[1.1] Nullius: A Factorio prequel

[Anachrony]

I've just released a new mod, Nullius. It's available to install now with Factorio 1.1 (you may need to opt into the experimental branch if you haven't already).
Mod Portal: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/nullius

In this Factorio prequel, you play an android sent to terraform barren planets and seed them with life. Eons later your efforts will result in a galaxy full of planets ready for engineers to crash land on. This is a full overhaul mod that replaces all recipes and technologies. No life means no coal, oil, wood, biters, or free oxygen in the atmosphere. Furthermore, since many planets are poor in rare heavier elements like copper or uranium, your technology will focus on the most abundant, lighter elements.

The fundamental natural resources are Iron Ore, Sandstone, Bauxite, Limestone, Air, Seawater, and Volcanic Gas. Advanced resources like copper and uranium become available later with asteroid mining technology. Bauxite is an ore for aluminum, a useful electrical conductor and structural material. Limestone is a source of calcium, useful in cement, glass, and metallurgy, and is also a source of trace amounts of sulfur. Sandstone provides silicon, essential for electronics and glass, plus trace quantities of titanium ore. Air consists mostly of nitrogen and carbon dioxide (a critical feedstock for organic chemistry products like plastic), but has traces of other important gases including noble gases like argon and helium. Seawater is a source of hydrogen, oxygen, chlorine, sodium, and trace amounts of deuterium, tritium, lithium, and other minerals. Volcanic gas is a source of sulfur, carbon monoxide, and trace amounts of boron.

Without coal or free oxygen, there is no burner technology. You rely on a blend of renewable energy sources. The earliest is wind power, which is intermittent and requires spaced out turbines. Slightly more advanced alternatives are solar and geothermal. Obviously solar has the usual day night cycle. Geothermal is the first steady source of energy, but it may only be placed in limited volcanic locations. Finally, at higher technology levels there is nuclear power, including both deuterium-tritium fusion and eventually uranium fission (once asteroid mining is unlocked). Wind and solar require energy storage, but without heavy elements, batteries require moderately advanced technology. Prior to unlocking batteries you will need other energy storage strategies including stored hydrogen/oxygen to burn during periods of low energy production, and compressed gas energy storage.

Once you've established a sufficient industrial base to launch rockets, your endgame goals are to seed this planet with life and to launch duplicates of yourself to repeat this process on other planets throughout the galaxy. You will need to raise the atmosphere's oxygen level and seed a genetically diverse ecosystem of multiple plant and animal species each with their own survival requirements. You must reestablish communications with your progenitors to download genomes of these species, and assemble biological materials from scratch until you have a sufficient breeding stock to reproduce itself naturally. Many of these species produce useful materials more cheaply than you can manufacture them, so you may wish to integrate some of these organisms into your factory production lines.

[Pridesfall]

Sounds cool!

[NotRexButCaesar]

Anyone else read this as “Nilaus” the first time?

[Anachrony]

Anyone else read this as “Nilaus” the first time?

Early in development it was known as Terra Nullius, but the full name was a little unwieldly to keep repeating in the internal implementation, so it was shortened. I didn't realize that there's a Factorio content creator with a similar name, so it's a little unfortunate. The etymology of Nilaus is Greek rather than Latin, so they have different meanings.

[NotRexButCaesar]

The etymology of Nilaus is Greek rather than Latin, so they have different meanings.

Is Nilaus not his real name?

[Anachrony]

Is Nilaus not his real name?

I would assume so. But most names come from somewhere originally. Nilaus means "victory of the people", and Nillius means "no one". Not suggesting that his is anything other than a name, just pointing out that the similarity is only superficial.

[GrumpyJoe]

Looking awesome.
Only played like 30 minutes or so, but looking at the tec tree, I think that's what I always wanted.

Was already thinking of reconfiguring Angels abit for my own pleasure, I guess you saved me 2 years of my time


What I couldn't figure out yet: why alien biomes?
For the masses of rock to handmine in the early game?
Anyway, I live how you give the player enough buildings to start without having the tech, makes up for the, not so missing, burner phase

[Anachrony]

Alien Biomes gives an easy way to eliminate all the grass, trees, bushes, etc, with a single setting. That much I could replicate on my own, but there are other benefits. They give more variety of the appearance of rocks, which a barren planet has in place of all those trees and bushes. As for the different color dirt patches, who knows what differences there were in the planets surface and climate a long time ago, pre-terraforming and pre-life. I think it gives a bit more visual interest to what could be a little bleak with a lot of the usual vanilla decor stripped away, and they have some options to tweak the color scheme if you prefer. Different color terrains map to different ores that you can handmine from the rocks there. Late game you get terraforming tools that allow you transform the appearance of big chunks of the surface at a time, mostly in ways that make it look a bit more like vanilla, which further helps explain why the planet looks different in vanilla.

[mathiaszealot]

I quite like this mod. It really provides a different narration behind the gameplay's progression relative to vanilla and most other major mods which run on a "build a rocket to escape Nauvis" framing. I'm working on twisting together a trickle of purple science before I start the train system and I can say the difficulty feels somewhere between vanilla and the main bob/angel mods, which is a good spot for a relatively standalone mod like this. The significant amount of actual chemistry and geology built into the recipes is also nice to see; it's a significant step up in detail from the abstractions in vanilla. Looking forward to what other fun bits I'll find in the tech tree from here!

Excellent work!

[Anachrony]

The new 1.1.0 major release is out, with some major new features, including a new biology lab with biological science research packs, and other end game changes. Plus a speed run achievement, some new mid game recipes, and balance changes.

I'd recommend that you make a separate save before upgrading, and then after upgrading use a new save. That way you have the option of reverting if any of the balance changes (or end game changes) are an issue for you. A notable early game change is that chlorine gas is no longer ventable. There are ways of neutralizing it in order to dispose of excess, but any existing factories that are relying on venting it may need attention to get this dealt with.

[Anarelion]

I have started to play this mod. I have found the first tier (2 first science) very well thought. But the 3rd tier (mechanical engineering (red with gear?)) shows me a lot of technologies that it is not clear where they lead or what to do with them. For example, waste management doesn't have any way to get rid of waste water, which seems counter-intuitive.

In this 3rd tier, I don't feel there is any guidance on where to go, there is a bazillion techs. So far the only use for aluminium is the mineral sample. Plastic is needed in everything, but hard to scale because there is no way to get rid of chlorine gases.

[Anarelion]

Adding a note: THERE ARE NO RADARS IN MY TECH TREE!!!!

[Stringweasel]

Adding a note: THERE ARE NO RADARS IN MY TECH TREE!!!!

Quote from the Nullius FAQ:

Where are the Cliff Explosives? Radar?

... Radars are called sensor nodes ....

[Anachrony]

For example, waste management doesn't have any way to get rid of waste water, which seems counter-intuitive.

A very early climatology tech already allows you to make outfalls. Their main purpose is to void unwanted fluids such as wastewater. Any liquid that does not specifically say non-disposable in the tooltip can be vented in an outfall. You even start the game with some outfalls, to deal with the wastewater from the hydro plants and other machines that you also start with.

So far the only use for aluminium is the mineral sample.

Aluminum smelting is pretty late in mechanical engineering, and is more complex than iron smelting. You start getting uses for aluminum metal in the other late techs that follow it almost immediately. You wouldn't want to get a bunch of recipes using aluminum before you get aluminum, so it makes sense that they're the ones that follow it. If nothing else, you will need aluminum to make the next research pack.

Plastic is needed in everything, but hard to scale because there is no way to get rid of chlorine gases.

You get a plastic 2 recipe as part of mechanical engineering, which doesn't require chlorine or sodium hydroxide. so you can scale that up as much as you want. Use desalination and don't electrolyze brine unless you need chlorine or sodium hydroxide.

The waste management tech you mentioned gives you lots of the key tools here. Such as a recipe to dissolve mineral dust using hydrochloric acid. Not only is this a good way to get rid of your unwanted gravel/stone, but it also neutralizes that hydrochloric acid, so it's killing 2 birds with one stone in terms of waste products. If you want to neutralize even more hydrochloric acid, there are recipes to make extra mineral dust from ore, so you can make as much of it as you need. Not the most efficient way to vent chlorine, but it will allow you to progress far enough to research more efficient alternatives in the next tech era and even more efficient options later. If your only goal is to neutralize a bit of HCL from the plastic 1 recipe, there is also the option of neutralizing it with caustic solution, but that's useful for other things and generating it involves generating even more chlorine that you may need to vent, so while it would work for just scaling up plastic 1, it may not be worth going down that path.

I'd suggest the Recipe Book mod listed as an optional dependency as a way to navigate these recipes and figure out what to do with different byproducts.

As for which techs to pursue, obviously all of them. You'll need to sort out how to expand your energy to grow anything else, so wind turbines and a hydrogen energy storage system for when the wind isn't blowing. Then you'll want to unlock all the different buildings you need to replicate the starting equipment and scale up. Then you'll want to deal with byproducts. Then you'll start looking at the new materials available to you, such as steel, glass, and aluminum. Then you'll be near the end of the tech tree, looking at how to make the next research pack, using your new materials. The mechanical engineering techs all have quite low counts of the amount of research required, so while there are a lot of them, it's not a lot of resources to research them. Research costs will start scaling up more with later techs.

[mrvn]

So I've build this started base in the first few minutes and now I'm twirling my thumbs getting bored:

nullius.png (4.11 MiB) Viewed 9599 times

There isn't really anything to do but sit around idle and research everything up to the red science flask. Lots of research I have no idea what it is about or use for. No incentive to use any of the researched stuff.

Somehow I would have hoped the early research stuff would have some immediate use giving me some incentive to build stuff. For example why not start of with only one air filter and add the recipe to one of the early techs. Then there would be incentive to build more air compressors to speed up the blue science flasks. That would give incentive to smelt iron ore and make iron plates and wires. Or drop the transport belts and add them to the early techs. Or drop all but a few pipes, just enough for one hydroplant with one pump and one air filter. To improve production you have to produce pipes.

I feel like there needs to be something in between my starter base and building the whole iron smelting and plastic chain to produce your first red science flask. If I look far enough ahead in the tech tree I can figure out what I need to build and why and start building it while more research produces. But somehow that lacks the gratification. You build and build and nothing usable is produced till the very end. Everything needed for the red science flask could be a single expensive tech for pretty much the same experience.

Just my 2 cents. I hope it becomes more interesting again with red science flasks.

[Anachrony]

The whole pre-red science era can be done in around 20 minutes or so. There's even a speedrun achievement for doing it. It requires that you not stand idly by doing nothing. Looking at the tech tree and anticipating your immediate upcoming needs prior to unlocking it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. There's a lot of information to absorb on your first playthrough. Or read the Informatron entries.

You have the recipe for furnaces prior to red science. This is Factorio, you're obviously going to want more than the 2 furnaces you started with very soon. Anything you can possibly make with red science is going to require metal, so get something started making some plates and rods. I'd set up your extra miners on iron.

You're shortly going to need more pipes than you start out with. It looks like you've used waterfill or something to give yourself a bit of water closer to the ore than the main starting area water, so your pipes will go a little further than usual. Normally it can be pretty tight whether you can make a plastic setup work with your starting pipes, and many people need to craft new ones prior to red science. If not, they'll definitely need them soon after, so it won't go to waste either way.

If you set up climatology reasonably early and keeping it churning away into a buffer, which you have, the geology packs are likely to be more of a limiting factor than climatology, especially since there are a bunch that are geology only. If you aren't doing anything better with your handcrafting, you could be handcrafting them, or set up a second assembler to speed them along, or both. The lab itself is pretty fast relative to the low research time costs in this starting era, so the faster you get those the faster you'll research things. For optimal speed, make sure not to waste time researching anything that's not a prereq for red science.

You'll need lots of ore, and your starting miners are pretty slow, so speed things along by getting more while exploring your immediate surroundings looking for non-starting resources such as geothermal or limestone. All the rocks are made of ore. Different ores based on the color of the terrain. There are a lot of rocks, and you have bots that can deconstruct rocks far faster than you can hand mine them. Explore a few different colors to deconstruct a few big rock patches of different colors to find the ore you need. You can give yourself a big head start over what your miners can produce.

[mrvn]

As a power player and when repeating Nullius you know all that and can plan ahead. But try to look at it from the perspective of a first time player.

You don't know what all the techs are for or what you will need in the future. And you don't want to spend 30 minutes going through the tech tree looking at every future tech up until you find the red science bottleneck. Also remember that while you are looking at the tech tree the game is paused. So in those 30 minutes looking at the tech tree you aren't advancing in the game. It's not something to do while waiting for research or items to be produced.

People want to get started doing something and getting some results. Not start the game with planning out the next 5 hours of play. So the mod needs to provide some small fun at the beginning to get the player hooked. And then it can have stretches where you have to plan ahead, wait for production to catch up, ... At least that is my feeling.

[Xynariz]

As a power player and when repeating Nullius you know all that and can plan ahead. But try to look at it from the perspective of a first time player.

I am a "power player" of Factorio itself, but I have previously started a (short so far, but hopefully to continue later) Nullius playthrough, into (but not through) red science. For me, my main goal was "how do I get more of the things I started with", and that alone very strongly directed my gameplay. Yes, I had the first two sciences set up quickly, but I spent basically zero time "just waiting", and instead spent a lot more time actually building setups to make things for me (e.g. power and plastic). Even with all the time that was paused while I was in the research view, I definitely spent longer waiting for ingredients (i.e. for me to build things) than I spent waiting for research to run.

All that is to say - for me personally, the pacing seemed amazing, especially due to the low counts of research required. However, I can understand why others might find it a slow start.

[Anachrony]

One approach I was thinking of to keep people motivated to make the lowest tech stuff would be to have some of the starting equipment be in a broken state that can be repaired with things like pipe 1, auxiliary valve, iron wire, iron plate, stone brick, etc. Things that you can make earlier, and doing so will allow you to repair your plastic making apparatus and speed up production of other stuff by getting more of the machines online. The repair recipes would be unlocked by some of the existing early techs in addition to their current effects, and would be hidden from your crafting menu after you repaired the last item of that type. This will give people some more concrete short term goal to motivate doing stuff if they do not like planning ahead for things that are not unlocked yet.

Just changing everything to be like vanilla where you can magically make conveyor belts out of iron plates is not practical for Nullius. You need a motor to make things like that, and all of the earliest techs are leading up to the minimal set of materials for you to be able to craft a motor. Rather than dumbing down all the recipes so that complex machinery can be made of nothing but iron plate, the repair recipes would bridge the gap by effectively allowing you to craft a limited quantity of machinery using very basic and cheap materials at the start of the game.

[mrvn]

As a power player and when repeating Nullius you know all that and can plan ahead. But try to look at it from the perspective of a first time player.

I am a "power player" of Factorio itself, but I have previously started a (short so far, but hopefully to continue later) Nullius playthrough, into (but not through) red science. For me, my main goal was "how do I get more of the things I started with", and that alone very strongly directed my gameplay. Yes, I had the first two sciences set up quickly, but I spent basically zero time "just waiting", and instead spent a lot more time actually building setups to make things for me (e.g. power and plastic). Even with all the time that was paused while I was in the research view, I definitely spent longer waiting for ingredients (i.e. for me to build things) than I spent waiting for research to run.

All that is to say - for me personally, the pacing seemed amazing, especially due to the low counts of research required. However, I can understand why others might find it a slow start.

For power you need the windmills, i.e. red science. And plastic you need for everything but you can't make it till you have it all researched. That was kind of my point.

One approach I was thinking of to keep people motivated to make the lowest tech stuff would be to have some of the starting equipment be in a broken state that can be repaired with things like pipe 1, auxiliary valve, iron wire, iron plate, stone brick, etc. Things that you can make earlier, and doing so will allow you to repair your plastic making apparatus and speed up production of other stuff by getting more of the machines online. The repair recipes would be unlocked by some of the existing early techs in addition to their current effects, and would be hidden from your crafting menu after you repaired the last item of that type. This will give people some more concrete short term goal to motivate doing stuff if they do not like planning ahead for things that are not unlocked yet.

Just changing everything to be like vanilla where you can magically make conveyor belts out of iron plates is not practical for Nullius. You need a motor to make things like that, and all of the earliest techs are leading up to the minimal set of materials for you to be able to craft a motor. Rather than dumbing down all the recipes so that complex machinery can be made of nothing but iron plate, the repair recipes would bridge the gap by effectively allowing you to craft a limited quantity of machinery using very basic and cheap materials at the start of the game.

That's actually a nice idea. You would have to think of some creative ways things can be broken so you need for example some graphite to repair something. Or use some hydrochloric acid to clean some parts of a machine. Otherwise it would be just smelting iron in quantities you can just do by hand, by dumping a stack of ore into a furnace and then dump the stack of ingots into an foundry. After the repair the items will be useless again till you have red science and can research things like belts, furnaces, inserter and assembler. But it might work out. Good idea I think.

In SeaBlock they have another way for early research. You don't start of with a science building and producing science flasks. Instead the first few researches need you to produce items. For example you need to produce some green algae to unlock the tech that unlocks recipes using green algae. That way you don't just have to research stuff but you have to use the recipes unlocked to advance. You can't just setup my started base from above and then sit for 30 minutes till everything is researched. Apart from engaging the player you are also likely to end up with a halfway functional factory for the early stuff.

FYI, I now have researched Railroads (my goal) and don't even have a factory for producing transport belts. After producing my first plastic (and red science) I've been just tinkering with the plastic setup. Unlocking some recipes to build an extra electrolyzer or chemical plant and making it so everything in the factory is either used, vented into the air or dumped into the ocean. So far I only had to make some sand and glass iirc, which I made by transferring a stack by hand. Meanwhile it's been producing red science enough to get to railroads.

Only now with the fuel canisters I'm forced to delve into something new, smelting bauxid. Feels like I got awfully far with just 2 furnaces smelting iron ore. For the railroad now I need rubber. That's my next big chemistry puzzle. And tons of steel for the rails and finally a use for gravel. I don't have train stops yet so that is kind of a problem for me, they need the purple flasks (Electrical Engineering). Never much understood the point of having rails and trains but no stops and in nullius they seem far apart in techs.

Or do I even need to smelt bauxid? I have some ingots already. Probably enough to drive a train around and without stops more trains are not that useful. Same as I have some steel ingots already. Why do I have those? I didn't need any of it before researching to make more. Where did they come from? I could understand getting plates or rods or wire from the space ship. But ingots? Did it transport some steel ingots as cargo that I recovered? We might never find out.