Obviously, when I play multiplayer with a particular friend, we fall into quasi-specialized roles. He often ends up preferring to stay back in the main base bootstrapping medium-output startup builds and working on his own to kitbash and spaghetti it up in a sort of proof-of-concept fashion -- whereupon, several co-op sessions later on the same playthrough, he and I will collaborate on streamlining and refining his original core concepts into something megabase-worthy.

During all of the above, I end up being the asshole (affectionate term) skellying around the map with a scrotum full of nukes, clearing the map and laying 6-track mainline trunks of what will grow into our megabase railnet to RSO-modded orefields and outposts. Ditto that I'm the one laying down new outposts, coordinating train schedules, designing trash-train schedules, and periodically using map-mode to prune depleted miners from existing outposts.

He just had a kid recently, however (beautiful little baby girl.) Which means he and I no longer play nowadays, and with what I can foresee in my own work schedule for the rest of 2018, it's doubtful-at-best that he and I will get any more playtime in before Factorio emerges entirely from pre-release.

That means that at least two hundred of my most recent hours in this game were all single player, and I'm really struggling to digest simply how truly reliant I've become in my gameplay habits on always having a partner who can handle at least half of the pending "loose end" issues always ongoing at any given time.

On at least two playthroughs so far (possibly three, I might've lost track) I end up playing more than a dozen hours past the point of no reasonable recovery.

1.) My pollution cloud grows so ginormous that the biter onslaught is essentially continuous. I barely have green science automated, can only lay down beginner-rails slowly, am handcrafting almost ten thousand units of red-belt, and I spend so long systematically wiping nests off the map that an interrupted coal belt results in a blackout so pronounced that the pollution cloud disappears entirely by the time I make it back to base to resupply with ammo or in triumphant return of having cleared the revealed map of all nests. At this point, I have never so much as started handcrafting my first pumpjack, but for some reason I'm more than 80% done exhausting all red-green research and 100% done all red-only research. I cannot remove the starter patches of uranium due to no oil infrastructure, which means my max-tech war machinery is red-ammo bullet-turrets.

2.) All resources are depleted, I'm running belt in distances of 1300 tiles from ore patches because the aforementioned blackouts and resource depletions mean I have insufficient stone (or iron) for either rails or landfill. At which point the biter attacks are continuous again.

3.) I disable / off-toggle all biter-aggression mods and run biters at entirely-default vanilla levels, keeping other mods enabled. Repeat same trend, managing to survive viably at least several dozen gameplay hours longer this time around, yet somehow achieving the exact same plateau of progress.

4.) Re-roll map, repeat.

I'm not asking for advice, I know exactly how to gitgud, I'm just repeating old habits every time.