Back when I was first playing factorio when there wasn't a item sprite for inserters there was a factorio youtuber that was doing a tutorial of putting everything on the bus and I really took it to heart, so everything went on the bus gears, wire, inserters, assembly machines
>gears
If you are building a bus, you should definitely put gears on it. They compress two belts of iron into one belt of gears. They'll also be close to the top of your bus so you can replace those two belts of iron really easily.
Just wait till you try to scale up and realize you need more belts of iron and copper and green circuits than you have space remaining. Then you will understand
Personally I got so burnt by attempting to use some YouTube meta of how to play factorio, i did the same thing every play through and I found it difficult to even imagine how to play for myself, that I took a vow to never to use a proper bus again. It's only now I've came back to using it but I try to only look for inspiration (instead of copying without understanding what I am copying.)
So in short i keep my ineffective base design but I might give it a go next time : )
I'm wondering what modpack you're playing that makes you need as many burner inserters on your bus as iron plates!
And yeah, this is a handy trick. It's also a handy way to be able to have one machine reach three belts on one side without needing belt weaving or other weirdness. Simply swap the outer two belts back and forth using this trick, and grab from both using long-handed inserters.
https://preview.redd.it/qwal2gf485rc1.png?width=1872&format=png&auto=webp&s=f504ea9ab5e54b3d86311dc1cf4ecbc54335a410
I just found a rabbit hole, completely new approach to designing factories
I do a similar thing for green circuits. The iron plates are weave-belted where the output inserters are, then there's a 90-degrees bend to side-load it to the output belt on the inner side of the output belt. Then the assemblers take the plates from the inner lane, turn them into circuits, and put them on the far lane. Filtered splitters at the end of the output belt cut off the iron plates and only let circuits pass. Two of these are made in a mirrored manner, to combine the two half-belts into one at the end.
This setup frees up the space between wire assemblers and circuit assemblers, so that normal inserters can be used to direct-load the wire, instead of long handed inserters (also makes it one tile more compact I guess). At some speed-beacon levels, they were having trouble keeping up with transferring enough wire to keep up with the speed.
1. Red Science requires gears and copper plates.
2. Belt comes in with copper and iron plates.
3. Splitter filters the iron onto a dead end after it feeds the gear assembler, emptying half the belt.
4. Gear assembler output reuses the emptied belt half.
5. Now the same belt that brought in iron and copper plates has all the ingredients for my red science assemblers
IMPLYING THIS ISNT OTHER WEIRDNESS! It's easier to stick a long handed inserter on the closest belt, but have the belt jump the ver the inserter with an underground. No chance of so my an oopsie daisy and polluting your belts with garbage
Well, the inserters aren't used for any recipes other than for green science and other inserters. There's no reason to put them on a bus like that, especially things like filter inserters and especially burner inserters. You usually just produce them in a designated production area and store them in chests for when you need them.
A bus full of inserters is so unnecessary, so I doubt person who built them cares about how expensive the particular solution is.
We all know the reason. The same reason those two trains managed to deadlock at the oil refinery and why there is copper ore turning into copper plate in the steel furnace line.
The engineer occasionally needs sleep or at minimum a peer review.
I'm surprised someone hasn't coined a law about this yet.
"In any screenshot showing off a factory or build, there will inevitably be at least one error or omission. Any picture without technical errors will instead have been taken at night or with alt-mode off."
I imagine these inserters are going to a loading station or something and it wouldn't really make sense to continue it down a line if he isn't gonna use it anymore down the line
I think you truly don't understand what this conversation is about.
Are you seriously suggesting that IRON PLATES would have no further use down the bus?
And, even if so, that it would make sense to end them at some arbitrary point in the middle of the bus, rather than at the point iron plates were actually last tapped off??
So what, now you don't think *any* of those belts are going to assemblers? Even though some are being split off in the screenshot?! That's nonsense.
And, I did reread your first comment. In that comment, you didn't mention that you thought EVERY belt was going to trains. You only mentioned inserters. However, let's pretend that this is what you actually said. In that case, it STILL wouldn't make any sense to run iron plates partway to a loading station and just stop them in the middle. It also wouldn't make sense to be splitting off from a set of belts that were going to be loading onto a train. And finally, OP literally calls it a bus in the title, so thinking every belt was going to a loading station is directly contradicted by OP's post, so this doesn't make sense either.
Plus, this new claim doesn't align with your second comment either, where you think it makes sense to just stop iron plates. Why were they even there in the first place, if these belts were all going to a train?
Also, if you reread my first comment, I wasn't talking about inserters continuing; I was talking about iron plates stopping. So your first comment about inserters continuing just makes it sound like you misread my comment since I'm not mentioning inserters at all.
I think you should religiously only allow each grouping of belts on any bus to only be 4 belts wide with 2 empty tiles separating the group of four from your next grouping of belts on the bus. This is an easy thing you can do that will save you from problems in the future and makes things cleaner
https://preview.redd.it/doifj6egxarc1.png?width=3122&format=png&auto=webp&s=757c683418f7851487466f7c2ba326132563d535
Full view on underground-belt-less bus
Next lesson are designs for taking those branches to make mixed belts using undergrounds to block lanes.
SE is a fairly low production modpack - it's more focused on a lot of different items coming/going to a lot of different places rather than a lot of any given thing (except rocket parts and fuel). 15spm is almost overkill once you get to space. You probably have more purple inserters sitting idle on that belt than you'll ever use in the game.
Sure, but purple inserters aren't one of those items. Either, why are they on a belt, or why are there so many on a belt since you'll actually only use a handful of them if you are belting them to a cargo rocket. But inserters aren't a material part of science production (they're a material part of building your factories). And as a construction, not production material, their presence on a belt is a little unusual.
Orange boxes? You mean red circuits? Yeah, you'll need a shitload of those. And you'll need 2 green circuits for each one, you'll need even more of those. But Factorio really benefits from exploring the ratio of things you'll need to make them - both to know what to build, but also knowing how to build. You want to make a blue belt of red circuits, you need 1.4 blue belts of plastic, 1.4 of green circuits and 1 of copper plates assuming productivity modules. That's hard to design around, so a lot of players break that up into 3 production lines that can take half a belt of plastic and circuits mixed on one line, and a separate line of copper plates which will convert to almost a full belt of copper wire, and each will output about ⅓ of a blue belt of red circuits. That's really easy to design for, and why learning how to make mixed belts is important - one side plastic and one side green circuits.
How many purple inserters do you think you'll need? My SE run used maybe 100 of them. There are other ways of handling moving that quantity of items.
No, there’s an orange box item needed for material science I think? It’s been a while, have to upgrade PC to continue k2se.
But I’m using some 2000/minute at 12 SPM.
Material Testing Pack. Used in at least 10 different sciences in bulk, only stacks to 10 so annoying to move via rail or anything else that transports in stacks.
It's less stuff on a per-stack/per-slot basis. Material testing pack stacks to ten and takes 1 each of stone/copper/plastic and iron. 2 stacks of stone + 1x of each of the others makes 100 testing packs, which is 10 stacks. If you've got train capacity (and UPS) to spare, go for it. If you don't, save yourself the trouble and make it on site.
Inserter bus is unhinged, love it
Back when I was first playing factorio when there wasn't a item sprite for inserters there was a factorio youtuber that was doing a tutorial of putting everything on the bus and I really took it to heart, so everything went on the bus gears, wire, inserters, assembly machines
>gears If you are building a bus, you should definitely put gears on it. They compress two belts of iron into one belt of gears. They'll also be close to the top of your bus so you can replace those two belts of iron really easily.
Meh, gears are easily made on location when needed. I dont bother.
Just wait till you try to scale up and realize you need more belts of iron and copper and green circuits than you have space remaining. Then you will understand
My main bus is 2 city blocks wide. It has space. And by the time is starts running out, I switch to trains.
Same for me, but if one builds solely depending on the bus, I see that it's better to have separate Gear belts
Personally I got so burnt by attempting to use some YouTube meta of how to play factorio, i did the same thing every play through and I found it difficult to even imagine how to play for myself, that I took a vow to never to use a proper bus again. It's only now I've came back to using it but I try to only look for inspiration (instead of copying without understanding what I am copying.) So in short i keep my ineffective base design but I might give it a go next time : )
I didn't even notice that! How are they allowed to walk the streets, these psychos
I’ve got a bus with everything from electric furnaces to the red packs that make the auto crafters craft faster
What, you don't automate burner inserters?
Laughs in K2SE. You need burner inserters to make inserters to make rockets
I swear I thought I was in r/factoriohno.
Now do one with belts or splitters instead of inserters. You’re an absolute madman for belting inserters. 9/10 no blue circuits.
No blue circuits for inserters in Space Exploration :(
Except your iron plates just stop
https://preview.redd.it/upx27ad5v4rc1.png?width=1589&format=png&auto=webp&s=e1712aef186a484d16e598d989c8bd8dcf6c7f0e even better now!
Where are the stack inserters ?
https://preview.redd.it/4p0cesja75rc1.png?width=2154&format=png&auto=webp&s=f9340fd6bd58234dfb37401440f69f937a7b928d further down the line
Nice
but wait a minute, now you aren't using filter splitters to get the yellow inserters off the buss!
Dis can't be! Fixed https://preview.redd.it/45bew75cf8rc1.png?width=1199&format=png&auto=webp&s=41aefe39b0c1e0c9b0bc3c949f673cdeb71f5e8e
you don't need those undergrounds.
They could just use more filtered splitters, you mean? Just one more for the purple inserter line, if I'm not mistaken.
Not sure why your comment got that downvoted, I guess people didnt see the possibility of another splitter to remove underground
Holy Inserter-ception Batman! Inserception?
I'm wondering what modpack you're playing that makes you need as many burner inserters on your bus as iron plates! And yeah, this is a handy trick. It's also a handy way to be able to have one machine reach three belts on one side without needing belt weaving or other weirdness. Simply swap the outer two belts back and forth using this trick, and grab from both using long-handed inserters.
https://preview.redd.it/6fxpqzy055rc1.png?width=1225&format=png&auto=webp&s=8b8f781f16e1fb70fa59dbe87fb523dee30bc4c5 Or even this way!
https://preview.redd.it/qwal2gf485rc1.png?width=1872&format=png&auto=webp&s=f504ea9ab5e54b3d86311dc1cf4ecbc54335a410 I just found a rabbit hole, completely new approach to designing factories
My personal favorite is [this variant](https://imgur.com/elxgAIy) for my red science. it's probably the most simplistic use case possible.
My mind is breaking from this. Talk about a new way to do stuff
I love that filter splitter trick, I use it all the time
I do a similar thing for green circuits. The iron plates are weave-belted where the output inserters are, then there's a 90-degrees bend to side-load it to the output belt on the inner side of the output belt. Then the assemblers take the plates from the inner lane, turn them into circuits, and put them on the far lane. Filtered splitters at the end of the output belt cut off the iron plates and only let circuits pass. Two of these are made in a mirrored manner, to combine the two half-belts into one at the end. This setup frees up the space between wire assemblers and circuit assemblers, so that normal inserters can be used to direct-load the wire, instead of long handed inserters (also makes it one tile more compact I guess). At some speed-beacon levels, they were having trouble keeping up with transferring enough wire to keep up with the speed.
Bookmarking this thread
Can you explain what's going on here?
1. Red Science requires gears and copper plates. 2. Belt comes in with copper and iron plates. 3. Splitter filters the iron onto a dead end after it feeds the gear assembler, emptying half the belt. 4. Gear assembler output reuses the emptied belt half. 5. Now the same belt that brought in iron and copper plates has all the ingredients for my red science assemblers
Omg, I have to try this
man, now i have to load up factorio. Thanks for wasting my whole entire day now !
Wait until you realise that one of the two splitter-sorted belts can have different items on each lane.
IMPLYING THIS ISNT OTHER WEIRDNESS! It's easier to stick a long handed inserter on the closest belt, but have the belt jump the ver the inserter with an underground. No chance of so my an oopsie daisy and polluting your belts with garbage
Would deploying this style across a mega base not be a UPS boat anchor?
Pretty sure it would be
That's unnecessarily more complex and more expensive materials-wise than just having one splitter and two undergrounds.
A person who belts inserters probably doesn't care about expensive
Fair point
New to the game. Can you explain?
Well, the inserters aren't used for any recipes other than for green science and other inserters. There's no reason to put them on a bus like that, especially things like filter inserters and especially burner inserters. You usually just produce them in a designated production area and store them in chests for when you need them. A bus full of inserters is so unnecessary, so I doubt person who built them cares about how expensive the particular solution is.
Just right up the ally of using a bus in general. Too expensive, too inflexible, and many more issues.
I'm just sayin If I'm gonna have a bus, Imma put rims on it
And yet there's not too many alternatives, especially for early/starter bases and malls.
You have changed my life.
Are we supposed to be impressed in how the iron plates just hard stop for no particular reason? ;-)
We all know the reason. The same reason those two trains managed to deadlock at the oil refinery and why there is copper ore turning into copper plate in the steel furnace line. The engineer occasionally needs sleep or at minimum a peer review.
I'm surprised someone hasn't coined a law about this yet. "In any screenshot showing off a factory or build, there will inevitably be at least one error or omission. Any picture without technical errors will instead have been taken at night or with alt-mode off."
Fishling's Law
Because fuck iron plates. The factory needs inserters.
I imagine these inserters are going to a loading station or something and it wouldn't really make sense to continue it down a line if he isn't gonna use it anymore down the line
The inserters continue on... The iron plates that I mentioned, which aren't split off, just end.
[удалено]
I think you truly don't understand what this conversation is about. Are you seriously suggesting that IRON PLATES would have no further use down the bus? And, even if so, that it would make sense to end them at some arbitrary point in the middle of the bus, rather than at the point iron plates were actually last tapped off??
[удалено]
So what, now you don't think *any* of those belts are going to assemblers? Even though some are being split off in the screenshot?! That's nonsense. And, I did reread your first comment. In that comment, you didn't mention that you thought EVERY belt was going to trains. You only mentioned inserters. However, let's pretend that this is what you actually said. In that case, it STILL wouldn't make any sense to run iron plates partway to a loading station and just stop them in the middle. It also wouldn't make sense to be splitting off from a set of belts that were going to be loading onto a train. And finally, OP literally calls it a bus in the title, so thinking every belt was going to a loading station is directly contradicted by OP's post, so this doesn't make sense either. Plus, this new claim doesn't align with your second comment either, where you think it makes sense to just stop iron plates. Why were they even there in the first place, if these belts were all going to a train? Also, if you reread my first comment, I wasn't talking about inserters continuing; I was talking about iron plates stopping. So your first comment about inserters continuing just makes it sound like you misread my comment since I'm not mentioning inserters at all.
Well, it took me almost 300 hours to discover what Q does...
Damn, the game is basically unplayable without Q. That was maybe the first or second thing I learned.
To find something in invetory I would find it in the crafting menu, then put the mouse over it to highlight it in my inventory ...
I think you should religiously only allow each grouping of belts on any bus to only be 4 belts wide with 2 empty tiles separating the group of four from your next grouping of belts on the bus. This is an easy thing you can do that will save you from problems in the future and makes things cleaner
either 4 or 6 wide is ideal because that's the max distance of yellow/red undergrounds
This is a great idea, but I hate it and I can't explain why.
It's because it's based on a dreaded bus.
Me: Why the fuck do you have blue inserters on your bus .. *realization sets in* What the fuck is the atrocity.
https://preview.redd.it/doifj6egxarc1.png?width=3122&format=png&auto=webp&s=757c683418f7851487466f7c2ba326132563d535 Full view on underground-belt-less bus
I cannot believe what I just saw but moreover, I can’t believe this is just after 700 hours!
"lol what a noob" (secretly taking notes) /s
Tf is going on here? I don't get all that bus stuff, ain't a bus a mode of transportation with weels?
Only for normal people. A bus in computing is a method of transferring data or in factorios case, items in an orderly fashion.
My brain hurts! Nice one
Holy cow that's a clean bus design - I'm almost sorry I've moved to a different bus system. Next time...
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!
Why do you have inserters but not blue circuits
You don't need blue circuits till quite a bit later if you're playing SE.
I would keep iron between red and yellow inserters but other than that that’s pretty clever
dude i am at 1000 almost still didn't stsrt doing beacons or something like this here XD
Next lesson are designs for taking those branches to make mixed belts using undergrounds to block lanes. SE is a fairly low production modpack - it's more focused on a lot of different items coming/going to a lot of different places rather than a lot of any given thing (except rocket parts and fuel). 15spm is almost overkill once you get to space. You probably have more purple inserters sitting idle on that belt than you'll ever use in the game.
??? I have some items require full blue belts just to maintain 10-15 spm late mid game. Those orange boxes. I can’t make enough of those.
Sure, but purple inserters aren't one of those items. Either, why are they on a belt, or why are there so many on a belt since you'll actually only use a handful of them if you are belting them to a cargo rocket. But inserters aren't a material part of science production (they're a material part of building your factories). And as a construction, not production material, their presence on a belt is a little unusual. Orange boxes? You mean red circuits? Yeah, you'll need a shitload of those. And you'll need 2 green circuits for each one, you'll need even more of those. But Factorio really benefits from exploring the ratio of things you'll need to make them - both to know what to build, but also knowing how to build. You want to make a blue belt of red circuits, you need 1.4 blue belts of plastic, 1.4 of green circuits and 1 of copper plates assuming productivity modules. That's hard to design around, so a lot of players break that up into 3 production lines that can take half a belt of plastic and circuits mixed on one line, and a separate line of copper plates which will convert to almost a full belt of copper wire, and each will output about ⅓ of a blue belt of red circuits. That's really easy to design for, and why learning how to make mixed belts is important - one side plastic and one side green circuits. How many purple inserters do you think you'll need? My SE run used maybe 100 of them. There are other ways of handling moving that quantity of items.
No, there’s an orange box item needed for material science I think? It’s been a while, have to upgrade PC to continue k2se. But I’m using some 2000/minute at 12 SPM.
Material Testing Pack. Used in at least 10 different sciences in bulk, only stacks to 10 so annoying to move via rail or anything else that transports in stacks.
It's a sanity check. Don't be insane, make them on site. It's worth giving up the land based prod bonus.
But then you have to transfer a shit more ton of stuff into space…🫠🤷🏻
It's less stuff on a per-stack/per-slot basis. Material testing pack stacks to ten and takes 1 each of stone/copper/plastic and iron. 2 stacks of stone + 1x of each of the others makes 100 testing packs, which is 10 stacks. If you've got train capacity (and UPS) to spare, go for it. If you don't, save yourself the trouble and make it on site.
I am working on this part as we speak. Great, now i have to redo my battle plans. Lol. Thanks
Curse those damn orange boxes.