hi! my advice to "set ore size to 200%" was aimed at prospective players, recommending they make this change in world generation settings, rather than you as the mod author. although, i think if you sped up miners as you planned, that might make that unnecessary.
i played with biters off, but i did notice the shorter undergrounds for pipes and belts, though at first i wasn't sure if it was just my memory.
i haven't played nullius very far either, which is why i said i'd like to see an abridged version. i'm aware doing that would probably be quite a lot of mental work, even if the process of creating the recipes is automated for you. there's a LOT of recipes, with weird object loops. also lots of recipes that make more than one thing, which i despise. i don't even like that vanilla advanced oil does that.
(also, i noticed it's possible to do alchemy in nullius, by a very weird process of turning, say, sandstone into sludge and then you can turn that sludge into iron. in fact, because you can get sludge by crafting "water" from "saline" which itself is made from "sewater", you can then turn that sludge into iron and get iron out of water....)
and worse, nullius added about a hundred new liquids, and made the fluid system even more annoying than vanilla. my least favourite thing about vanilla factorio is liquids, and if a mod existed that would neatly cut all liquids out of the game, and out of every mod that tries to add new liquids, i would never play without that mod.
what nullius promised was building life, growing plants, and it made me think of the reason i didn't try factorio for many years after hearing about it: the dirty, dieselpunk, pollution aesthetic is the exact opposite of what i like. i would absolutely love a game that plays like factorio, but growing forests instead of destroying them. and i thought that's what nullius was.
nullius is instead utterly divorced from the growing of plants, and is simply factorio but everything is more annoying to do. i did start a thread on nullius' forum on the matter if you're curious: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/nullius/discussion/62af9e80dcc82994d51443f1
in my opinion, an abridged nullius would:
cut out A LOT of the pointless intermediates
make it so that every recipe only produces one thing
make fluids and pipes go back to vanilla functionality
ideally remove all the mod-added fluids, but at least significantly cut down on the number of them and the number of recipes that need those
i've honestly thought about trying to edit the nullius mod and re-uploading to make it focused on the seeding of life it promises without the added annoyances, but my skills are too lacking for that (and i'm not sure if it would be allowed anyway, though i didn't even get as far as seeking permission because i simply cannot edit the mod)
