A Nullius question

[Huckleberry Hank]

Just started Nullius about 3 hours ago and figuring out plastic took me about an hour haha (so confusing at first glance), Now I'm finally making plastic does anyone have a decent layout for plastic that looks "nice" because my current one looks horrible and it's screwing with my OCD xD

[image]https://i.gyazo.com/25df0756989a3fe6650abcd4cb30ad6d.jpg[/image]

[Nico]

From my experience in many complex overhaul mods you eventually have to do that complicated layouts that OCD eventually becomes really difficult to be satisfied. Though I guess with something simple as this plastic production you might still be able to do it.

[shadain597]

Nullius is so convoluted that it's hard to make everything nice and neat; my initial base was/is so stuffed full of spaghetti that the Squeak Through mod is the only reason I could actually move across it--and I was manually dumping tanks or moving stacks of solid byproducts around to some extent until I got a decent number of logistics bots. I don't actually recommend doing that, incidentally. A few things I want to point out:

1) Be aware that you will get many "upgrade" recipes over time that produce the same product, but more efficiently, at the cost of being a more complex recipe; plastic is no exception. So most/all of your early production lines will become obsolete, meaning that you may or may not want to simply grit your teeth and tolerate ugly-yet-functional designs instead of spending 5 hours designing a setup that will likely be scrapped/ignored before you reach what could be considered midgame.

2) a) You probably know this, but your plastic factory isn't quite finished. You need to do something with the wastewater byproduct, (void that I assume) the sodium hydroxide in the electrolyzer, as well as the hydrogen chloride (??) byproduct from the plastic itself--you'll end up needing the HCl and sodium hydroxide fairly soon, so building out some storage isn't a bad idea, though entirely optional.

2) b) Just as importantly, you need to find a way to balance some of these products; the
products from the electrolyzer are, I believe, used at different rates, so you'll end up backed up on one thing while empty on another--it's a lot like balancing oil cracking in the base game, except there are 4 products instead of 3 and they can't be converted into each other. On the other hand, you have tools to void the excess and your supply of them is effectively unlimited, provided you have enough power.

3) This is entirely a personal decision, but it's worth pointing out that some of those production buildings will be operating significantly under their maximum potential here--the electrolyzer, for example, will probably spend a fair about of time idling. For my early base, a single surge electrolyzer with storage tanks was enough to meet my demands for the first few types of sciences (though I admittedly had very low SPM). I don't think I built another until I had to build out rubber production, and even then I think I made a second electrolyzer more to get away from the worst of the spaghetti and produce large quantities of hydrogen without dealing with the chlorine or sodium hydroxide (using the alternate electrolyzer recipe).