[1.1] Nullius: A Factorio prequel

[mrvn]

I just tried adding Deadlocks Stacking & Beltboxes to Nullius but that fails to load.

The reason looks like Nullius sets flags={"hidden"} on the transport belts in data-upgrades and the loaders prototype is based on the transport belts. Any chance this could be done in data-final instead? I think that would fix Deadlocks Stacking & Beltboxes.

[Anachrony]

I could look into it, but the reason I haven't investigated adding that mod to the list of compatible mods is that Nullius has a native compression system already. So you'd have boxes of boxes, which would get weird. I'll add it to my to-do list to see if there is any sane interaction for this combination of mods.

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.

Without stops it's just another personal transportation option, and not a particularly practical one, though you could haul a lot more cargo to an outpost than in a car. However, I would dispute that it's all that far from stops. Trains are near the end of mechanical engineering (though if you beeline for it there may still be a number of other mechanical engineering techs left to get through). While train stops are near the very beginning of electrical engineering, at a point where the research costs are still pretty cheap. So you do need to set up the new research pack, but you don't have to get that far into the new research to unlock stops. Once you have stops, they are suitable for very simple loops to mining outposts. No complex city block bases yet, but it will get you started with resources outside your starting area on a train world or RSO type map. Now the signals you need for a proper rail base are pretty deep into electrical engineering, but I would argue by the time you automate enough building materials to actually make expanding to a rail base a practical design, you'll stumble through most of electrical engineering in the background without much effort.

All the electical engineering techs on the critical path to rail signals tend to be a little cheaper than their peers to make it practical to beeline to that for a rail base. Also, nearly all techs on the critical path to rail signals are immune to tech multipliers, so that someone who wants to build a huge rail base with a high tech multiplier can actually get to that point before the tech cost scaling starts to get crazy.

But ingots? Did it transport some steel ingots as cargo that I recovered? We might never find out.

Scrap metal isn't an item in Nullius. When recycling used metal it's no longer really uniform enough to qualify as a standard metal plate or rod, so it's scrap that you have to melt down and re-cast into a fresh form, which matches up best with role of an ingot.

[mrvn]

I could look into it, but the reason I haven't investigated adding that mod to the list of compatible mods is that Nullius has a native compression system already. So you'd have boxes of boxes, which would get weird. I'll add it to my to-do list to see if there is any sane interaction for this combination of mods.

I was looking for the loaders. You are right that the stacking conflicts with the boxes conceptually. I saw that Miniloaders are supported. But they behave somewhat odd. I have the grey miniloaders and they seem to load a yellow belt fine but only unload half a yellow belt. Could it be that miniloaders are implemented with inserters and not actual loader entities?

On another node: How do you use Train Stops without signals? As soon as you have 2 trains on the same rail network you get collisions. So unless you just use single trains on dedicated lines to drive ore from a far away mines to your base I think trains will remain useless until you have the signals too. Worse for me as I want to use LTN, that's another tech level up for the LTN Train Stops.

[Anachrony]

Miniloaders are not modified by Nullius, except for the recipe and position on the tech tree. So their behavior removing stuff from lanes is a question for the Miniloader mod. But the low tech grey one is much slower than the regular miniloader 1. The upside is that the grey one is cheap and requires no electricity, while the other ones do require electricity. The regular miniloaders are fast enough to unload the full belt of their color, so the under the hood implementation doesn't matter too much. But my understanding is that yes, they are special inserters under the hood, and there are some advantages to doing it that way. The miniloader mod author would know more details. Miniloaders works better with trains than the built in vanilla inserter prototype, and it performs pretty well in terms of UPS, so it's a popular loader mod. The "chute" is not a good way to judge its capability.

You use a single rail line for a single mining outpost. A different line for a different outpost. Until you have signals, then you can do whatever you want. It's a very limited use, but it's a use. A single train has a ton more potential throughput than you are likely able to use at that point. By the time you can use multiple trains worth of ore from a single mine, you'll have long since exhausted the relatively cheap electrical engineering tech tree.

A lot of people see the big gap on the tech tree and think they're going to be ready to build a rail base if only they had that one tech. In reality, there's still a ton of stuff you need to build up after you have that tech, and they end up researching it almost by accident before they actually have all the things they need to expand to a proper rail base.

[mrvn]

I've run into a power crisis. Till now I've used the solar cells recovered from the space ship and build windmills. But you can't place windmills to close together, which limits the amount you can build there. So what's the next step up from there?

I've looked into the combustion chamber but producing the hydrogen and oxygen for it consumes more energy than you get out of it. So that looks like a dead end. Only good to recover energy from waste hydrogen and oxygen instead of venting it. Should I try the Ethylene/Propene/Benzen combution or is that still an energy loss?

Next I looked at the solar collectors and heat exchangers. They need water. Producing that eats up most of the energy but there is a small surplus. Not much of a surplus given the size of the solar collectors needed. Unless I have surplus water from somewhere (e.g. brine production iirc) this seems impractical too.

Am I missing something?

[Anachrony]

I've looked into the combustion chamber but producing the hydrogen and oxygen for it consumes more energy than you get out of it. So that looks like a dead end. Only good to recover energy from waste hydrogen and oxygen instead of venting it.

Look at the name of the technology that unlocks combustion chamber for a clue to its purpose: "Energy Storage". Windmills produce power intermittently, so there is no way to completely avoid power outages with them. If you overbuild them by enough, you'll see fewer outages, but still some. Hydrogen and oxygen are your batteries to store energy for later. If you read the tooltip description of "turbine" and "surge electrolyzer", you can see how this works. Surge electrolyzer only electrolyzes things using surplus power, e.g. when winds are strong. Turbine only provides backup power when other power sources are insufficient, e.g. when winds are low. So these properties make it pretty easy to set up an energy storage system that will automatically store power when you have it to spare and generate power when you need it. It wouldn't make sense to get back more energy from burning hydrogen than it took you to create it from scratch, and the same goes for other chemical fuels. They don't work for energy production, but they serve a useful role for energy storage. Hydrogen is the most efficient option, but you may need to burn the others if you get them as byproducts. There is some discussion of energy storage in Informatron as well as the mod portal FAQ tab. Some of this material may be migrated to the games new tips and tricks system at some point.

But you can't place windmills to close together, which limits the amount you can build there.

You don't have to defend any territory from biters, so space to build is pretty unlimited. A 10x10 wind farm only covers 320 tiles x 320 tiles, and provides a lot of power when the wind is blowing. A little annoying to build, but not a huge area in the grand scheme of things. It helps to use f5 to show the grid, since they can be placed exactly 1 grid sector away from one another, and you can arrange to place them on the corners. You can configure f5 to show less extraneous information besides the grid. Or just setup a grid aligned blueprint. When you research pylons, they also reach exactly one sector, so it makes wind farms much easier to build. Stone bricks are very, very cheap to mass produce even at low tech levels, so you could make yourself a little road as you're running to speed things up. Or you can build a car to travel faster and place the wind turbines more quickly. Your construction bots may help with placing the power poles. Since they may have trouble keeping up with you, you have the option of removing your roboport from your suit and placing it on the ground instead, allowing them to construct in a limited area while you run around. You should have gotten a storage chest from the crash site that is helpful to use for this.

Next I looked at the solar collectors and heat exchangers. They need water. Producing that eats up most of the energy but there is a small surplus.

What version of the mod are you on? There were changes to solar collectors and heat exchangers recently. The new heat exchanger uses less water, and gives you a choice of water to use, and the solar collectors produce more heat. Stirling engines can be used with solar collectors which may be a bit easier than dealing with water, but those aren't available until electrical engineering.

[mrvn]

But you can't place windmills to close together, which limits the amount you can build there.

You don't have to defend any territory from biters, so space to build is pretty unlimited. A 10x10 wind farm only covers 320 tiles x 320 tiles, and provides a lot of power when the wind is blowing. A little annoying to build, but not a huge area in the grand scheme of things. It helps to use f5 to show the grid, since they can be placed exactly 1 grid sector away from one another, and you can arrange to place them on the corners. You can configure f5 to show less extraneous information besides the grid. Or just setup a grid aligned blueprint. When you research pylons, they also reach exactly one sector, so it makes wind farms much easier to build. Stone bricks are very, very cheap to mass produce even at low tech levels, so you could make yourself a little road as you're running to speed things up. Or you can build a car to travel faster and place the wind turbines more quickly. Your construction bots may help with placing the power poles. Since they may have trouble keeping up with you, you have the option of removing your roboport from your suit and placing it on the ground instead, allowing them to construct in a limited area while you run around. You should have gotten a storage chest from the crash site that is helpful to use for this.

Yeah, my problem is mostly that I'm too lazy to run around so far to place the windmills and power poles. But if that is the way to go ...
Good point on the surge electrolyzers as kind of battery thing too.

Next I looked at the solar collectors and heat exchangers. They need water. Producing that eats up most of the energy but there is a small surplus.

What version of the mod are you on? There were changes to solar collectors and heat exchangers recently. The new heat exchanger uses less water, and gives you a choice of water to use, and the solar collectors produce more heat. Stirling engines can be used with solar collectors which may be a bit easier than dealing with water, but those aren't available until electrical engineering.

I just started a few days ago when 1.1.2 was current. But I will update to 1.1.4. Seems like that addresses the issue. With other water types as source for steam the solar collector should become viable as real energy source.

[Anachrony]

The other issue, which I'm still addressing, is that the turbine is designed as a backup power generator, for use with the hydrogen battery. You want a higher priority turbine for a primary power generator. I intend to deal with that in the next update.

[mrvn]

Can you have turbines that
1) charge accumulators
2) charge surge catalysators
3) charge both
4) charge none

2+3 could probably be combined.

What I would really like to see would be a power switch where you can select both the input and output priority. So you can e.g. have 2 power grids and put a switch between them that says anything left over in grid 1 goes to grid 2 usable by everything. There is an issue open for that but the devs don't seem to care ennough about it.

[Anachrony]

The electricity system only has 3 priority levels to work with. Surge stuff and accumulators are the same priority, the lowest. A new turbine will charge both. The old one charges neither. There is currently a priority turbine, but it's higher tech, and its the same priority as wind and solar, so it would be wasting fuel unnecessarily if used with solar collectors. The main use of priority turbine prior to solar collectors was for waste products, as a more constructive alternative to venting stuff in chimneys.

[mrvn]

When I look at Ethylene / Propene / Benzene it says "(void in 1)". It's quite helpful where it says Chimney or Outfall. But what is a "void in 1"?

[Anachrony]

It means it can’t be directly voided but is 1 processing step to turn it into something that can be voided. In this case you need to burn them first, like a diy flare stack. The tech for burning them is later in mechanical engineering. Save some room for that, but in the meantime put them in tanks and you’re unlikely to get too backed up in the time it takes before researching that.

[mrvn]

Thanks, good to know. I see the combustion recipes. Venting steam seem a bit stupid though. That should go into storage for turbines in case the wind stops. I've added the ethylene + propene -> plastic recipe leaving me with the benzene for methanol canister. So nothing should back up there.

Apropo wind stopping. Seems to happen quite a bit here. I really need to setup surge electrolysers and H2/O2 storage. Nice feature.

[GrumpyJoe]

While I'm not in the "wtf, why use plastic for everything, it's hard to mass produce" corner, I recently unlocked trains, and I'm wondering why rails use the same amount of plastic and steel?

All the other stuff I'm very ok with, I had no trouble automating everything up to electrical engineering, but the rail recipe seems very odd.

I'm not even thinking about rails yet. I have very high ore density and it's unlikely I would need rails other than to start building designated blocks when I finally get to LTN.

I just wanted to know the reason behind that one recipe choice. All the other stuff looks so much more realistic.

[Anachrony]

The rail part of a railroad is the steel beams in the recipe, but the railroad ties/sleepers can be made of a variety of materials. Traditionally they were made of wood, something that Nullius doesn't have, but even on Earth they are not always made of wood. These days some railroad ties are made of recycled plastic. Some are made of concrete, or rubber, or steel, or fiberglass. If concrete were lower tech or rails were higher tech, maybe they'd use concrete instead of plastic. Benefits of plastic railroad ties over wood include a longer anticipated lifespan and reduced noise and vibrations.

As for the ratio, by volume the ties/sleepers make up a greater part of the material in a railroad than the rails themselves. The steel rods in the recipe are bolts/spikes, and the gravel is self explanatory.

By the way, there is a second recipe for rail that uses wood instead of plastic. But it's a bit further down the tech tree. After you genetically engineer the trees.

[GrumpyJoe]

That's what I like most about this mod.
You have answers that make sense.

[mrvn]

I had a little argument with a train and now am quite low on health. I don't seem to heal while I rest and there are no fish to catch and throw at myself to heal.

So how do I regain health in Nullius?

[Anachrony]

You’re an android, you have to build a repair pack.

[mrvn]

Might I suggest replacing the breathing sound when injured with some screeching and clicking of a broken machine?

[mrvn]

What happened to the yellow miniloader? I see the grey chute and the red (fast-transport) one but the yellow flavor seem to get skipped.

And if you are looking into the mod support maybe allow the silos and warehouse from angelsaddons-storage? Or other chest mod. I would really like a 6 wide chest for the train stations. It's not even about the number of slots but the physical dimension allowing 6 inserters to transfer between a single chest and cargo wagon.

And last, would it make sense to put all the compatible mods as optional depends in the info.json? That way the mod portal shows them. I see Warehousing in the compatibility list so I'm going to try that now.