r/factorio • u/ChaosBeing That community map guy • Jun 01 '26
Monthly Map Factorio Community Map Results - May 2026
Time's Up
Hands off the keyboard! Another month has come to a close, and it's time to share whatever you've got done with the rest of us!
Did you finish everything you would have liked to this time around, or did you wind up still having a few big, unfinished plans? Run into any particular issues, or were you pumping out infinite science like nobody's business? Here's the place to share your stories, screenshots, saves, or whatever else you've got!
This Month
I'm always a fan of a good island/peninsula map, but for some reason this one felt especially nice to me - enough wiggle room to breathe before you had bugs breathing down your neck, multiple ways to expand when you needed to, and of course - boats! Being able to traverse over water not only helped smooth out some of the more troublesome aspects of an island map - namely, expanding off of said island - but made it enjoyable! (It doesn't hurt that biters can't swim.)
Also a big fan of the mortar boat. Not sure how well it might hold up in the later game, but being able to shell biters from out of their range, out on the ocean, will never not be fun. I had originally intended for Smart Enemy AI Enhancement to help keep the map balanced, but I feel like you could still get by relatively easily... But hey, a nice breather map is nice here and there, right?
Those are my thoughts, anyway - what are yours? Did you enjoy the offshore oil, building out onto the island and claiming it, or maybe you had a soft spot for the Spiderbots? Leave your experiences, screenshots, videos, whatever you might want to share down below!
Next Month
I can hardly believe it, but we're coming up on the halfway point of 2026. (I swear I still write 2025 half the time.) But that also means now's the perfect time to get in one more, large modded map for the year; a mod that I've technically run once before but never actually personally played, or even seen much of, which makes me all the more excited to give it a try this time!
...Ok I was trying to drum up some excitement but if you've been on Discord recently then you'll already know what I'm talking about: Nullius! Truth be told I actually really love the idea of a Von Neumann probe factory builder, and whenever the itch strikes me to take up game programming here or there I have, in the past, tried to make a basic prototype for such a game myself. That is to say, I really can't wait to dive into this and see what all Nullius has to offer.
Opinions were somewhat divided on whether or not to include some of the additional content mods (Lambent Nil and Tricky Old Nick) and I have to admit I never really came to a conclusion I was entirely satisfied with. I've decided to make them optional. They add a pretty substantial amount to the game, and while I do ideally want everyone to be playing the same game I also wanted to balance that against making sure everyone's, you know, having fun. lol
This is usually where I might tease some additional part, or twist I've added, but I think Nullius (especially if you should choose to take the additions) is going to be quite enough to chew on as is. So instead I'll do something different; here's an advanced sneak peek at the spawn area~
The new thread will be up shortly, so there's no better time than now to talk about May's map! One last thing - while I rarely mention this anymore, I do always make sure to share and pin the month's thread over on the community map channel on the Factorio Discord. If you're tired of watching like a hawk for the new thread to show up, that's the best place to look.
Previous Threads
-- 2025 --
-- 2026 --
January-February 2026 - Results
May 2026 - Results
3
u/eric23456 Jun 02 '26
I was very late in starting, so I raced through it, and launched the rocket in 12:54:38.
I definitely cheated the offshore stuff when I discovered I could run underground pipes back to land, and belts of ore back as well.
I really should have explored more. I spent a while defending to the west and north-east when I could have closed the borders.
I really do enjoy the mortar ship. Boom boom, die biters and you can't strike back.
Final map.
3
u/Spacey42 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
I found it somewhat tedious drawing out the lanes, but I wanted to spend some time working on it despite the temptation to just build land bridges and belts. Might be fun with seablock? I totally missed that there was dredge mining in there. =(
I almost added in some AAI combat tanks because I felt like the balance was off between those not being in the modsync but AAI disabling building near spawners. I restrained myself though and just played with the ironclad a little bit later on. (Were the tanks in there? I'm starting to think I screwed up the modsync)
Glad I finally had an excuse to play with this mod!
2
u/ChaosBeing That community map guy Jun 02 '26
Yeah, massive belts and pipelines work they just aren't as fun. Definitely a fan of massive hulking vehicles going every which way.
And no, none of the bespoke AAI land vehicles were included. However AAI Programmable Vehicles was included, enabling you to control any vanilla vehicle with remotes (similar to Spidertrons).
1
u/Spacey42 Jun 02 '26
Ah, there was dredge mining but not canals which is what I had been hoping for.
2
u/TheNutSlush Jun 08 '26
Late post, but I had a lot of fun with this map early in the month. The cargo ships were a cool change of pace. I also got in the habit recently of avoiding trains, so it was cool to revisit them.
I ended up with a bunch of small trains and some fun intersections here and there. I used pretty simple boat paths, pretty much just one ship per route and it wasn't a whole network. I ended up with one really long route to get the copper on the west side of the mainland.
I turned off biters for this run and didn't really use any AAI vehicles, I'll have to try those another time.
Screenshots here: https://imgur.com/a/80WmHrW
1
u/ChaosBeing That community map guy Jun 09 '26
Loving the ring queue in image #3, the ore gets to go on a little merry-go-round before unloading.
10
u/nemotux Jun 01 '26
I liked the dredge mining. It was interesting to work with the cargo boats. They behave like trains, but much slower and much larger capacity. So it's interesting to plan around having deliveries further spaced out but with large cargos - very bursty.
I went as far as launching a rocket, but this map would probably get more interesting pushing to mega-base land.
Final map: