- The "no crafting challenge" mod, where you can't build anything by hand, only in factories. You get a factory to start with in order to bootstrap. Playing in this mode actually taught me that I had been relying on hand crafting way more than I should have -- it turns out that automated crafting of a lot of the stuff you normally hand-craft can actually speed up the game a lot. (Incidentally, I tried to create a "no inventory challenge" mod, where you start with a mobile roboport train car and have to use robots to build everything, but I found the modding API wasn't quite powerful enough to make this work well. But it worked well enough to allow me to conclude that this would be a pretty interesting mode of play if it worked.)
- Use a mod that makes resources spawn further away, so you have to build more trains. Trains are like a game in themselves.
- I hear people talking about "bob's mod" a lot, which apparently adds a bunch of new resource types and things to build with them, basically multiplying the game complexity.
- The "no crafting challenge" mod, where you can't build anything by hand, only in factories. You get a factory to start with in order to bootstrap. Playing in this mode actually taught me that I had been relying on hand crafting way more than I should have -- it turns out that automated crafting of a lot of the stuff you normally hand-craft can actually speed up the game a lot. (Incidentally, I tried to create a "no inventory challenge" mod, where you start with a mobile roboport train car and have to use robots to build everything, but I found the modding API wasn't quite powerful enough to make this work well. But it worked well enough to allow me to conclude that this would be a pretty interesting mode of play if it worked.)
- Use a mod that makes resources spawn further away, so you have to build more trains. Trains are like a game in themselves.
- I hear people talking about "bob's mod" a lot, which apparently adds a bunch of new resource types and things to build with them, basically multiplying the game complexity.