Factorio main bus reddit

Factorio main bus reddit. I'll post some pictures / video eventually. For instance, commonly thrown around numbers are 4-8 belts of iron and copper, 2-4 of green circuits, and so on. City block designs really shine when you want to build really big, probably bigger than anyone who ShadowTheAge • 7 yr. Critical areas of a main bus, from my experience, are the beginning (smelting, feeding, unloading too close, not enough space to bring it all together), the area between assemblers and main bus (you often have to cramp something in between and you might want a "road" there) and if you want to build on both sides of the bus, it can't be widened I don't know what it's called. Sulfur is only used in 3 recipes: sulfuric acid, explosives, and blue science. Don't build more than 4 belts wide before leaving a gap of a few tiles so there is room for splitters and underground belts to split off resources to the factories on either side of the belt. Anti-main-bus build, space exploration. Main bus is not just "Supply ALL THE THINGS," you have to actually account for how much a belt can support in throughput. From KatherineOfSky's "How to Build a Main Bus" guide: . Sulfuric acid and lube get routed through my main bus for batteries and electric. smelters) at the start of their bus, which causes a huge amount of belts. red and green science production (5 red sciene assemblers to 6 green science assemblers) automating yellow, red and blue inserters. 3. You can have a bus with any number of belts. Personally the biggest I have built is 2K. One lane each of red chips, blue chips, LDS, RCU, batteries, rocket fuel, coal, sulfur, stone and stone-brick. My K2 bus became wider than my factory was long. Try to build only on one side of the bus, leave the other to grow. Busghetti clearly the superior option. So a double engine train on a 2 way track takes Lubricant and Sulfuric Acid from one end of the factory to the other. My Main Bus From memory, my main bus in my low-SPM, learning-as I go base - still enough to win the game - was 2x iron, 2x steel, 3x copper, 1x rubber, 1x coke, 1x sulfer, 1x plastic, 1x green chips, 1x red chips, 1x raw lead ore, 1x of all of the “byproduct” ore washing metals (lead, nickel, etc. Half belt each of iron plates, gears, yellow engines, blue engines, green circuits, steel plates. Plates are melted de centrally to reduce the space of the main BUS. You can't expand a bus. Main Bus till I launch the first rocket, then I switch over to decentralized production aka Modular. Main Bus Tutorial/Guide. Half expecting David Bowie to start singing Now for the arguments for: The first and by far the most important is item density. Main Bus is good for a certain amount of SPM, but modular is just better to get mega base status. Long answer: a main bus will get you to a rocket (or even several rockets an hour) with minimal overhead and is pretty much always a good place to start off. I only have a couple concerns. Then a belt of copper plates spaghettied to the assemblers that Marathon, yes. • 6 yr. Just create lines of materials needed for the factory. ago. In order for a main bus to work well, you need to set yourself some rules and stick to them. You and KoS were the first two factorio youtubers I found, and I include a version of her mall, and some flavor of bus/cityblock from you in just about every map I play. New lines are added to the bottom of the bus. Thats why we got the production bus: if 90% of your copper leaves the bus at red and green circuits, there is no reason for keeping 8 lanes past that point as many do in main busses. Factorio main bus dyson sphere style. Then that train can go wherever to start a new bus without needing to deal with the multiple stops and sorting on-site. If you build to ratio you can track how many belts of material would be left after a split and trim off excess and/or merge/shift over the remaining. Broadly speaking, yes, that looks about right. I've played about 500h and have never built a main bus. My 30spm science-from-raw starter base blueprint is 230 x 81, of which a third (77x81) is smelting and refining, a third (146x35) is red circuits/low density modules/engines from plates, and a third (144x34) is science If you have 4 belts and something needs a full one to run and you throw down a balancer after, the remaining 3 belts will only be 3/4 full. Bus has 16 belts: Two short rows of copper smelters (4 x 36 furnaces) into 2 bus belts of copper. Intput/output ratio doesn't change - in Factorio assemblers work the same way no matter their arrangement (excluding beacons). So in this regard it's less efficient than more organic design. Personally, I don't bother and make on site. Sulfur is mostly for blue science and sulfuric acid. My bus at the end of K2 was 156 tiles wide. Cries in 4 carriage long trains on a loop. Wood is a good example: Raw wood is used for resin and wood. However when you have 4 lanes you get 60 plates a second. Best tip for building a main bus is to take the room you expect to use, double it, double it again, and still eventually run out of space and have to fill in a lake. paco7748. Keep it minimal. In fact, it is designed not to be. /s. For example, my main "mix" takes entire 4-wagon trains full of either iron plates, copper plates, steel, or plastic, and mixes them into one train with one wagon each of the preceding. For me the transition usually goes: Main bus - Main bus supplied by ore trains - Main bus supplied by smelter city blocks - City blocks producing tier 3 modules - City blocks producing everything else. I bus backwards, sure that can represent a lot of resources sitting there, but you'll use them all eventually. Image 2: Add splitters to lines to divert plates perpendicularly. • 4 yr. As SPM doubles the bus is twice as long and twice as wide so you need ~4x as many belts. After that you choose what ingredients you want on bus, like let says 4 belts of iron, copper etc. I dislike the concept. Every time I try to design/plan a factory I just get somehow "locked in" on a main bus concept, which I really don't like because of: splitter mess. For example: Image 1: Two lines each of iron plates and copper plates. 1. Generally this confirms the conventional wisdom: 1 yellow belt of everything you bus except for iron, copper, and greens, plus 4 yellow belts of iron, 2 yellow belts of copper, 4 yellow belts of greens with dedicated supply. However, the justification is that the ratio of 2 iron plates makes it more efficient to bus gears than plates, which I suppose it's true. Meanwhile, a main bus is probably the easiest step to start planning a more organized factory, while at the same time letting the player get used to some of the more advanced concepts like efficiency and space management. I've bussed almost every single item. Petroleum gas is only used in 4 recipes: plastic, sulfur, solid fuel, and barrelling. When you need to make something, you can tap it and go perpendicular to the bus, then have the "new stuff" join the flow. That way later stations have access to all your fancy new stuff as well. It's complicated to make and takes a ton of water, so you'd just need to add water and petrol to your main bus if you didn't add sulfuric acid (and plastic). So you route all 8 belts down from your smelting, let 4 go to green and the rest continue on. Short answer: Main bus. maybe 25-50% wider than what you do in vanilla should be enough. These blocks usually contain a square of 2way rail around it. One short row of iron smelters (2 x 36 furnaces) into 1 bus belt of iron. Example Main bus So I know the average layout of a main bas group em in 4s with a 2 wide gap for underground but my question is this, how many smelteries (average design of 48 furnaces with 30 drills) should I use to fill a 4 stack of iron, coal, copper, and stone. With this configuration, if your belts were at 100% usage the right most bus lane would be empty. Start with one belt of each item if you like, and when you're no longer meeting demand, just tack some more belts to on to the outside of your Oil Products. You'll have a hard time using a main bus. I just finished my second attempt (first attempt dissolved into unrecoverable spaghetti chaos) at the Krastorio 2 mod and I loved it. Then choose a side I will build on. Plastic is petroleum and coal, but it's a 1:2 recipe, not unlike copper cables or iron sticks. I have over 1500 hours in this game, and I've come to realize that my play style has been heavily influenced by you. The entire game was played biters on aggressive mode. At the end of the playthrough, the bus is still there, but the only thing it still makes is satellites. Build all your factories on one side of the bus. Obviously, the part-of-one-belt of iron and copper plates you're feeding the bus aren't enough and you will need to expand your smelters. It has about 5 different "busses" zigzagging between production blocks. 2 empty spaces between each component on the bus. Modular bases don't have to be train-based. The BUS just takes so much space, and beyond a few beginning factories, just seems like a waste of belts and capacity, and makes it hard to grokk my input/output. Good candidate materials for the bus are items that are used in high quantities by many recipes. One short row of steel smelters (4 x 30 furnaces) into 1/2 bus belt of steel. I'm trying to get the most items on one mainbus, and am currently and over 20. Overview of my main bus. First try at the Main-Bus design pattern. 4x iron, 4x copper, <1x steel, 1x stone, 1x bricks, 1/2x glass, 1x plastic, 2x green circuits, <1x red circuits, <1x blue circuits. Useful? Even needed? So a quick and dirty diagram i threw together below, when my mind wandered into theorycraft territory. Main bus base usually needs a LOT of extra belts. tank shells and artillery. A good way to think about it is if the belts are all full at the start, and you use the materials as the main bus proceeds it will no longer be full. Light blue feed on right inputting into 4 storage mk1 (or eventually a single mk2 with two inputs/outputs) Right output on an elevated belt (dark blue) left outputs ground level. The tradeoff is that it requires much more space reserved for it, and many more belts and splitters spent upfront. But if you're making, say an atomic bomb, you also need nuclear stuff Strictly speaking, the Factorio main bus concept would not work in ONI because the production chains are highly cyclical -- there are few strict hierarchies of Low Level / Raw ingredients to High Level / End Use ingredients, like there is for most things in Factorio. Leave 2 space gaps every 4 lanes so you can route undergrounds easier. That way, you'll always have both on hand. That gets very nearly 45 non-white spm (it's a tiny bit short on plastic). If its a construction material, I bus it. Find a huge empty area that isn't part of your main bus and put oil there. Pick a direction and imagine all your "stuff" flowing in that direction, usually via a dozen or so belts and pipes. This is not what you want for maximum throughput on any split off the bus; there is material that could have gone to the split, but was Most people don't get it, but main busses are wasteful. Rules such as, "Bus runs right to left. However, with each recipe added to the bus, more of the heavy lifting actually happens before the initialization of the bus. Also, digging the 80's music - gives me Labyrinth vibes. It made sense to put all this stuff on one train, as it's mostly loaded in the same place. Then just conveyor/pipe resources to and from your main bus/oil factory as needed. Sort by: zepaperclip. growth of the bus for additional inter-products. Build on a map with a lot of water. if you are making plastic from the bus (something I don't recommend), you'll want probably 2-3 belts of coal. Production goes above the bus. This is a good measure to combat "spaghetti factories" as it forces someone to plan a structured layout and move everything to use items from the bus. I suspect keep all stone products together in a small area. To defend against them I built a perimeter of laser turrets across a series of choke points. I have this opinion because of one big disadvantage of a big bus. cheers. You left way too little space between the bus and your machines, leave at least 2-3 assemblers worth. but I am sure you could go a lot bigger if you Sulfur is just water and petroleum which is easy to transfer. this design doesn't work well, if everything is not backed-up - production at the beginning takes "priority" and can consume resources unbalanced. One elegant solution I saw someone here do was to shrink the bus as it proceeded, so it was 4 lanes at the start, but downsizes to 3 lanes, then 2 lanes, then 1 lane. Reply reply. Pipes full of fetal serum and artificial blood. Maybe you have an ore deposit south of the map (and in the way of bus expansion), you can either run a 400 belt long conveyor to the top where your smelters are, or a train. For example, when I build the main iron plate factory that is really the backbone of my main bus. It consists of: 2 belts of iron (part of which goes to steel) 1 belt of copper. So it doesnt scale as well as other designs but essentially its size is unlimited. Sulfur is more of a niche product used only for certain weapons. • 2 yr. City Block uses rail to move items to and from itself. So it doesn't matter that a lane is missing. Unpopular opinion: I don't like the idea of a main bus. From there I scout a few chunk to see what direction looks clear. t3hPoundcake. For me it goes: belt in the usual resources - iron, copper, stone, coal, later add a pipe each of crude oil and water. Summary: The bus system allows for an simple routing system for input products, easy addition to your factory in a piecemeal fashion, and if used properly, can help you organize the chaos that will often plagues bases. Have a train pull in alongside the bus and splice it in using input priority splitters. Once you have trains, a light rail network feeding a main bus will make grabbing new ressources very easy Downside : Limited throughput. Although when you talk about modular, it can mean anything. Build long straight lines of belt and fill it with a single item. It is also more visually understandable. At some point, your main bus simply cannot withstand your base consumption. (bus 1: iron+steel; bus 2: copper + plastic; bus 3: green circuits + red circuits ; bus 4: the mall; bus 5: half a belt of every advanced intermediate) 1. If you look at popular bus designs most of them seem to have 4 belts with 2 spaces in between. I hear that BUS is inefficient, but I have a hard time figuring out what the alternative is, if not just pure spaghetti. The number of belts required for a main bus style base isn't linear with the SPM. 62. Processing units (blue circuits) And the stuff I'm not sure at all what the best way to handle is stone and stone brick. You use the Main Bus as the starting point to the City Block base. • 40 min. Every time you add a new science, add each new item to the bus. I am trying to plan out my main bus (properly this time) and have a question about how some of the recommendations about numbers of belts (e. lots of green circuits. First 1 splitter from the mainbus output side to split away, and then more splitters diagonally after it to the other side. This is generally what make me switch to another build. Main buses are great for expansion, but your item capacity can be quite limited. They tend to get really, really big, and faster than one would expect. If I run an item off the main bus from one of the far lanes it takes around 9 minutes to get to the machines that need it. It was enough of an extra challenge from the base game to keep things fun and interesting without becoming as crazy as Bob's+Angels (or similar) can get. However, we’re not going for perfect balance if we’re using main bus in the first place. I have thousands of neuroprocessors sitting on the main bus lulz. oil. This train carries Plastic, Sulfur (so sulfuric acid could be created on the main bus, where Iron was already available), Sulfuric Acid, Lubricant, Solid Fuel and Batteries (also loaded from the main bus at The main bus is a more robust solution, because it splits off resources (somewhat) more fairly. The buss doesn't have to be 100% full all the time. EVERYTHING belongs in the main bus. We can ignore solid fuel and barrelling for the purposes of the bus. : r/factorio. 1/2 bus belt of Coal. " and so on. I switched to trains as soon as I got logistic bots up and running. Add a Comment. Hell, produce your gears sttaight out of your smelters and just belt/ train that to your base. Gears: While the ratio of iron plates to iron gear wheels is advantageous ratio-wise, (2 plates makes 1 iron gear wheel), I've found (through real experimentation) that it is much more efficient to make Gears locally. ) Once enough items have been built off the bus, one can start making science packs off-bus too, and trains that do not serve the bus start their first journey. I also run a secondary bus that supplies the mall. I like to "pre-process" at mining outposts (smelting ore to plates, and making iron gears and steel); then I'll find the biggest consumer of something and do "through factory unloading" (e. I'm currently about 40 hours into my first playthrough and I've reached a point where I need to redesign the factory and utilize a structured main bus. IRON GEAR WHEELS, copper plates, electronic circuits, steel. Try mixing up your world settings a bit, easy first step is to play trainworld, you're gonna be forced into some logistical challenges that are fun, especially with angels+bobs, that has to be solved outside of a main bus. You can design smallish bases that are I/O optimized with just belts. Once the Mainbus Area starts outputting enough assemblers, inserters, rails, modules, and all the various parts needed to set up your City Block you move to City Block. Expanding is a pain if you bus too many or too few items. you get the idea. Materials just aren't reaching the end of my factory efficiently with my current belt spaghetti. So the main bus is definitely not spaghetti. Let's say the fist thing you your bus is Reverse waterfall priority splitters. wood for sure. Just play around them until you unlock cliff explosive. it is cleaner if you leave space between your lanes for undergrounds. And extra smelting arrays that were far enough from the start of the bus that I had miles of spaghetti just getting to the bus :-( And nowhere to expand my green circuit production into. I have dedicated lanes for science going backwards. I just do the metal plates (including steel) and green chips, and petrol. Hi everyone, i'm new to the game and the subreddit. Community-run subreddit for the game Factorio made by Wube Software. Absolutely. Things that you put on your bus if you are doing a no-logistic-bots-ever design (mid-large factory, low rate, but several uses): Speed module 1. So manufacturing process has exactly the same efficiency no matter the shape. So I ended up with two little train stations shoved into corners between my smelters and my solar array. vanilla stuff + stone chain stuff. Here is a small example main bus from google. I usually find a patch of iron and a patch of stone close to my base and build a small outpost. if you aren't not making plastic from coal on the bus then one belt is enough for military science and explosives. It would be very helpful if there is a small step by step depiction of a main bus being built. •. The concept of a Main Bus is to put the most used and useful ingredients in a central spot to use for assembling machines. 67, blues 40 items per second. My completed main bus Krastorio 2 base. Salmonelongo I steal designs and ain't ashamed! • 9 yr. from KatherineOfSky‘s excellent guide) are meant. Later in the bus when items start running out you can add more production to resupply the bus, and it’s recommended that you have a diagonal line of splitters going across the bus and into the output (or out from an input) with priority settings to grab or input items from/onto the furthest belt first before other belts get used. Did a bus kill your family? I started out a newbie, went through a bus phase, a bots phase, and several different phases of rail before embracing a philosophy I call "organized spaghetti. Take resources from the outermost belts, then priority split from the inside belts towards the outside. Put a circuit wire connecting the chest with pipes to the inserter input into the pipe-to-ground assembler, and set a Enable condition on the inserter with the expression " [pipe-to-ground] <= [pipe]". If you don't pre-plan your bus then estimate the number of lanes and triple it. Share. Use a splitter, set to output priority (left or right). Tutorial:Main bus. 16 labs. Cliffs are in the way of my early game main bus planning. All balancers can do is split the load across every belt, so each belt becomes slightly emptier at the same time. That is all. 16 is to treat adjacent items on the bus as one big item. Construction materials are often used in lots of recipes. So you should generally have 4 iron, 4 copper, 4 green circuits, and then you can do 2/2 steel/plastic to start out, then as you progress and get other resources made you can either leave them local (for gears/copper wire Priority splitting off main bus. Image 3: The diverted lines being used to make red science. I started with a main bus, and it's pretty convenient. A base using a main bus is modular, and uses the bus to connect modules. How am i doing so far and is there anything i can improve in my factory ? AzraelleWormser. So this is my third run, and I decided to try the main bus design, because it was cleaner, they said. So even though these belts are huge, the fact that they're fully packed means there aren't too many logical items for the system to track. This guide covers the complete set up of a Main Bus system, from products to adding to the bus, pulling from the bus, belt balancing, splitting, and general tips & tricks for a successful Main Bus. Everything else is built in dedicated factories on the railway network. Delivery of resources only by train (except fluids). Reply. If you have a single yellow lane of iron plate, you get 15 plates a second to wherever it's going. The belt optimization in 0. I expect you already know this, but for the record. This allows you to use the full bus worth of goods by only accessing the outer belts. One belt each of green chips and steel. and have the correct amount of lanes for each material. Items are mainly created per inventory tab and are separated to ensure the bots only deliver locally. In standard factorio, people will argue over wheter gears should be on the bus or not, but for IR3, there are too many of these parts for it to make sense. Oxygen, for example, is an input and output for numerous processes. gozulio. • 7 yr. If its a finished product, I produce it at the location. Aug 29, 2016 · If you want to get away from spaghetti designs, building a Main Bus will allow you to reach a vast throughput of materials through your factory. Main bus is just a stepping stone. I like patterns. GregorSamsanite. It also requires more planning and knowledge of the game. Unless, you really need to split a whole belt of the bus, but then you should either shrink it down after the split or add more belts to the input. Sulfuric acid on your main bus. from there you keep on expanding along the bus. I build it kind of far away from ore deposits. Most people tend to put raw resource processing (e. You don't really need to put every fluid on the bus, sulfuric acid and lubricant should be sufficient (make plastic and rocket fuel at the oil processing area to avoid needing to move petroleum and light oil) 5. The so-called spaghetti code in software engineering is not inefficient code, but first and foremost code that is hard to read and hard to change. I've had many questions about how i split of a main bus so i decided to make a video splitting off a main bus, using priority splitters in both a waterfall and a reverse waterfall method, as well as more traditional main bus splits which take 25% off each lane. I did it for the optimization spagbutti. One very short half-row of stone brick smelters (1 x 8 furnaces) into 1/2 But before the main bus, you should focus on a jump start base. From there I have two red belts each of iron and copper. Once the city block is up and running, you demolish the bus base. City blocks should use the Blueprint grid feature to align blocks perfectly. 33, reds 26. This is a really big problem in a game about building an evergrowing factory. But if it's going to be consuming a full belt, just feed it a full belt and don't bother splitting it off, just turn that belt. The alternative is to make modular local production that takes only basic materials (copper, iron, plastic) and produces final product (science packs for example) The example of this type of production is a well-known 3:2 green circuit Base. " At 1500+ hours, my factories for the last three hundred or so have all followed the principle of "keep it neat, put Mine is currently copper, iron, steel, coal and green chips. This is also a downside as there are more belts used You have to set the game resolution to the extended desktop resolution. There is a large interchange in the middle to merge all the belts. Each train stops for max 10 seconds before moving further down the line. You've put sulfuric acid on your bus already, and explosives aren't needed for any science. You also have to have cards to power it. That dramatically reduces the width of the bus. It isn’t necessarily more efficient, but by making circuits locally we are creating more opportunities for inefficiencies to add up. One pipeline of lube. . smelting iron, copper, and steel. I usually try to group the science manufacturing together on the same side of the bus, with their outputs going away from the bus to labs close by. The same is with factorio, the spaghetti doesn't necessarily mean inefficient, but it definitely means hard to figure out. I’m starting to hate them. Main buses are best for smelted and refined items, because crafting those on-site is a logistical nightmare. One minor improvement is to arrange the splitters after the priority split and to invert their placement. g. Limit the output of each to 100-200 pipe-to ground and 100-400 pipe or so. Rather than using the popular main bus it uses a 18 red belts that are half copper and half iron. I usually put oil right after green circuits on my bus. This is done because 'The Main Bus' architecture favors the first factories on the bus. This is my second playthrough ( i decided to scrap the first one because my factory was a complete mess ) and try the bus design i saw on youtube. e. Smelting and module production is a great way to hash out your city block design before you commit to making the rest of the base. You missed one of the easiest methods, take from different belt each time, 4-4 The way you do it, when it comes to the 4-belt balancer you are spreading two belts over to 4 belts, that will never fill the 4 belts unless everything down bus is backed up. Yellows are 13. Carries the various oil products. Feel free to ask me about anything! Electronic Circuit production. Output side should never change because you can only ensure 1 belt of the bus is always as full as it can be. Other than those, both are used in advanced military i. Group them in row/columns of 4 with 2 space between each group for underground belts. If you need a city block design, you know you need one and why. This is my main issue with the bus, yes. Main bus: How long is too long? I'm doing my first game using the main bus method, which I've found works really nicely. 4 lanes of plates gives you 4 times the bandwidth of 1 lane. Make a block around your smelting area. The two solutions are to use trains, (slow and disrupts your flow if your factory is too far from the ore patch, or unless you put a silly number of carriages on) or to center your production around/at your ore patches, which makes your factory very temporary by definition, because once your current Community-run subreddit for the game Factorio made by Wube Software. I'm running two old 980tis in sli so I use the Nvidia control panel to sli then do surround and that makes the res 7680x1600 then I set the game res to that. plastic is the biggest If its a raw material, I prefer to refine it close to where it is being produced. 74. Your base can be either an unentanglable mass of spaghetti where you build things without criteria, or modular. 2. I hate the idea anyway: items queued to an assembler are a sign the factory must grow upstream. If you can't keep your bus full at the You start with iron plates and copper plates and whatever you need for the first science. The general rule is to not bus intermediates that only have one ingredient. To put that into perspective, by adding 4 lanes of gears to your bus, you reduce the total number of lanes in your bus by Now that priority splitters exist, pushing everything to one side is clearly the better option. . I'd say trains go with anything, but logistic networks are best when paired with city blocks. Plastic is mostly for red circuits. Intersection on a main bus. Instead, move the second splitter from the top two space up so it's above the diverting splitter. Gears are twice as dense as iron plates, meaning you need half as many lanes in the bus to have the same net throughput of iron downstream. motors. My recommendation is to only bus ingots, circuits, etc. City blocks or "town districts" are modules. I feed stone and bricks for science from the side and produce bricks, concrete etc at the stone mine. But once you have more hungry production lines, you'll probably have dedicated trains supplying them anyway. No no, you should put rails to your bus instead. However I'm getting to a point where I'd bet my main bus is probably 500 (or more) belt unit lengths. Next to fish and pistols. yt dg xd pd nt tf zm nn ha yk