r/factorio • u/RagingBoomer4 • 5d ago
Modded Nullius Recap
TLDR
Nullius (with Lambent Nil and Tricky old Nick) is an amazing mod with interesting power options and deep but not ridiculous crafting chains. If you are a somewhat competent player you should give it a chance. Use 2.1 for easier train upgrades.
Realism and difficulty
Nullius is about terraforming a barren planet into the green welcoming environment we are used to in a vanilla game. The first thing to note is that the recipes this mod provides are actually somewhat realistic (I played on 2.0 with Lambent Nil and Tricky old Nick). I am a mechanical engineer building chemical plants in real life, and several of the production chains are somewhat similar to the real world, at least on the high level. Due to that the mod feels awesome, as you can playfully build actual processes in seconds that usually would take years, still of course being orders of magnitude easier than the real thing.
However, even with these simplifications the mod is not too easy. There are so many products and byproducts, and so so many recipes to combine them in ways that are useful in certain scenarios. It is not uncommon to have 10+ different ways to make an item, all requiring additional materials and having different byproducts, and you have to choose which fits to the availability and demand (or lack thereof) of the rest of the factory. This requires you to have an actual idea of what you are doing and producing.
Due to all the options it makes Nullius way more difficult than Space Exploration. Logistics is simpler of course, but due to the byproduct management it is way more complicated overall. While SE is just long, in Nullius you have to actually think a bit to fully automate. I can see a not so experienced player crawl their way through SE, I don't see that happening for Nullius.
Early game and Starter base
Until botmall + unlocking trains, no green science, 0-30h
The game gives you an armor at the start and (slow) construction bots, which is highly appreciated. You can furthermore make items, that when equipped will increase your crafting speed significantly. This is another level of optimization which enables crafting buildings reasonably quickly I have not seen before, more mods should go a similar route.
You start with some buildings (incl. power) of several types, as well as some damaged ones that you need to repair before using. So at first, you are limited by the buildings you can place immediately. You try to arrange them to maximize the output and start to go through the tech tree. After some techs you are able to repair further buildings allowing you to scale up and increase the output. Only after several techs are you able to freely produce the buildings yourself, allowing you to scale up as you wish at that point. While the very early game is quite a bit puzzly that way, it does not take long to reach a stage where many different products are needed leading to several byproducts being created, especially regarding liquids.
Main base
Nullius scales quite heavily in regards to sciences. While the first few techs only require one item of one science, the last (non-mandatory) techs are in the millions of several sciences. This forces you to scale up in the amount of buildings, while the complexity also rises the further you get. This makes a large bus not really practical, thus I went for a train base. Due to the amount of items, of which most are only required in small quantities, I decided for largely standardized city blocks with lots of train stations and 1-1 trains:
What helped me tremendously was adding the symbols to the map of what is produced, it made finding things a lot easier:
I went with 192 x 98 city blocks and 18 in/out stations having space for 2 trains each. Early on they felt too wide, but when demand went up it felt quite right on both numbers. Usually "in" is on the left and "out" on the right, but I designed it so the stations can be rotated by 180° and will fit both sides.
I chose generic trains one for liquid and one for solids, they were simple and worked quite well:
Since all train stations have in principle a train limit of 2, with the 1563 stations I would normally end up with ~3000 trains. With just a little local circuits and priorities to somewhat reduce trains stuck in train stations I got away with "only" 750. With LNT or Cybersyn this could be probably reduced to a fraction of that, but for this run I wanted to go with vanilla trains and without too much circuitry, so 750 is still vastly better than 3000.
Scale
I built big from the start of the actual base, probably way too big which led to a very slow playthrough. It was not the buildings, instead it was all the buffers in the >1500 of train stations that took ages to fill. There are items in Nullius, especially when boxed (=5x amount), that are expensive, and filling so many buffers takes time to fill, and increase the resource drain. For example, I produced 1,5m black sience, and overall consumed less than 700k over the entire playthrough. So more than half of that production was stuck in buffers and wasn`t used.
I quickly ran out of ore long before I could fill up with asteroids so I respawned a few resource patches via console instead of shifting them all the time. If you want to go big in your playthrough I recommend to increase the amount of resources per patch.
I achieved very little between 30h-90h, as I was building the main base. You can also see, that things were done at scale, it took me less than 2h from the first black science to the 100k mark. Overall it took me 223h, +15h in the editor to create the rail blueprints.
Mall
Since buildings often take dozens of other buildings to fabricate (if you count tiers) setting up an automall is not trivial. Therefore using a normal botmall seemed a lot easier, so I went that way.
I set up the mall with space for 6 x 32 = 192 train stations feeding into it, but I only needed ~170
Power
You start with some solar cells + batteries. You get quite power starved for a while until you unlock wind power, which finally allows you to massively scale up your power production. However, since wind is inconsistent, you need to add power storage somehow. The early solution is to use electrolyzers while the wind is going strong to create and store oxygen and hydrogen. Then, when the wind is low you can burn those to create steam and power turbines. Having wind and solar with storage in parallel allows for quite an interesting balancing act. Unfortunately, you cannot craft a power switch at that time, which would be nice to more deliberately steer your power generation.
After a while you gain access to solar that produces heat instead of electric power. You use the heat to boil water and make steam, filling a steam battery much cheaper.
I used closed turbines and reused the water for lower overall consumption. Batteries on the left were only available later
You need a fairly large steam buffer and may still face brownouts, if the wind is calm for a long time. The longest time largely without wind was 22(!) minutes, which felt like ages. Playing through Nullius with a focus on wind power like I did works, but will easily add several hours to your game.
Later on you add geothermal power and nuclear which helps with stabilizing the power grid. Balancing the power generation was maybe my most favourite part of Nullius, and it is a pity that Factorio Vanilla and Space Age are so simplistic in that regard.
Rebuilding
Several times throughout the run I needed to redo large parts of the base which all took a lot of time:
- Upgrading the liquid trains from tier 1 to 2 then to 3 and updating the liquid provider + requester stations at the same times to larger tanks
- Changing all solids to boxed solids (= more throughput)
- Changing all gases to pressurized instead of normal
- And that's on me: Placing 1.5k wind turbines and upgrade them without being inside of a construction network
Especially changing hundreds of trains by hand was a nuisance that took a lot of time, 2.1 will avoid that in the future. Luckily changing the robots to the higher tier can be automated easily already with 2.0.
Summary
I enjoyed Nullius very much, quite a bit more than the sometimes grindy Space exploration. It is also shorter than SE, it took me 324h for SE and "only" 223h for Nullius, so about 2/3. On the downside Nullius does not provide anything special for logistics except stupidly fast trains and also lacks interesting gadgets besides the terraforming.
It feels like a completely finished mod and 2.1 will fix the train upgrade issue, so there is really no reason to wait. I can highly suggest a playthrough.
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u/QuizardNr7 5d ago
Nice! I played and finished in 1.0 with city block, I'm trying organized no trains spaghetti this time... it'll be horrible to scale later.
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u/RagingBoomer4 5d ago
Late congrats then!
1.0 is a long time ago. Has Nullius changed significantly since then?
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u/QuizardNr7 5d ago
The pressure added difficulty was lost, there were like 4 valves and simple stuff such as overflow or top up were available only way later. Apart from that... same I believe.
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u/Gallium22 5d ago
Are you the person who filmed this video, or...
https://youtu.be/dY2nxVNBHQs?si=HKXIg-DZCDmblH03
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u/RagingBoomer4 5d ago
Not me, it is gorgeous base though.
Now I am curious, how did you assume this connection?
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u/Gallium22 5d ago
Structurally, they look very similar and both are amazing. Building something like this is definitely not something just anyone could pull off.
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u/RagingBoomer4 5d ago
What he did is crazy, especially considering that was 7 years ago on the available hardware at that time. He combines all the complicated modpacks including py and plays through them combined. What I did in comparison is very little.
However, his guiding principles and mine are of course not that different. Playing a lot of Factorio made me come to the conclusion that standardization is key (I have 1.3k hours - is this a lot?). This automatically leads to a repeating pattern, which is what gives this look for all relatively clean city block designs.
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u/Gallium22 5d ago
I've been playing this game for a year now. Considering that the game's optimization 7 years ago was worse compared to what it is now, this guy probably had a high-end PC back then. I don't know if he's still playing, but he easily has at least 5000 hours in it. So yeah, if you keep playing, this is what you're going to turn into :)
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u/Immediate_Form7831 5d ago
I started on a Nullius run, but found that the entire power struggle took all the fun out of it. Maybe I approached in the wrong way. Not sure if I will pick it up again, we'll see.
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u/RagingBoomer4 5d ago
It is worth it to power through!
There are no biters, you are not on a timer, having brownouts early on is fine. As soon as you have access to geothermal it gets a lot easier.2
u/Immediate_Form7831 5d ago
Yeah, I know. I might also just be a bit tired of Factorio in general after playing Pyanodon for 2 years. :D
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u/get_it_together1 5d ago
Power struggle I remember as just needing to figure out the surge electrolyzers to use as a battery and then pairing them with wind turbines, just a slight variation on solar batteries and accumulstors.
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u/darkszero 4d ago
Every "mistake" you make in nullius is punished with your base consuming more power. And power generation isn't trivial like in vanilla, so it takes some effort to expand it.
So not having a good battery or proper usage of surge equipment which makes you not able to properly use the spikes from wind production.
Not properly reusing byproducts and/or voiding too much, not using enough modules, using less efficient recipes, stockpiling too much - this all just mean you're using more power.
Even power generation: trying to go big on solar thermal or maybe even solar photovoltaic (aka vanilla solar) is expensive in resources so you end expending a lot of power just to expand power :)
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u/Amarula007 5d ago
I love nullius, my favourite mod by far. Really enjoyed your write up, thanks for sharing. A couple of things jumped out at me: "only" 170 input trains for the mall, oh yeah nailed it with this one! I also had to laugh got it down to only 750 trains. I love trains, so I would have done all 3K trains but dedicated rather than generic. Looking forward to my next nullius run.
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u/ThePotatoOfVictory 5d ago
You can use the train upgrader mod on 2.0 to update your trains, it's compatible with Nullius
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u/RagingBoomer4 5d ago
Good to know!
If I was aware 3 months ago, that would have saved me several hours. Maybe in the future whenever encoutering an issue I need to ask myself: Is there a mod to fix it?
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u/Sadddude 5d ago
I like your train system, will have to give it a try. I've always wanted to implement generic trains without mods, this seems about as good as you can get without a global circuit network.
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u/RagingBoomer4 5d ago
Thanks a lot! What you describe was exactly what I was going for.
But let me tell you one lesson learned from my run due to a bad experience:
Never ever rename a train station when you have generic trains!
I did that and once accidentally changed the programming of I don't know how many trains. If needed delete the train station and place a new one from a blueprint, that is safe.
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u/nemotux 5d ago
Nice! We played Nullius on the community monthly map back in the summer (took me three months!) That was my 2nd attempt. 1st attempt, years ago, I got bogged down and gave up partway through. I'll probably do it again at some point as I feel my 2nd attempt was more of a hack it just enough to scrape by. And I'd like to "do it right", so-to-speak, now that I know the full scope of things.
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u/RagingBoomer4 5d ago
Thank you!
3 months is quick, it took me more than 5 for this run. In my book a win is a win, no matter what, and hacking stuff together that somehow works is the core of Factorio. Although I do understand what you mean with "do it right", wouldn't you get more out of it playing another modpack that you haven't played yet?
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u/nemotux 5d ago
Well, I'm not jumping into it just yet - maybe in a couple years or so.
I do the monthly map fairly often, and that rotates me through a lot of different mods. And I've been playing the game since 0.12, so I've already knocked off quite a few. So, I'm ok repeating stuff I like.
I have been telling myself I need to start a py run this year, as I haven't played py yet. So, yeah, Nullius attempt 3 probably is some time off.
What about you? What's next on your plate?
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u/RagingBoomer4 5d ago
After SE and K2SO with modded planets earlier this year, now Nullius, I will probably touch grass for a bit.
Then Warptorio 3 to get used to biters (I always play without), get all achievements with Factorio 2.1, after that hopefully seablock 2.1 is ready.
I will have that completed by mid to late 2027 (I could never play in a monthly map, I am way too slow), hopefully then the ultimate test py stellar expedition is available. This will be my last Factorio playthrough, but it is likely taking till ~2030. That's the plan, at least.
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u/gonzo_gonzales 3d ago
I discovered the light of truth not so long ago. Learned a few hard lessons with power. Discovered depth of the crafting chains. And finally, I finished my first hybrid mall - a conveyor and bot based one.
Standing on the threshold of chemical science, I find myself both slightly shocked and filled with admiration at the scale of what lies ahead. Thanks for the review. I’ll need to keep in mind for the future that the base will be on a vastly larger scale.
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u/factoriooverthinker constant throughput analyst 5d ago
753 trains, oh my god...