How to Change the Difficulty on Your Factorio Server

Factorio uses a dynamic difficulty system to affect progression rate, enemy behaviour, and expansion. By using various commands, you can alter your world and/or playstyle post-world generation.

As there aren't traditional difficulties like easy, normal, and hard in Factorio, you will have to change individual enemy traits and attributes to adjust your game difficulty.

Important: Using these commands will disable achievements within your world save!

Using Console Commands

To adjust in-game enemy difficulty settings, you'll need to send commands into the in-game console as an admin.

  1. Ensure you are an admin in-game by following this guide.
  2. Press the ~ key to open the in-game console.
  3. Input a command; press the Enter key to send.

Changing Enemy Expansion Settings

An expansion is when a group of biters/spitters leave their base to create a new base, which will consist of as many worms/nests as there are members in the group. 

To easily change your overall enemy difficulty, increasing the enemy expansion cooldown on your world may be your best option.

Note: The time values in these commands are in-game ticks. There are 60 game ticks in one second. Additionally, these values must be between 0 and 4294967295.
Command Description
/c game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.min_expansion_cooldown=<ticks> Set the minimum cooldown for enemy expansion events. The default is 14400 (4 minutes).
/c game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.max_expansion_cooldown=<ticks> Set the maximum cooldown for enemy expansion events. The default is 216000 (60 minutes).

Other Common Difficulty Commands

Listed below are a few other common difficulty-related commands. For more in-game console commands, please visit this wiki page.

Command Description
/c game.forces["enemy"].evolution_factor=X Set enemy evolution factor. Ranges from 0 (new game) to 1.
/c game.map_settings.enemy_evolution.time_factor=0 Disables time-based evolution.
/c game.forces["enemy"].kill_all_units() Kill all biters on the enemy force. This will only kill mobile units, spawners will persist.
/c game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.min_player_base_distance=-1 Biters will ignore player structures and build next to walls.
/c game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.min_base_spacing=1 Distance enemy bases can spawn next to each other (default 3).
/c game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.max_expansion_distance=4 Distance between an existing and new enemy base (default 7).

To learn more about Factorio server hosting, you can browse our library of Knowledgebase articles here.

If you require any further assistance, please contact our support at: https://shockbyte.com/billing/submitticket.php

Mitchell Smith

Managing Director @ Shockbyte

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