehicles, the obstacle clearing function only activates when the actor moves, so the cost is generally small.

More specifically, my performance targets are, for a large map (and on my modest hardware):

• If bulldozer is disabled, 1 us per tick on average.
• If bulldozer is enabled but nothing is moving, 5 us per tick on average.
• If enabled and moving but not near water, 15 us per tick on average.

The process of designating tiles for landfilling is somewhat slow since each water tile (that doesn't have a ghost tile yet) has to be iterated over in Lua, crossing the C++/Lua boundary for each one. If the mod is configured to use a large tile search radius and short period between checks, there could be a UPS hit when approaching a shoreline.

Related mods ============

Available for Factorio 2.x

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• Tree Cleaner by

GPS: Marks dead trees for deconstruction.

• King Jo's Bulldozer by

TheKingJo: A vehicle intended, I think, to simply ram into the trees and rocks.

Only for Factorio 1.x

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• Bulldozer by ckhawks

• Bulldozer-Fixed by

amwdrizz: Obsolete fork of ckhawks Bulldozer.

• Bulldozer by InsanePyro

• Dozer by shanemadden: Provides

a tank-like vehicle that destroys cliffs and mines mineable non-resource entities (trees, rocks, buildings) that are near the vehicle. Destruction and mining are instantaneous rather than being done by robots.

Acknowledgements ================

The bulldozer icon comes from <a href="https://www.freepik.com/icon/bulldozer_10984315#fromView=keyword&page=2&position=94&uuid=7c749113-0d7b-4d98-8946-5d19b072c52d">Freepik</a>.