[Qwertious]

>And my favorite fun fact: The "fish" object in Factorio is a useless joke item, but because it isn't used by anything, it's sometimes used as a null value, a flag for when a belt has completed a full loop, or a debugging tool. https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=544302#p544302

1. Fish is a crafting item for spidertron, it's not completely useless. 2. In multiplayer, the standard null-value item is the deconstruction planner (which is a big red square). I guess some people might use fish, but I've never seen it. It helps that deconstruction planners are free, nowadays, if you click the red button at the bottom-screen UI. 3. Fish is incredibly useful for fighting in early-game - if a nest won't stop bugging you, just go to the nearest pond, grab a few dozen fish, and you're basically invincible for a few minutes as long as you spam fish whenever you reach low health. Make sure to bring extra pistol ammo though, otherwise killing the nests will take ages (you can melee them to death but it deals even less damage than pistols).

[jon_richards]

Ah. I was playing before the 1.0.0 spidertron and the 0.15.0 patch where fish healing apparently got 20x as effective!

[dragontamer]

Shotgun is usually my first move out.

Shotgun means you can kill nests very quickly. It's terrible at killing biters though, but machine gun kills early biters while shotguns clear nests.