[1.1] Nullius: A Factorio prequel

[orzelek]

If steel or one of other chests exists as normal then wide chests should work. Just need to limit it in settings a bit to not generate tons of variants. And it can do 13x1 chests for nice 2 cargo wagon stops.

[mrvn]

If steel or one of other chests exists as normal then wide chests should work. Just need to limit it in settings a bit to not generate tons of variants. And it can do 13x1 chests for nice 2 cargo wagon stops.

No, not out of the box. Nullius sets the hidden flag on any entity (in many categories) that isn't explicitly excluded. Containers is one of the categories it hides.

[Anachrony]

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

I'll look into it. I don't play Factorio with the sound on, so I don't even know what the injured sound is.

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.

You don't get all the nice toys yet in mechanical engineering, you get the essentials. On the plus side all the mechanical engineering research costs are quite low, so you can get through it relatively quickly. Electrical engineering has a lot more of the quality of life stuff, and red belts/miniloaders 1 are pretty early in electrical engineering.

Or other chest mod. I would really like a 6 wide chest for the train stations.

Warehousing is the supported mod for that. Wide chests is not out of the question for porting, but it's not a high priority.

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.

The mod portal page lists the supported mods on 2 different tabs, one of them with links. The in-game mod viewer description refers you to the mod portal information tab for a list of comaptible mods, and it has a link to get there. I do not want to add 20 optional dependencies, that's too much. There is no clear consensus on what an optional dependency even means, and some people think you're meant to play with all of them.

Nullius sets the hidden flag on any entity (in many categories) that isn't explicitly excluded.

There is an interface to prevent Nullius from disabling a tech or recipe. Other mods can use it to add support for Nullius the same way that Nullius currently adds support for other mods. Or a third party mod could do it. It doesn't have to be done in Nullius. It almost always involves more porting to make anything actually work though, so it's almost never just a matter of not hiding it and it automatically works. The not hiding it is the easiest part. For a lot of things it's not too bad to port though. Essentially all items are different, so any recipe has to use different ingredients. Almost all crafting machines are different, so the recipe has to use different crafting machines. All the science flasks are different, so the techs need to use different research costs. All the vanilla techs are absent, so the techs need to hook into different prerequisites. These sorts of things can all be conditionally overriden when the Nullius mod is detected. Mods that have heavy scripting can be another matter, since anything hardcoded into a script usually can't be overridden unless the script intentionally exposes parameters that can be set to adjust that behavior.

[mrvn]

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

I'll look into it. I don't play Factorio with the sound on, so I don't even know what the injured sound is.

It's a labored breathing sound, gasping for your last breath.

Since the player is supposed to be a robot and not a person you might check out the "I, Robot" mod. Works out of the box except it breaks the no-healing. Doesn't change the labored breathing sound when injured as I had hoped. Still, if I am a robot then lets look the part.

[mrvn]

Now I've finally researched everything needed for LTN and produce everything:

train-factory.png (697.26 KiB) Viewed 4741 times

build-everything.png (3.9 MiB) Viewed 4741 times

Now I can rebuild everything a bit bigger. Trains with just one fluid wagon are just too small for e.g. hydrogen. I also sometimes get grid locks because the round-abouts are too close together for the amount of traffic I already have.

I have one problem though: What do I do with all the Chlorine? I need more caustic acid but the electrolyser that split water for it can't get rid of their chlorine.

[Anachrony]

I have one problem though: What do I do with all the Chlorine? I need more caustic acid but the electrolyser that split water for it can't get rid of their chlorine.

For one thing, make sure to use desalination and brine electrolysis, so you only split brine when you actually need the caustic solution. This may be obvious, but some people stick with saline electrolysis and try to void both caustic solution and chlorine. I've seen people complain about chlorine while also dumping sodium hydroxide.

A major early game (mechanical engineering) sink of chlorine is mineral dust. Crush all your gravel to dust, dispose of it with hydrochloric acid. If you need to neutralize even more acid, you can use a recipe like crushed limestone -> dust to make as much as you want of it. Lubricant, polycrystalline silicon, and plastic 1 all have chlorine byproducts to deal with but overall each process consumes more chlorine than it produces. So anything that uses those is using some chlorine.

A more efficient option in electrical engineering is to make calcium chloride solution with the hydrochloric acid, which can be voided. In chemical engineering you can improve the efficiency of this by recycling the calcium chloride solution back to limestone to neutralize more chlorine per limestone wasted. In physics you can improve the efficiency even more with a recipe to make calcium chloride solution from chlorine gas instead of hydrochloric acid. And the better your equipment and productivity modules get, the more efficient that recycling loop becomes.

In chemical engineering you also get a bunch of other options. Titanium processing is a pretty good chlorine sink. The sand recovery recipe is a good sink for hydrochloric acid. You can do sand recovery as much as you want, since the only other input is sludge, which you get a lot of naturally, and if you need more you can do the trick mentioned above to create extra mineral dust, neutralize that, and then use the sludge in sand recovery. You can even turn the output of sand recovery into more sludge if you don't need it, though it is useful.

These methods should allow you to vent as much chlorine as you need to, with increasing levels of efficiency as your tech improves. As long as you are managing your caustic solution wisely (e.g. buffering it and not dumping it due to poor regulation of electrolysis or inefficient fluid control), any of these should make your chlorine very manageable.

ETA: I've added this to the FAQ on the mod portal, since it comes up a lot.

[mrvn]

Nullius sets the hidden flag on any entity (in many categories) that isn't explicitly excluded.

There is an interface to prevent Nullius from disabling a tech or recipe. Other mods can use it to add support for Nullius the same way that Nullius currently adds support for other mods. Or a third party mod could do it. It doesn't have to be done in Nullius.

What's the interface for doing this? I want to enable bulk railloaders and deadlocks loaders since miniloaders don't work right with the bulk railloaders.

[Anachrony]

There is a thread about it on the mod portal discussion tab: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/nullius/d ... 7568f624a5
Un-hiding stuff is only the first and simplest step to making it compatible.

[mrvn]

There is a thread about it on the mod portal discussion tab: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/nullius/d ... 7568f624a5
Un-hiding stuff is only the first and simplest step to making it compatible.

That's hardly an interface. An interface would be nullius providing some method you call to translate something to nullius names. E.g. renames all the science flasks to their basically equivalent nullius names, rename items to equivalent nullius items where known, and so on.

I think I've figured everything out recipe and tech wise now. Except I need to change my Persistant-Blueprint. In vanilla it's made from wood. It's a marker you place on the map and it places a blueprint there. Changes to the original blueprint are placed on the map as ghosts as long as the marker exists. With nullius starting off with personal roboport and bots the PB should be available right from the start or only needing mineral samples for research. I'm thinking the marker could require some stone to build in easy mode and Antenna, Logic Circuit and Wire in hard mode (because it communicates wireless with your blueprint library) and harder science flask to match.

[Anachrony]

I very specifically said that there is an interface to prevent Nullius from disabling techs and recipes, and that not disabling them was only the first step. I didn't say that there was an interface to automatically fully port techs and recipes without any effort. There are a lot of subtle details that are better left to individual judgement. The word "interface" doesn't imply that things will seamlessly do whatever behavior you would prefer. The disabling of techs and recipes is something happening on the Nullius side that some people who don't know this interface misinterpret to think that porting can only happen on the Nullius side. The simple interface allows such porting to happen in other mods by preventing Nullius from doing the thing that would otherwise prevent it. And that's all it does. The rest of the porting requires manual attention.

[mrvn]

Sorry. Just as programmer the word interface means something different to me.

[Anachrony]

It's a labored breathing sound, gasping for your last breath.

Since the player is supposed to be a robot and not a person you might check out the "I, Robot" mod. Works out of the box except it breaks the no-healing. Doesn't change the labored breathing sound when injured as I had hoped. Still, if I am a robot then lets look the part.

The next update, 1.1.7, due soon, will include new sounds for that. It's nothing groundbreaking, it reuses some vanilla robot repair sounds, but it's more suitable than the current heartbeat sound.

I also changed it so that if you use a character reskin mod you still don't regenerate health and get robot damage sounds.

[mrvn]

It's a labored breathing sound, gasping for your last breath.

Since the player is supposed to be a robot and not a person you might check out the "I, Robot" mod. Works out of the box except it breaks the no-healing. Doesn't change the labored breathing sound when injured as I had hoped. Still, if I am a robot then lets look the part.

The next update, 1.1.7, due soon, will include new sounds for that. It's nothing groundbreaking, it reuses some vanilla robot repair sounds, but it's more suitable than the current heartbeat sound.

I also changed it so that if you use a character reskin mod you still don't regenerate health and get robot damage sounds.

Thanks. Luckily by now I have researched the repair packs. Before that getting hurt is kind of problematic. But with no biters and no gun I think standing in front of a moving train is the only way to hurt yourself.

[mrvn]

I'm thinking of building a proper solar collector steam plant now to boil of excess water of various kinds.

I figured I build a unit of 12 heat exchangers with 10x10 solar collectors. That's nearly the right ratio thanks to the neighbour bonuses, one collector is extra but removing it would remove some neighbour bonus too and then it's not enough heat.

What I wonder now is if the heat will transfer or if solar collectors will reach their maximum temp. I would like to put all heat exchangers on one side of the solar collectors square. But then heat has to travel through 10 solar collectors and some heat pipes. And there needs to be enough heat capacity to buffer production during the day and release it at night. Anyone build something similar and done the math or experimented with the best shape? Do I need to add extra heat pipes for additional heat capacity or just the minimum to connect the heat exchangers? Questions over questions.

[GrumpyJoe]

I've now gone the wind route, about 60 of them, only having some steam buffers from surge electrolysing water.
I'm running a very minimal setup, only 2 labs, reading/learning how to produce the next item.
I'm almost through electrical science that way and I'm way too fast! Too much to do I've unlocked but not really touched.

For solar collectors, I don't think it's about the perfect collector arrangement, tho it can minimize resources put into it, but about heat storage.

Heat storage, be it through steam or heat in heat pipes, replaces accumulators until you can make them.

Since nuclear is so far away, I think this will be the first time ever I'm going for a solar base, and as soon as a can.

What I've researched but not really looked at is volcanic heat gen.

Need to reorganize once LTN is running, otherwise I'll research rockets with one AM for each item

[disentius]

@grumpyjoe very recognizable.

Been running3 labs,have done more research than i know what to do with. up to first four scince packs(yellow, blue, purple, green)
Made a gigantic spagettimall to produce most of the machines we can/need (tier 2 most of them), and now setting up cityblock of 4x4 chunks for klonans karts.
Having lots of fun with this!

2021-09-07 17_05_41-Factorio 1.1.39.png (6.78 MiB) Viewed 4534 times

[mrvn]

I've now gone the wind route, about 60 of them, only having some steam buffers from surge electrolysing water.
I'm running a very minimal setup, only 2 labs, reading/learning how to produce the next item.
I'm almost through electrical science that way and I'm way too fast! Too much to do I've unlocked but not really touched.

For solar collectors, I don't think it's about the perfect collector arrangement, tho it can minimize resources put into it, but about heat storage.

Heat storage, be it through steam or heat in heat pipes, replaces accumulators until you can make them.

Since nuclear is so far away, I think this will be the first time ever I'm going for a solar base, and as soon as a can.

What I've researched but not really looked at is volcanic heat gen.

Need to reorganize once LTN is running, otherwise I'll research rockets with one AM for each item

I now have 150 wind turbines, gone kind of overboard there with an assembler producing them unchecked for a while, and still get hit by dry spells every now and then. I have 16 surge electrolysers and only use a fraction of the maximum power. The H2 and O2 is stored in 20 and 40 30k tanks and then fed to 36 combustion chambers and 40 backup turbines. I probably don't have enough storage for H2 and O2 as well. When the wind dies too long I run out of steam. I could use more power when the wind is strong and buffer more.

But the reason I want to check out solar collectors is that I have processes producing e.g. Water with not enough consuming it. I'm dumping it in the ocean at the moment but that seems wasteful. I need more steam for windless nights and solar collectors I haven't tried since the new boiling recipes came about.


As for "I don't think it's about the perfect collector arrangement": Each collector has a max temp of 250°C. The heat exchanger needs 185°C to work. And heat only flows so fast. It needs a certain gradient to flow. So with each solar collector added to a chain the gradient gets shallower. There is a maximum number of solar collectors you can chain to a heat exchanger before the heat won't flow fast enough. At that point the solar collectors will reach 250°C and not produce more heat. And I'm guessing you can't chain up enough solar collectors in a straight row to a heat exchanger till you hit the 1.8MW it can use. But I'm gonna try tonight.

[Anachrony]

I've only experimented with moderate builds of solar collector 1s. In my builds I had 2 shorter rows of solar collector hooked up to each heat exchanger rather than 1 long row per exchanger. At one point I had a build with longer rows but heat exchangers on both sides. I did not strive to maximize the ratio of collectors to heat exchangers, because the heat exchangers are cheap enough to have a bit lower ratio like 8 to 1, and there may be some benefits to a lower ratio to allow it to be more flexible about using stored heat when needed rather than letting it accumulate and possibly go to waste. These have been the subject of lots of recent balancing, so probably there is not a lot of knowledge out there yet about which builds are most successful. My testing just shows that there are at least some viable builds, without exploring all possibilities.

[mrvn]

So I came up with this:

solar.png (3.03 MiB) Viewed 4493 times

The solar collectors produce on average 1837KW per heatexchanger and the tooltip says the heatexchangers take 1.8MW. That must be rounded down because I'm running out of heat at night and none of the solar collectors overheat during the day. But it's as close to right as I can get. You can probably remove some heat pipes but not too many. Didn't try it out down to the last heat pipe.

Given a solar collector is worth about 6-7 heat pipes it's probably more cost efficient to use more solar collectors and accept some heat loss during the day. So tomorrow I will see what it looks like with 1 or 2 more columns of solar collectors and with other types of water. Have to add some pipes to take away the fluid output for non-pure water steaming.

PS: my previous calculation of 10x10 solar collectors for 12 heatexchangers was wrong, I must have forgotten to update since the values where recently adjusted.

[Anachrony]

What temperature does it peak at during the day? It does gain a little more heat if it's below a certain temperature threshold. It's not all or nothing at the max temp like a nuclear reactor. It shouldn't be a huge difference. One more reason why erring on the side of having a little extra heat exchanger capacity can be good, rather than trying to perfectly match the ratio. Heat exchanger 1 is pretty cheap compared to solar collectors.

Heat exchanger 1 operates at 165C. Stirling engines are less than that, and the higher tier ones get even lower, so they have a more favorable temperature range to work with. The threshold for absolute max temperature generation is 175C. In practice it's hard to stick to that, especially with a big build, and one that is trying to perfectly match the ratio of collector to exchanger. If you can keep the temp a bit lower you should see marginally better energy generation, but below 175C there is no additional benefit to going lower. The advantage of stirling engine is that there's a lot more room for variation between their working temperature and 175C, so it's easier to keep it at maximum production. Also they can effectively store more heat energy since they have those extra degrees of storage.

I don't think there's much practical value in trying to optimize every last kJ, unless it's out of curiosity or enjoyment. In practical terms you can get pretty close to optimal and just focus on building more as you need more. When you get to higher tech solar thermal or geothermal your equipment will get a little better and less will be lost to inefficiency.