You start on a 25x25 tile landfill island surrounded entirely by lava. There are no ore patches, no trees, no water — just your starting equipment and two chemical plants. Everything has to come from the lava.
Requires Space Age.
Instead of mining, you extract resources by processing lava in chemical plants:
- Lava → Stone / Coal / Iron Ore / Copper Ore
- Lava → Iron Plate / Copper Plate / Stone Bricks (unlocked via research)
- Lava + Coal → Steam → Crude Oil → everything downstream
- Stone + Sulfuric Acid → Uranium Ore
- Lava + Coal + Stone Bricks → Calcite
Electric mining drills are removed from the tech tree — they serve no purpose here.
Land is the other scarce resource. The only way to expand is by researching island expansion technologies, which grant landfill. Every tile matters.
The islands out in the lava are not empty. Biters and worms hold them, at the largest enemy settings the map generator has, and Nauvis has demolisher territories like Vulcanus's from about 200 tiles out. Ticking No enemies in the map generator removes both.
LavaBlock adds several new science packs alongside the base game ones:
- Lava Science Pack — the core pack, crafted from lava-derived materials
- Military Science Pack 2 — advanced military research using railgun ammo, tesla ammo, artillery shells, uranium, and electromagnetic plant
- Circuit Science Pack — electronics-focused pack using electronic circuits, advanced circuits, and processing units
- XP Science Pack — earned automatically through crafting; feeds into the XP Lab
- Pyroclast Science Pack (Space Age) — crafted on Pyroclast using obsidian, lava, and advanced electronics
Pyroclast is a hyper-volcanic planet reachable from Vulcanus. It has higher gravity and pressure than Vulcanus, and a completely lava-dominated landscape.
What's on Pyroclast:
- Minable volcanic rocks (huge and big variants) yielding stone and ores
- Sulfuric acid lakes — pumpable with offshore pumps
- Molten Iron Geysers and Molten Copper Geysers — extractable with offshore pumps; cluster size, frequency, and richness are adjustable in map generation settings
- Demolisher territories
- Obsidian — a volcanic glass mineral extracted from lava in chemical plants, used for Pyroclast Science Pack
The connection to Pyroclast runs from Vulcanus.
- 2 chemical plants
- 10 solar panels and 5 accumulators, enough to run both chemical plants and a pump through the night
- 4 small electric poles
- 2 iron gear wheels and 3 pipes: exactly one offshore pump, so the first move is to craft it and place it on the lava
- Lava Mech Armor, unless turned off in the mod settings. It flies over lava, but slows you to a fifth of walking speed while you wear it
Steam power research is unlocked at the start so you can get power running without needing coal first.
The fluid lake tile implementation (sulfuric acid lakes on Pyroclast) was adapted from Corrundum by Zach Kolansky, used under the MIT License.
MIT License
Copyright (c) 2025 Zach Kolansky
Factorio 2.1 + Space Age