Noise and Unrest

Your factory wakes its own enemies. Running machines make noise, the noise spreads across the steppe, and when it reaches a nest the creatures come to find its source. Over time the whole world also grows more restless, and bigger creatures appear. If you know Factorio: noise is pollution, unrest is evolution.

Noise

Noise is counted per chunk (32 × 32 blocks), in units per minute.

• Machines make noise only while they work. An idle or sleeping machine is silent. Belts, grabbers, chests and power poles never make noise.
• Noise spreads. Every second, a chunk with more than 15 noise passes 2 % of it to each of its four neighbours.
• The ground absorbs noise. Every chunk swallows 10 noise per minute.
• Trees absorb noise. Every tree in a chunk swallows another 2 per minute. If you clear a forest, your factory can be heard further away.
• Nests absorb noise. A nest takes in the noise of its own chunk (60 per minute for a small burrow, 120 for a large one) and turns it into attack groups. See Enemies.

What makes noise

Source	Noise per minute
Coal Plant	40
Water Boiler	30
Steam Locomotive or Golem Locomotive, while moving	30
Armored Car, while driving	30
Rune Tank, while driving	40
Outlander Test Site, while testing	20
Steam Buggy, while driving	20
Wooden Drill	12
Auto Drill	10
Stone Golems Refinery	10
SlaughterHouse	6
Blast Furnace, Steam Generator, Fabricator T1	4
Fabricator T2	3
Brick Furnace, Tree Farm	2
Every shot from a hand weapon	2 (once)

Machines that are not listed run silently.

Attack groups aim for the place where the most noise was made recently, not where it ended up after spreading. A quiet source is forgotten after about two minutes.

Seeing the noise

• Open the world map and switch on the Noise layer with the layer buttons at the left edge (or type /maplayers). Louder chunks are tinted red. Map layers are switched for everyone in the world.
• The Statistics page of the Field Manual shows the total noise, how many chunks are noisy and how much new noise your factory makes per minute.

Unrest

Unrest is one value for the whole world, from 0 to 100 %. It never goes down.

It grows from three things:

Cause	How much
Time	A little every second, roughly 1.4 % per hour at the start
Noise	A little for every unit of noise made anywhere in the world
Destroyed nests	0.2 % for each nest destroyed

Every increase gets smaller as unrest rises: it creeps towards 100 % but never reaches it.

What unrest changes:

Unrest	Effect
0 %	Groups of 3 to 5 Dust Crawlers
20 %	Dust Spitters join groups and guard nests
50 %	Dust Brutes join groups and guard large nests; groups can have up to 12 creatures

Unrest is shown on the Statistics page of the Field Manual, next to the noise.

In multiplayer, noise and unrest belong to the whole world. A loud team wakes the nests for its neighbours too.

Keeping it low

• Build away from nests. No nests spawn within 500 blocks of the spawn (by default). Expand towards empty steppe first.
• Leave the trees. Each tree near your factory swallows noise. Plant or keep a forest belt between your factory and the nests.
• Watch the loud machines. Coal Plants and Water Boilers are the loudest. Placing them on the side away from nests helps.
• Do not overbuild. Idle machines are silent, so machines that run all the time make the most noise.
• Defend the targets. Groups go for the loudest place. Put Gun Towers and walls around it.
• Clear nearby nests. A destroyed nest no longer sends groups, at a small cost in unrest. Nests that hear a lot of noise spread, so deal with them early.

See also

• Enemies
• Defense
• Field Manual
• World Settings (peaceful mode)