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Armor types

While the engineer has protective personal equipment against the elements and the such, armor against enemies is something that needs to be crafted and researched. You can craft light armor pretty much immediately and it is significantly better than nothing. Later on, using steel, heavy armor can be crafted, offering nearly complete protection against small enemy physical attacks but not so much against other damage types, such as fire or acid. Higher tiers of armor offer greater protection against all types of damage. In addition, armor tiers after heavy armor also include electronic components such that they can hold armor equipment.

To equip an armor item, open your inventory, but not a building, and then take the item in hand with LEFT BRACKET and equip the item with SHIFT + LEFT BRACKET.

Armor equipment modules

Armor equipment modules offer functions such as increasing your running speed, or generating a rechargable shield around you, or operating construction robots around you. The equipment works by being attached to the equipment grid of an electronic armor suit. The grid has limited number of slots and so you need to choose your equipment carefully. Furthermore, most equipment requires power drawn from the armor itself. Therefore your equipment grid must also hold items such as solar panels or battery packs. Also note that armor equipment modules are different from the module devices used in buildings.

Most equipment is related to combat, but some of it can be considered as multi-purpose. On the other hand, due to combat and construction robots not yet having sufficient accessibility, armor equipment in general is not yet that useful in Factorio Access. Nevertheless, we expect that eventually it will be worthwhile to have and so it was worthwhile to add support for.

Summary of armor equipment types

This summary list gives a general idea of what equipment exists so that a player can decide if they want to invest their resources into armor equipment. Equipment examples include:

• Energy shields. They absorb damage instead of the engineer, and they recharge automatically over time by drawing power from the armor. If you have enough of them, you can survive getting hit by slow moving trains, but only if you jump out of the way after taking the first hit.
• Exoskeletons. These large items consume power to increase your running speed by 30 percent per unit equipped. The bonus applies in smooth walking mode while it has no effect on your already-high telestep speed.
• Personal roboports. They allow you to automatically deploy construction robots around you, which can repair damaged structures for you or do various kinds of construction work for you using blueprints or other planners.
• Personal laser defenses. They are little automatic laser turrets that can shoot enemies that get too close.
• Batteries. These are charged by generators and discharge to other equipment when needed.
• Power generators. These include personal solar panels or small portable fusion reactors.

Adding and removing equipment.

You can read your current armor and equipment stats by opening the inventory and then pressing G. Similarly you can get a list of the equipment currently installed by pressing SHIFT + G. This information is enough to tell if your total equipment arrangement is functional. There is also information provided about armor slots, which is how equipment space is described.

Factorio Access treats the equipment grid like another inventory such that you can easily insert and dump out the equipment modules. However, the equipment grid is actually a geometric square grid of slots where the modules need to be dropped into and arranged by hand. This becomes a mini visual puzzle because different equipment modules have different rectangular or square sizes that cover one or more slots. Factorio Access automates the slot filling in an iterative way so that you can simply press a key and the item is inserted appropriately. We recommend that you install the largest items first, and then the smaller items can easily fill in the gaps left over.

To equip an armor equipment module, you need to be wearing modular armor or power armor. Open your inventory, but not from inside a building menu, and then take the item to equip in hand with LEFT BRACKET and equip the item with SHIFT + LEFT BRACKET. This will add the module to your equipment grid according to its sizes, and inform you about how many empty armor slots you have left. When you want to remove your equipment, you can press CONTROL + SHIFT + G, and this will return all the installed equipment and remove your armor too.

Removing equipment is needed if you want to upgrade or modify your equipment stats, like when you unlock a new and improved item. Also sometimes you may have the error that an item does not fit your grid despite having enough slots left. In these cases, repacking the grid can assist with improving the fit.

Equipment grid packing strategy

To fit items optimally into the equipment grid, we recommend that you add items in the order of largest to smallest in terms of sizes on the grid. The largest items fit the best they can and leave the fewest gaps, and then the smaller items can fill in the gaps. This strategy will improve your arrangement but it won't solve every none-fit issue because there is also the inherent geometric limitation of the grid puzzle. For example, if there is a 1 by 2 space left and you have a 2 by 1 item to add, it will not work because the game does not allow rotating equipment.

Managing guns

Guns are weapons that you can carry and use freely, such as a pistol. Holding a gun does not limit your ability to hold items in hand via the cursor. The engineer has three gun slots and three ammo slots, all of which are separate from the main inventory. Guns in these slots are considered to be on your belt so that you can reach for them quickly and one of the guns is set as the active gun. You can select your active gun by pressing TAB when no menus are open. This will read out the selected gun and its equipped ammo stock.

You can read all your gun slots at once by opening your inventory and pressing R. You can also reload all ammo slots with appropriate ammo at one go, by pressing SHIFT + R, but it is also possible to load in ammo stacks individually. To equip a new gun, open your inventory, but not a building, and then take the item to equip in hand with LEFT BRACKET and equip the item with SHIFT + LEFT BRACKET. Ammo can be equipped similarly, but only if the corresponding gun slot can actually use the ammo type. If you want to reset your gun arrangement, such as for changing an ammo type, you can remove all guns and ammo by opening the inventory and pressing CONTROL + SHIFT + R.

Using guns

If you press C, the engineer will indiscriminantly fire the selected gun at whatever is at the cursor. You can damage friends and foes alike that way. For some guns, there is automatic aiming available. These include the pistol, submachine gun, and rocket launcher (with regular rockets). For these guns, if you press SPACEBAR, the engineer will fire only at enemies with reasonable accuracy and only if they are within range. For other guns, usually ones that do area damage, such as the shotgun or flamethrower or the rocket launcher with special rockets, pressing the SPACEBAR is the same as pressing C.

Therefore we generally recommend using submachine guns most of the time. However, if you prefer to have no guns at all to prevent accidents, you can unequip them all. In this case, and only in this case, the engineer is capable of melee combat using the pickaxe.

Generally, in combat it is more effective to use multiple tools at once, such as deploying turrets to run back to before going in, installing armor equipment, and using combat capsule drones to assist you, while you enter the fight with your gun or maybe in a vehicle.

Overview of gun types

• The pistol is the cheap and available gun you have at the start, but it becomes insufficient pretty quickly.
• A selection of guns becomes available as you advance military technology, but the submachine gun is a reliable and balanced personal weapon that is greatly recommended, because it has decent range and automatic aiming, and its performance continues to improve as you upgrade your weapons technology and ammo technology.
• Some alternative guns are the shotguns and the flamethrower, which at the moment are not well-supported by the mod because they are designed to fire towards the mouse cursor rather than automatic aiming. Overall, they are good at handling a large enemy group in close proximity, but they have limited range and so spitters and worms could be a problem.
• The rocket launcher is another personal weapon option that has automatic aiming for regular or highly explosive rockets. However, individual rockets, even with area damage, generally cannot keep up with an incoming swarm of enemies. Rockets are best used for targeting worms and spawners from a distance, although that level of aiming precision is not supported by the mod.

Next Page: Chapter 23 - Death and enemies