I'm about halfway through a Factorio campaign with Enable Planet Mods Lite modpack by Kryzeth, a bit over 200h into the campaign.
Factorio is very popular, but very few people play with modded planets, so I'm writing about my experiences so you can see if that's something for you. It will contain mild spoilers.
General notes
What I describe is an early/mid game experience. The planets sometimes have additional late game content that I won't cover. I also won't list all less impactful bonuses, as there are too many.
Most planets want you to return there multiple times with more advanced technology. The first time you land, you'd likely build a starter base able to just do some basic rocket launches, and export a trickle of planet specific science packs. Then after unlocking a few technologies, you'd be able to come back and build a much better base. And perhaps later you'll come back again, combining technologies from multiple planets.
Various planet mods were created by different modders, but they all put considerable effort into making the overall experience cohesive! Planets try to work with each other, and nothing from one planet is going to break another.
For every planet, I offer a quick description, main rewards, 1-5 star rating for difficulty and reward, and any special notes. Difficulty rating is based on building a sustainable base that can work and export relevant goods without your presence, and with only modest ongoing imports (like calcite).
The campaign is still on Factorio 2.0, and the mods might have changed since I played them. Enable Planet Mods Lite also keeps moving planets between recommended and optional every now and then, so you might get a different set if you start now. I list the planets in order I visited them, but after Muluna you can visit all of them in pretty much any order you want.
Game balance
Modded planets offer rewards, but they're dramatically lower than vanilla planets.
For comparison, the cost of a blue chip is (counting each mined resource as costing 1, oil as 0.1, and water as free):
- Nauvis tech only - 24.1 iron, 40 copper, 2 coal, 48.8 oil - cost 71
- with Fulgora tech - 10.2 iron, 11.3 copper, 0.9 coal, 23.4 oil - cost 24.75
- with Vulcanus tech - 10.8 iron, 8.9 copper, 2 coal, 0.4 calcite, 48.8 oil - cost 27.1
- with both Vulcanus and Fulgora tech - 4.6 iron, 3.8 copper, 0.9 coal, 0.2 calcite, 23.4 oil - 11.85
So with these two planets you can make 6x as many blue chips as you would with Nauvis tech. This is supposed to give you incentive to explore space, but if there were 20 planets with these kind of bonuses, it would completely break the game. So the bonuses you get are usually a lot smaller, but hopefully still meaningful.
Lignumis, woody moon of Nauvis
This is an optional dependency. I included it, but I recommend against doing so. This is my only negative recommendation, I loved all other planets.
Lignumis is a moon of Nauvis. If you enable it, you start the game there until you build a Provisional Rocket Silo. It can launch a single-use rocket that brings you to Nauvis with a small inventory. Then your Provisional Rocket Silo blows up, and your Lignumis base will probably get overrun by native wildlife before you get back to space.
Lignumis is sort of Gleba lite. There are easy enemies, and a new pollution type - noise - which is even emitted by conveyor belts! You grow some trees and golden bacteria, and build things mainly from wood and gold. There are burner and steam versions of early game buildings.
Your reward is tier 0 technology, like wooden walls (worse than stone walls), wooden darts (worse than basic ammo), wooden conveyor belts (worse than basic conveyor belts) and so on. You also get some buildings for planting trees and processing wood. The most useful rewards you get are coal-powered personal roboports, and basic construction robots, which you can take with you to Nauvis for an easier first hour or two. But a few hours into Nauvis, you'll be using none of that. Tier 1 items are cheap enough, and if you're reading this, you probably played Factorio enough times that you know how to get construction bots quickly.
The main problem with this mod is that you can choose to enable "telescopic recipes", that is, make tier 1 items require a corresponding tier 0 item to build. By default it does it to green chips only. Vanilla recipe is 1 iron plate, 3 copper cables, and with Lignumis you can either make them with 1 iron plate, 3 copper cables, and 1 wooden chip, or with vanilla recipe at twice the cost - 2 iron plates, 6 copper cables.
This is fine on Nauvis, as mass producing wooden chips is a minor hassle. This is fine on Fulgora, as you don't make green chips from scratch. This is fine on Vulcanus, as you can brute force your way through double the cost, as metals are so cheap there anyway. I'm not entirely sure if you can plant trees on Gleba or not. But it makes the start on so many modded planets a huge pain for no good reason. Rubia even has a special Rubia-only "you can use vanilla recipe for green chips here" recipe, even with Lignumis enabled.
And if you disable telescopic recipes completely, Lignumis offers pretty much nothing. You'll forget it even existed as soon as you unlock blue science on Nauvis for proper construction bots. This is likely still a better experience than default settings.
Lignumis is probably a lot better for a separate playthrough. Just vanilla planets, Lignumis, a lot of extra mods like "Wooden Fulgora", "Wooden Vulcanus" and so on, and you can enable all those telescopic recipes. But for all planets playthrough, just don't enable Lignumis.
Reward rating: 1 star
Difficulty rating: 3 stars
Nauvis and your first space station
After launching yourself from Lignumis to Nauvis, you play the normal game up to your rocket launch, except you start with some basic construction bots operating out of your coal-powered personal roboport. I took a lot of supplies from Lignumis, but you can actually build all of that on Nauvis anyway.
You might be tempted to use tier 0 buildings for your defensive wall and belts to save on iron and stone, but it will cost you a lot more time fixing all the wall breaches than it saves resources.
And if you play without Lignumis, or just disable telescopic recipes, then you just play a totally normal game.
Either way, everything continues normally until you build your first rocket silo. But there's a surprise coming.
Reward rating: 4 stars
Difficulty rating: 2 stars
Muluna, barren moon of Nauvis
Muluna is the other optional dependency I included. It changes the game in two ways:
- you cannot make crushers, or asteroid collectors, or make space science in space at first
- all rocket launches are 2x more expensive from everywhere except Muluna. But you get 2x as many module slots in the rocket silo, a lot of rocket part productivity tech, so it isn't as much of a nerf as it seems.
With the Muluna mod enabled, you need to barrel some ingredients that will be turned into thruster fuel and oxidizer for your first space ship, unload them there, and travel to Muluna to unlock the rest of space science.
Muluna is somewhat challenging. You can mine all 3 types of asteroids, as well as an extra type that produces aluminum (since copper from metallic asteroids is post Gleba tech), produce space science there, and send it back to Nauvis by rocket. Ironically you need to grow trees on the moon, in greenhouses, to produce rocket fuel and plastic for blue chips and low density structures for rocket launches. Balancing oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, steam, and various wood products without your base getting stuck is not easy, especially with the limited technology you have available at this point.
And in the end, what's the reward you get? The most important part is probably that you can build a far better space casino on Muluna than you could realistically build in limited space available on space stations. And you get Crusher 2, with twice as many module slots for quality modules. Ironically, Factorio 2.1 will ban all space casinos, and other planets have better quality sources, so I'd say that Muluna is probably making the game harder rather than easier in 2.1. But it's still fun, and the difficulty is mostly contained to your first few hours in space.
You will return to Muluna many times as you unlock new technologies, unlocking another science pack that gives more rocket part productivity, thruster fuel productivity and so on, but none of it seems to do anything too game changing.
Reward rating: 3 stars (1 star once they ban space casinos)
Difficulty rating: 3 stars
Vulcanus
After Muluna I went straight for Vulcanus. Vulcanus is super easy, and rewards are crazy overpowered.
The biggest difficulty with Vulcanus is dealing with the temptation to abandon your base on Nauvis, and build your main base here. Sure, only Nauvis can have biolabs at 50% science pack drain, but you can probably make twice as many science packs on Vulcanus with metals and stone being free, so it sort of evens out.
Reward rating: 5 stars
Difficulty rating: 1 star
Cerys, moon of Fulgora
This is the third moon I visited, and not even one new real planet yet. Cerys is tiny, with a fixed map, and all of it starts frozen and unusable. At first it might seem like it's just like a Fulgora island with a different type of scrap, but you need to solve multiple puzzles to win.
Cerys won't let you drop anything there at all (except construction bots, somehow I missed that) until you unlock the right tech, so you have to solve it with only what's on the moon.
Cerys has a teleporter to Fulgora, which you can use to teleport away (without any inventory, it would get deleted!), so you don't get soft locked even if you can't solve the puzzles.
The most important things that you get for all the trouble:
- techs for holmium plate productivity, which can improve your science production on Fulgora
- a slightly better version of your personal nuclear reactor
- flare stack, which lets you void any fluid - surprisingly useful on many planets!
You also get a plutonium nuclear reactor, which is more powerful than Nauvis version, but setting up regular plutonium fuel cell shipments from Cerys would be a challenge, and it's not like you really need that.
Reward rating: 2 stars
Difficulty rating: 3 stars
Fulgora
Then I went for Fulgora, only making a tiny starter base to unlock some techs and export electromagnetic plants. I came there later to build a bigger base, and even an extra base for just quality ingredients, but Fulgora really isn't the right planet to get quality.
Fulgora benefits a lot from modded planets. Cerys gives holmium plate productivity, Corrundum gives sulfuric acid productivity (which is used to make accumulators for science packs), while Cubium gives you easy access to high quality modules-2.
Reward rating: 5 stars
Difficulty rating: 3 stars
Arig
After that I went to Arig. Its main resource is sand, which is a fluid (there's a completely unrelated sand item on Moshine - this can be a bit confusing when looking for recipes). The planet is super easy - just pump sand, extract various goodies out of it, and discard what you don't need as everything is infinite.
There are minor difficulties as space is a bit tight until you unlock sandstone foundations, and robots cost a lot more energy, so you should really belt things up if possible. And you cannot drop anything to Arig (except construction bots) until you research unlocking tech, but it's so easy that you don't need to.
For rewards you get:
- second calcite exporting planet after Vulcanus
- Press that has 50% productivity and some extra recipes for some chemical products, notably plastic, solid fuel, and landfill
- water harvesting that lets you capture water from air on multiple planets (but not all, and its efficiency varies by planet)
- better solar panels
- power poles that can be installed in deep ocean, including on Fulgora (they're not lightning proof, but you can often connect power grids of nearby islands this way if you have good lightning rods protecting them)
- big storage boxes
Reward rating: 3 stars
Difficulty rating: 1 star
Corrundum
Corrundum is a sulfur planet. You'll be processing a lot of sulfur products to extract metals from minerals. There's also platinum used in science packs and for the catalytic plant.
For rewards you get:
- sulfuric acid productivity tech - it's extremely cheap research without typical 1.5x exponential scaling, so you should get it all the way to +300% cap as soon as practical; Corrundum is quite hard to make work decently without this bonus, and you need sulfuric acid on many planets
- catalytic plant - 2x faster chemical plant, with one special recipe (rocket fuel), but no inherent productivity bonus. Rocket fuel recipe only gets productivity bonus after you research relevant tech. It's fine, but you can get high quality chemical plant a lot more easily than catalytic plant, so that speed difference isn't so significant
- productivity bonuses for pipes and (for some reason) steam turbines, at the usual 1.5x exponentially scaling cost
Reward rating: 2 stars
Difficulty rating: 2 stars
Moshine
Moshine is another sand planet, but it has solid instead of fluid sand.
The main problem with Moshine is that you need to go through a lot of steps of tech progression that do nothing except for unlocking the next level of Moshine tech progression. Any reward relevant to other planets is only at the very end of the process, so you'll probably leave it before you even get anything of value.
It felt like the least rewarding planet, even though late game rewards look pretty solid, if I ever get to them.
Reward rating: 1 star
Difficulty rating: 2 stars
Igrys
Igrys is a ribbon world. It can't quite decide if it has a magic theme or a mineral theme. You can collect copper from the air at night, but there's no iron at all. Due to lack of iron, you need to drop some supplies to get started, but there are alternative recipes for most things.
For rewards you get:
- copper plate productivity techs - this is really impactful, but it only affects copper plate, not other products, so you should switch from making copper cables and low density structures in foundries to making copper plates in foundries, and converting them to copper cables and low density structures in electromagnetic plants and assemblers respectively. You can double your copper on all planets this way.
- stone to magic glass recipe, and various productivity levels for it; magic glass can be used on other planets in alternative recipes for many common ingredients, notably for plastic and green chips. You could probably get some meaningful high quality products out of excess stone available on many planets.
Reward rating: 3 stars
Difficulty rating: 1 star
Cubium
Cubium is a cube-shaped planet where the main resource is a cube. It's unlike all other planets you've ever played. Every recipe takes an energized cube, and converts some inputs to some outputs, while making the cube dormant. You can either wait for it to wake up again (it takes 1h to wake up on its own, and 30 minutes to go dormant on its own), or use another recipe to wake it up at some cost. Later there's a second type of cube.
You can easily make thousands of cubes, each used to produce a small amount of various resources, like iron ore, copper ore, plastic, and so on, while using some other resource like steam, carbon, or copper plates. You could drop some cubes on each planet, and use this to generate any resource that's lacking on that planet, but that's the least powerful thing you can do.
If you put some quality modules in the loop, step by step, all cubes will eventually become legendary cubes, producing legendary resources directly, without any recycling or casinos. The only real limitation is that it doesn't easily produce legendary planet specific resources, but with hundreds of thousands of legendary modules-2, you can figure something out. And the second cube type seems to have some ways to get tungsten and holmium products out of it, in a highly convoluted way.
And if that's not enough, there are alternative recipes for all 6 basic science packs that take energized cubes and concentrated dream in addition to their normal inputs, and generate 3x as many science packs. This is especially useful for the purple production science packs, as they don't benefit from any infinite research or other tricks, but nothing stops you from just making all 6 science packs this way.
And that's just the first cube type. There's so much beyond that.
Cubium is the only planet that's about as powerful as vanilla planets Vulcanus, Fulgora, or Gleba. A playthrough can deal with one OP planet, and the complexity cost is considerable, as you'll need not just a Cubium base, but also fairly complex Cubium bases on Nauvis, Vulcanus, and who knows where else. Cubium offers a lot, but there's a cost.
For rewards you get:
- infinite legendary resources
- 3x all vanilla science packs
- and a lot more
Reward rating: 5 stars
Difficulty rating: 4 stars
Rubia
Rubia is a planet of wind. It blows to the right so strongly that all the belts can only move up, down, or right. All inserters and splitters can only move to the right. Bots can't fly at all. Eventually you unlock armored trains, but until then you'll likely be dragging a lot of resources upwind by hand. All recipes are nasty with multiple inputs and outputs. And everything is bombarded by trash asteroids, which spawn everywhere, so you can't just put gun turrets around your base like on Nauvis - you need them to cover every tile of your base.
Oh and just for good measure:
- you can't drop anything to Rubia until you unlock the right tech
- asteroids are immune to lasers
- asteroids get more hp based on your physical damage tech so you can't just outtech the problem
- recyclers don't work on Rubia
- there's a lot of toilet humor (there's an extra mod to disable that part if you want)
It's as if Rubia is trying to outcompete Gleba for being the most miserable one in Factorio.
The rewards are interesting. Once you unlock drops to Rubia, importing various items from other planets and throwing them into the wind gives you either personal or planet specific bonuses, and they are all quite solid. Some are planet specific (like improving Arig Presses from +50% to +60%), while most upgrade your character slightly (reach, speed, trash slots etc.).
There's even an optional Rubia stage two, where you mix Gleba's, Rubia's, and Nauvis's wildlife all together into some abomination, which I did not try yet.
Reward rating: 3 stars
Difficulty rating: 5 stars
Gleba
And finally after I ran out of planets to try, I had to go to Gleba. Rewards from Gleba are extremely solid - biolabs that double your science per pack, belt stacking and stack inserters, bonuses to plastic and rocket fuel productivity. But it's also a really miserable planet.
Reward rating: 5 stars
Difficulty rating: 5 stars
And there's more
There's a whole second tier of planets after Gleba. When I finish the campaign, which might take months, I'd like to write a follow-up to this post.
If what I described sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can play it now. Either grab Enable Planet Mods Lite with a preselected list of recommended planets, or just pick and choose the ones you like the most.
Overall I've been extremely happy with the planets. They range from alright (like Igrys, Corrundum, and Moshine) to just amazing (like Cubium, Cerys, and Rubia). Even the one planet I recommend against - Lignumis - is in no way bad, it just doesn't fit this kind of playthrough.
