Biters
A factories worst nightmare.
These are not enabled by default, this entire page is really based on out of the box settings, a server owner simply has to turn on biters and they will function as described below. However since biters are so configurable they could easily be harder or easier to deal with then is described here.
What Are They?
Biters are custom mobs that Minetorio spawns. These mobs are spiders! They are not just vanilla spiders. These biters can be bigger (1.20.6 and above), have more health and deal more damage. They also have special features about them when attacking a factory to, they can attack blocks and eventually break them. They also can build web towers to get to high places like a floating fortress. Some of them even spit acid at targets. They really really don't like pollution. And will relentlessly attack pollution causing areas.
Evolution
Biters evolve and become stronger as they inhabit super chunks that have seen a lot of pollution in their life. A super chunk doesn't have to have pollution in it at all to raise the biter evolution in that super chunk, the evolution is instead based on the lifetime pollution of the super chunk, that is the pollution that has entered, left or dissipated into the super chunk. Evolution stops at 100% Below is a table of when different types of biters spawn.
| Biter Type | Evolution % |
|---|---|
Small Biter | 0% |
Medium Biter | 10% |
Small Spitter | 15% |
Medium Spitter | 20% |
Big Biter | 30% |
Big Spitter | 40% |
Behemoth Biter | 60% |
Behemoth Spitter | 70% |
Biter Attacks
Biter will spawn a certain number of biters to defend their nest as they absorb pollution however, once they have enough defenders they will start to form an attack against the closest polluting device. They will gather their forces with nearby nests until a certain amount of time has passed and then they will start to move towards the factory. They do not spawn immediately there, they do actually virtually travel from their gathering spot near the nest that started the gathering to their target. This is important to note because it means that the direction the biters attack your factory from is the direction their nest is in! Once biters reach a certain distance of their target they spawn their attack and begin their physical attack. These biters can break blocks as mentioned before. However in their frenzy they do slide on walls, meaning they don't climb well. This makes walls somewhat effective against them, they need to be 3 blocks in height minimum to stop them from climbing over.
You can use the Biter Detector to get notified of when an attach is spotted moving towards your base! It will tell you the coordinates of the device that set off the alarm in chat.
The only good bug, is a dead bug
Defend your base using turrets, a bow turret is the basic defense and will work for early game defense against the small and weak biters. You can automate arrow crafting using a crafter to craft the bow and arrows. Use a crusher to acquire mass amounts of flint and sifters for sticks or have a log use the auto logger to collect logs and convert them into sticks. The sifter also gives a good amount of feathers but you can also use an auto plucker to pluck feathers off chickens. Once the biters get stronger you will want to look into better defenses, land mines are great against bugs. You can even automate landmine placement with the mine layer device. Don't forget there is better turrets to use too, the auto bow turret has a much higher dps then a normal bow turret and the laser turret while doing less damage is easy to setup since it uses only power for ammo.
A good defense is offense! Now that you know how biters work you can also slow down their attacks by simply killing the nests! Grenades are amazing for not only clearing trees, but for breaking nests open. To kill a nest you have to break the monster spawner in the middle. This will kill all the biters around it and the nest itself. You can also just prune the nest and kill any of the spiders. Killing them will make it so the nest has to absorb more pollution to spawn more, so it will slow down their attacks greatly. This is pretty effective early game and even in power efficient mid game.
You could also opt for green energy. Yuck. But biters are worse then green energy. So setting up a solar array with a lot of batteries is a good idea. You can also use a device like the battery monitor to only use pollution causing power sources to turn on when batteries get low. Keep in mind, biters are not that smart so they will still attack these sources as device is a target to them.
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