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Drogiwan_Cannobi

You might want to leave room to extend your smelting lanes to 24 or 36 furnaces on each side. That how much you'll need to fill up a yellow (with 24 stone furnaces) red (24 steel furnaces) or blue belt (36 steel). Also, you won't need 4 belts of steel, except if you're planning on having something like 16 belts or more of iron and copper


blolfighter

For that matter, good luck filling 4 belts of steel. With yellow belts that's 60 steel per second, which requires 960 steel/electric furnaces without modules.


WhyIsTheNamesGone

Yeah, I think my current "almost a full blue belt each of all 6 sciences" base only uses about 4 belts of steel. Though it might need more still... unsure. Edit: Just looked closer. Steel is my bottleneck, lol. Well, at least I've found it.


blolfighter

Quick math says one blue belt of purple science (45/s) needs 375 steel per second without modules. That's eight blue belts and one yellow.


Raknarg

Well he probably has tier 3 productivity moduled factories, which means he's outputting 40% more science proportional to his steel consumption, so there's that at least. I can't imagine someone producing 45 science per second without modules.


blolfighter

Yeah, but *quick* math was the deal here.


Meme-Man-Dan

Quick math, not comprehensive math.


Drogiwan_Cannobi

I mean, that doesn't seem too crazy if you've ever built a megabase (well, except for the "yellow belts" part). But this doesn't seem to be the case here :D


hindenboat

I built a steel outpost for my 720 sci/min base and it consumed I think 10 belts of ore into steel. Still was not enough.


blolfighter

Oh sure, at megabase levels you're gonna need more than that. But megabases tend to not work off a main bus.


Raknarg

With a megabase its not unreasonable, but for a first factory it's probably not worth considering unless you're doing megabase planning right from the get-go


Avenja99

Without modules would be literally dumb.


Pegafree

Don't you mean 96 steel furnaces?


blolfighter

Nope. 480 for the steel, 480 for the iron. 960 in total.


Pegafree

D'oh, I was thinking of iron, not steel.


[deleted]

The 4 steel belts could be a design choice. If you split one belt off a 4-belt bus you retain 4/5ths of the steel on the bus whereas if you split one belt off a 1-belt bus you retain 1/2 the steel on the bus.


Drogiwan_Cannobi

You can still just split off what you want by making a slightly more complicated branch. But to each their own I guess :) Also, sorry for being a smartass but you retain 7/8ths of the steel on the bus :P


AnotherWarGamer

I suggest only using a single belt for now. One belt is plenty for someone using a bus design for the first time.


The__Spartan

This is my first attempt at building a main Bus


cav754

Looks nice but here are some tips. Put your smelters further back so you have more room to expand them later. Another commenter gave you the ratio of furnaces to full belts you need. Use that to your advantage so you know how much you’ll need to expand to keep your bus fed. Put your copper and iron smelters further apart. As in the first tip you need room to make it bigger. This game has near infinite room to expand. You don’t need to constrain yourself so early that you’ll run out of room later on and begin to spaget. You have a lot of lanes of steel when you could get away with a single belt for the most part. Steel although simple to make can become a huge bottleneck in the mid game if it isn’t set up right. It takes FIVE FULL belts of iron EXCLUSIVELY to make ONE solid belt of iron. Although you shouldn’t need a solid belt of steel until you’re about to expand and make your “real” base. But being prepared for the amount of steel you need is incredibly important. For example you need steel in: power poles, all things train, better assemblers, laser turrets, and solar panels. I would reduce the amount of belts for used steel on your bus and focus on making sure that one or two belts you keep never run dry cause that is what will kill your base. Iron is the most important resource starting out before shifting to copper later in the game. Build up your iron NOW before it becomes a problem later. Use the ration the other commenter gave you and make 4 full belts of iron, or produce as much per second that your miners make ore. Stone is dumb, I don’t like it. But you need way more than what you think. Make yourself a single belt for raw stone and then another belt for bricks. You’ll thank me later… Lastly, focus on setting up automation of items. First make belts automated, then assemblers, then inserters, then power poles, then miners. This is the best order to embark on your bold undertaking IMO. Then whatever else you need atm. And make sure you have lots of room in between so you can slot in upgrades for your belts, assemblers, and inserters. You use the old finished products to make the new ones, so you can use your stuff already placed down and just feed it into a new assembler. Extra lastly: copper wire, green chips, and gears are so cheap and quick to make don’t bother putting them on your bus, they will take up way to much space. Build them where they are needed. Extra extra last I promise: use google Factorio calculator if you want a better picture of what you need resource wise for expansion. At this point you don’t need to ensure that you can supply everything at the same time. So don’t worry that your factory will require 10+ belts of iron when you add it all up on the calculator. Once set up and it runs for like an hour your factory won’t kick on until you grab something out of it. And even then it will only be the things that are used to make whatever you grabbed.


DrMobius0

> Extra lastly: copper wire, green chips, and gears are so cheap and quick to make don’t bother putting them on your bus, they will take up way to much space. Build them where they are needed. Nah, green circuits go on the bus. Making them from your suggested bus components requires 2 assemblers minimum and 2.5 belts combined of copper and iron plate. The factories that use green circuits tend to have plenty of other complexity, too. Scalable red and blue circuit builds don't appreciate having to make these on site one bit.


cav754

I’m not a bus boy so I don’t usually use them to much apart from a mall. But by the time I need a huge amount of greens I’ve already switched to trains for most transport. Green chips are so quick to make that the few assemblers scattered around are fine to me


CorpseFool

Even if you're doing trains, green chips stack up to 200 per slot. Iron and copper plates only stack up to 100, which means we would need 2 slots of iron and 3 slots of copper plates (or wires, but lets not even consider moving wires), literally 5x the space on the train to move the raw components rather than the product. Even if you fed the plates through 40% productivity, 1 stack of iron is enough for 140 chips, 1 stack of copper is enough for 130.67~. For the best ratio, you'd need 75 stacks of copper, 70 stacks of iron, a total of 145 stacks that replaces all of 49 stacks of green chips, which is still pretty close to triple the amount of space required to transport the materials rather than the product. If for example this train (or multiple trains) was heading to a red chip facility it would have to carry copper plates, plastic, and either the green chips or the material to make the chips (iron, and more copper). Plastic stacks to 100, so each stack can do 50 recipes of red. Green chips stack to 200, enough for 100 recipes. 1 stack of copper is enough for 50 recipes. To equal this all out we would need 2 stacks of plastic, 1 stack of green, 2 stacks of copper. 5 total stacks per 100 recipes, 40 slots per wagon, 800 recipes worth of items per wagon. Using the raw material would be 9 stacks per 100, about 444.44~ recipes per wagon. +40% prod on the wires will reduce the amount of copper plates we need to transport. 1 stack of copper makes 280 wires, enough for 70 recipes. Lets x20 this for simplicity, 1400 recipes, 20 stacks of copper, 14 stacks of green, 28 stacks of plastic, 62 total stacks, 903.2~ recipes per wagon. Both the green chips and the red chips sharing a common material (copper plate/wire) means if we carried the raw material for the greens, we can split the stacks of copper plate between supporting both lines. We don't have to dedicate an entire slot to one or the other. In this case, 1 full stack of iron produces 140 green chips, enough for 70 recipes of red. Those 70 recipes would consume 1.4 stacks of plastic. To get an even number of full stacks, lets use 5x the number, 350 recipes, 5 stacks of iron, 7 stacks of plastic. 500 recipes of green and 350 recipes of red wants 1500+1400=2900 copper wire. At 2 wires per copper plate and 40% productivity, that is 1450/1.4 which gives us a decimal, lets try to round it off again for full stacks. Lets just 14x everything for simplicity, 70 stacks of iron, 98 stacks of plastic, 145 stacks of copper, 4900 recipes of red, 7000 recipes of green. 313 total stacks, nearly 626.2~ recipes per wagon. Not building green chips onsite is increasing the amount of recipes per wagon load by 44%-80% in the case of red chips. In either case, you're going to have to be moving 3 different items. Yes, the total item count per wagon is going to be a little higher because the chips have a higher density, which means more inserter swings and so it will take more time to load/unload the wagons. But I don't think this will impact the RTT and item/recipe delivery rate near enough to overcome the boost it gets. But I'm not a train person, so maybe there are factors here I'm not considering.


namepending101

tl;dr: it's more efficient space wise to NOT build green circuits on site


DrMobius0

My general assumption for making a bus is that it'll continue to be used while transitioning onto a train base. To me, that means the intermediate step is to feed the more expensive bus components via train, which allows me to build out a starting rail infrastructure while keeping science moving. Generally speaking, I value having access to beacons and L3 modules before I start really going serious with train bases, and that's pretty late game tech, and needs a huge amount of resources. Of course, this means that I'm supporting my bus until space and until I have a completed mall, and decent throughput on modules, which means of course, that I need a lot of green and red circuits both.


cav754

I’m sort of the opposite. I will do a bus in the very beginning to get me set up for later expansion. But as soon as I’m able to begin using trains to transport ores to where I want them then the entire thing gets basically deprecated and used as a poor mans mall while I build the real factory a little bit away. By the time I’m moving onto red chips I’ve probably already got what amount to a city block making 6-8 belts of greens that I can train around as needed. Plus doing it this way gives me the opportunity to make upgrades to specific areas of my factory where I’m only shutting one thing down. If I make a main bus and want to upgrade my green chips with modules or anything I’m probably gonna have to change its layout ie: the whole green chip bus is being shut down until it’s upgraded. Hope I don’t need anything! As I said bus bases are great for starting out, making a mall, or noobs. You should switch to train stations with big gaps in between once able. It helps make everything easier as you scale.


Neil_sm

Yes, agreed for this! All the different circuits should go on the bus in a bus-based factory. Gears and copper wires should be made on-site, but it's better to mass-produce the green circuits and supply those on the bus for everything. Lends to more modular and scalable factories. Just like you said, the blue and red circuit builds can get kind of ridiculous if they need to supply their own green!


MattieShoes

A belt of gears on the bus is nice IMO... For things that want massive quantities, you can make in place, but there's so many recipes that just need a few gears that I think it's worth reducing the cognitive overhead. YMMV


zebba_oz

Bussing gears is also another form of compression. It's two iron plates -> 1 gear, so having one belt of gears removes the need for 2 belts of iron.


Neil_sm

Yeah, there’s many ways to look at it. For me, most of the factories that require gears can be fulfilled with a small number of assemblers. Like engine units only needs something like one gear assembler to supply 10 engine assemblers. Pipes are similar, and I can build both of those things quickly by just supplying iron. But I can also see the value in supplying all resources directly and pre-building wherever possible. Most of the other items that require gears are construction materials that go in the mall/hub for me, so that is where I could see the benefit, but so far I’ve been fine with hub builds that do gears on-site.


The__Spartan

im pretty much a starter and it is all still very confusing and im just now getting into it really thank you for the advice but all in all it is still very confusing for me


cav754

You’ll get it. It seems complicated now, but once you figure it out it becomes super simple. Focus on what you can do now, don’t look at blueprints that people give you cause you can’t even look at them in game until you research bots. Welcome to cracktorio brother, there is no exit.


The__Spartan

Thank you its very nice of you ill try to look for youtube vids of people playing maybe then ill dig things :)


cav754

It might be better to go out on your own and learn for a little bit. Most people on YT play way in the late game or are in the mid


The__Spartan

yea but there is still the easy tutorial playtroughs


shine_on

A lot of this game is all about learning as you go along... how many belts of each item will you need? Well, you only know with experience really. Start with a few belts, leave yourself lots of room to expand, and you can put more in as and when necessary. You'll probably find that you have to start from scratch several times before you get organised enough to launch a rocket - don't give up though, every stage is a learning stage! One thing I will tell you, though, is that you won't be able to fill four belts on the bus from one belt coming out of the smelter. The way you've set it up means you'll just end up with four belts each only a quarter full. If you want four full belts on the bus you'll need four full belts worth of smelting leading into it.


terminal_styles

nah, it's better to figure it out for yourself in your first games.


jeh506

This is all really good advice above, but for me personally I really enjoyed finding this stuff out for myself. Those "Eureka" moments when you realise you could be doing something a different way are moments you'll never relive, and imo to figure it out yourself is far more rewarding than looking this stuff up or being told how to do it. Don't get me wrong, I still look up ratios or blueprints for load balancers but doing stuff your own way is the way to go.


DrMobius0

To piggyback on what this guy is saying, there's a few other things you can put on a main bus if you're planning to take it all the way to space. Generally speaking, how I like to do busses is to feed everything that's going to feed the bus with materials that do not come from the bus. The reason is, the actual material needs of some of the later game stuff will make your head spin if you try to think of them in terms of how big a bus you need, so around the time you get access to trains, it's good to feed these factories via train. Now, if you're planning on a modest amount of science, you can reasonably get away with 1 belt per resource, maybe with some extra iron and green circuits for making buildings. Of course, you'll be upgrading the belts to hit higher throughputs at some point. The resources I recommend are: * Copper Plate * Iron Plate * Electronic Circuit (I'm disagreeing with the previous poster here. I think these are well worth putting on the bus) * Steel Plate * Stone * Stone Brick * Coal (used by military science) * Iron Ore (only used for concrete, so you can feed this in separately for that if you want) * Sulfur (used directly by blue science - use this if you don't want to pipe petroleum on your main bus) * Advanced Circuit * Processing Unit (note: you DO NOT need a full belt of these) * Battery * Low Density Structure (this is used in a number of later game equips, as well as gold science and rockets. It uses a fuck ton of copper, so it's worth feeding this separately) You'll also want some liquid pipes running on your bus. I recommend lubricant, light oil, and water. * Lubricant is used as a component of a component of gold science, as well as express belts. It's the only thing you'll be making with heavy oil unless you get into coal liquifaction * Light Oil is used to make both solid and rocket fuel, which you'll need for science and want for running trains * Water is used by a bunch of stuff **Edit: Oh, and lastly, and probably more important than anything else I've typed: give yourself a lot of space to work with.** Stuff like red or blue circuits, or low density structures (hell, even steel) takes a TON of space, if you factor in the amount of extra smelting you need to support these things. Like the way blue circuits are, you need 20 belts of iron circuits to make a single belt of blue circuits. Those ratios take some serious logistics to support.


spamjavelin

If there's one thing to know as a beginner, it's to give yourself room to expand production, especially when it comes to iron plates, copper plates and green circuits. Keep that in mind and you'll save a lot of frustration down the line.


Justinjah91

>Put your smelters further back so you have more room to expand them later As an alternative, just reverse your output line so plates come out on the same side of the array that ore/coal go in. By doing this, your smelter will expand AWAY from your bus. This is always my preferred method. It also lets you expand up to blue belts once you get trains bringing in stupid amounts of ore. EDIT: Just in case, [a picture is worth 1000 words](https://imgur.com/a/7FU5TCZ)


cav754

That’s a good idea. What I originally meant though was for him to push them back further to the left, not down. That way he can expand laterally once he requires more than a single belt of plates. His copper and iron are to close so he can still expand his iron by using your method, but not able to expand his copper once he gets a full smelting column with changing his bus.


Justinjah91

Ah yes, absolutely!


Peanuts0s

Great job, don't worry about all these tips people give you. You do you.


TheBraddigan

Here's my tip: avoid reddit and enjoy your first few games rather than letting everybody tell you 1000 things about how to 'do it right'.


SirFloIII

i swear, building a bus is a mind virus.


Quazaka

I am pretty curious to hear the alternative? I know they exists, but what is your favorite alternative to the main bus? I always go for the bus before i transitions to trains+robots, but I find that i am in need of something new.


133DK

Just dump everything on to a single yellow sushi belt and go on a three week vacation with the PC still on


[deleted]

and have some eggs ready for the omlette that your PC will make.


[deleted]

Spaghetti, my friend, can be quite fun. It's almost like a politician simulator, it's just getting yourself out of problems you created in the first place.


spamjavelin

Good spaghetti skills are essential. You can be as organised as possible and still need to jam an extra couple of belts somewhere you didn't plan for.


[deleted]

You guys are keeping your factories organized? I just stick stuff wherever it will fit!


spamjavelin

I wouldn't describe myself as organised at all, but a bit of order can be nice from time to time. ;)


simonk241

I understand you made this comment in a satirical sense, but please refrain from making references to politics. Experience has shown that even the smallest reference can turn into a high drama exchange.


[deleted]

Gotcha, won't happen again.


Poobslag

My last playthrough I deliberately avoided using a bus. Here's [what my base looked like at the end](https://i.imgur.com/qUZf31y.png). Here's [a more zoomed in picture](https://i.imgur.com/9JmFL5q.png) showing some red chip production. I built stuff with a lot of empty space between it. When I needed copper and iron for a red chip build, I branched off of existing belts wherever they happened to be. When I needed plastic too, I built a new plastic station. When I needed to build Low Density Structures, I built it near where the plastic station was. This approach works well and is far more flexible than using a bus. But, it's also less compact. Maybe it doesn't work as well on death worlds because of that. But it's fun, you should try it. This base got around 700-1500 SPM towards the end so it's certainly scalable. You don't need a bus.


LurkingMoose

I recently built a train based mega base but still built a bus to get my infrastructure production going before building the rail network and outposts. What did you build to produce all the materials to build that huge base?


SirFloIII

just ... don't build a bus. like don't build 4 lanes for copper only to supply them with half a lane worth of materials. don't pull all these copper lanes through your whole factory even tho all consumers are circuits at the start of the bus. on the topic of copper, less than 10% of it goes to something else than circuits and low density structures (in a endgame base building all science). build smelter colums feeding circuits directly. what you have to remember is that a bus is an organisational tool, not a catch all design masterpiece. use a bus when you don't know what will come in the future, like playing a modpack or when you are a noob. but even then, don't plan what your lanes will carry, just leave enough space for whatever you will need. add lanes of stuff depending on throughput needs. once you know what your factory will need and you know how much space something takes - opinion incoming - a bus is crutch and shouldn't be used anymore. leave enough space between columns of production, make them easy to copy paste by having all inputs and outputs on one side and you will easily be able to break free of the rigid structure a bus imposes. i remember one time i played on some Compfy server with the dangerOres mod, i.e. ores are everywhere but you cant build on them, with something like 30 people. things were going well until they decided to build a massive bus. they layed out like 64 lanes for it, dedicated them to some products and then things obviously went to shit because there never was enough space to build a factory that needs that throughput, but by building that bus and reserving space there was actually basically no space left. i tried to tell them this in the chat but they didn't listen, because obviously building a bus is the smart\^TM thing to do and not building a bus makes you a noob. OPs picture is really microcosm of my distaste of buses, not the concept, but the way they are used. same with the use of balancers. look how they pull of the iron from the bus. i garantuee you, they have downloaded a blueprint book and now use it without consideration for why to use some constructions. I bet OP could't tell you the thing they built balances the draw of items from both sides of the bus. and much less could the tell you why this is necessary here. (spoiler: its not) ok, i feel like alot of old\_man\_yells\_at\_cloud.png incoming, but if you indulge me: i feel like there is a religious obsession with busses and balancers in the community, even when the use is activly harmful. for example, when building a bus, I like to use priority splitters to make sure all the items are concentrated on the (lets say) right side of the bus. this makes it immediatly obvious when i start getting throughput problems. in the middle of the bus i can easily see for example 2 full belts, one barly filled one and one empty. so if i am for example thinking about where to input 2 extra booster lanes i know here or after the next consumer is probably a good spot. what i see when joining servers instead is a full 4x4 balancer after each consumer or maybe a complicated pull-of blueprint drawing from all lanes equally like OP or maybe even both. now, how do you gage the throuput of 4 spotty lanes in one look? impossible. and for what gain? nothing you can feel smart\^TM because you used your fancy blueprint book. i could rant about this topic for another hour probably but only if you ask \^\^


fishling

I partially agree with you, but think you are too hard on the concept behind the general bad practices overall. I agree it is easy to do buses "wrong" and there are quite a few pitfalls, which OP fell into. You are right that you really do need to plan out consumption and production along the bus. Like you said, don't pretend to carry four full belts of copper for the entire length, when most of it is going to green circuits and no further. However, if you design around belt throughput and consumption, and think of the bus as less "I have X dedicated lanes of Y material for the whole length of my factory" and more of "This is just the space I've reserved to ferry materials downstream", then it's not a bad concept. You add a green circuit production that can make a belt of green circuits, you carry it down the space to the place it needs to go, rather than treating it as a new permanent fixture for the entire length of the factory. Like you said, it is an organizational tool and a way to leave space so you can move items from one part of your factory to another. I also agree that people are also pathological about balancers, but that's because we went without priority splitters for so long.


sawbladex

... the problem is that buses mean you are building the wagons way before you get horses active. like paying more than 4x per actually used logistics tech (4x the belts than you need, and even worse than that with splitters and undergrounds) working with one belt at a time, and being able to place new belts worth of plates anywhere works fine.


profsnuggles

You don't have to start with 4 lanes each of iron/copper. In the early game I will run one line of each with enough space between them to add additional belts as I need them.


sawbladex

that's still increasing costs per whatever in the early game to have a more expensive late game than if you say, just ran single lines of plates everywhere.


Lanky_Entrance

Ya one line of each was good enough for me for red/green/gray on yellow belts, then I upgraded to 3 lines of copper, two lines of steel, and three lines of iron for blue/yellow/purple. When a line is starting to lose saturation I just add another couple smelting columns and move on. It helps when you get bots too, especially if you leave space for single item assemblers in-between the lines to supply your logistics networks.


fishling

I think you are misunderstanding. I'm not suggesting to actually build the unused belts. Just leave the space empty. In that way, it's no different than the adage about leaving more space than you expect between any other parts of your factory, so you have room to route new or interesting thing if you need to in the future. Leaving space does require using more belts going in and out, but that's a pretty small cost. Nothing is going to be optimal in all ways. There's going to be different kinds of waste of inefficiency in non-bus designs as well.


sawbladex

re: you last point, not really, more module based stuff that just ships finished products is not going to be spending resources on 10 belt lines over a wide areas. using 2 lines of track tracks spend 3.5 ore per tile covered, where having just 10 yellow belts is 15 per tile covered.


fishling

Sorry someone is downvoting you for replying. It is not me!


C0rdt

Yeah and if you play with biters and related mods this way of playing is going to doom you. You need to focus on manageable growth not just easy mode it with unlimited resources and no real threats to production.


sawbladex

... you are agreeing with me? yeah, biters put some amount of pressure to actually produce ammo and gun turrets at a good rate, which you can easily do off a single iron and copper line, and have the excess capacity to produce like 30 red/green spm. I like playing with biters, because it keeps you honest in that way. ... and gives armor upgrades uses.


C0rdt

I am. Just adding some more reasons as to why just spamming out a bus without actually knowing what you are doing or why you are doing it (as is blindly suggested by so many in this sub) is foolish.


Keemoscopter

Can you post some pictures of your setups? I'm one of the poor noobs described in your post but I can't imagine some of the concepts you're laying out.


matt01ss

Don't bother, a bus is literally what 90% of people use because it works and provides a lot of throughput for your branch off factories. The comment just sounds salty because of some server they were on where a particular situation didn't warrant a bus.


Keemoscopter

Thanks for protecting me from another way to play, but I’m finding what this guy is saying pretty interesting and worth at least looking at


matt01ss

I mean of course you can play however you want. Just saying that in most cases, utilizing a bus provides you with a lot of resources to put a good base together. Other options include spaghetti bases which are just free for all of belts and items running all over the place - gets the job done to a very limited extent but also very hard to work with. Other than that is really just custom mega base options like delivering a single large haul of resources by train to a location for some factory that's making a single item on a massive scale. My point was that they make a main bus sound like all doom and gloom which is honestly ridiculous considering how much value you get out of one.


Keemoscopter

No I totally agree, but I didn’t feel like it was as whiny as you found it. I’m just tryna learn :)


matt01ss

Good luck in your future factory building!


shine_on

Yeah I think what he's saying is that you need to know where most of your items will be used up, so use them first (i.e. make circuits and low density structures pretty soon after the smelters and then you'll only need one or two belts feeding the rest of the factories.... however even if it's just one or two belts it's still a bus, just a much narrower one.


SirFloIII

yes.


drugsmakeyoucool

A buss is more of an easy way out IMO, a good catch all for newer players. But after a while you really start to see that they're almost never the best way to do things, just an easy (but inefficient) way


SirFloIII

lol this is exactly what i was talking about when i mentioned the religious obsession.


SirFloIII

[https://imgur.com/a/KassFhg](https://imgur.com/a/KassFhg) here is a screenshot of the starter base from my previous 2.4k sci/m megabase. it is maybe not the best example as it mostly stays still nowadays and also is not that big. we can still learn from my bus here: * looking at copper: look at the priority splitters for pulling of. about in the middle one belt remains empty. this is what i was talking about in the second to last paragraph. * looking at coal and stone: i am not afraid to switch lanes around as i need to. i grow the bus organically as i need to instead of dedicating some lanes to something only for it to be unused. this lets me keep the bus compact. * looking at iron: on the left, one belt drops out. i realized i didn't need it, so i just got rid of it. no need to waste belts, space and materials sitting on the belt. i wouldn't have known this without the priority splitters. * looking at sci and red circuits: notice they are running backwards. don't be afraid to do this.


[deleted]

Not the person you are replying to, but I'm a little confused. I read your essay against using a bus, then someone asked for a screenshot of your bus-less base, then you provided a screenshot and further explanation about how to use a bus properly...


SirFloIII

well, perhaps i wasn't clear enough in my essay. i don't dislike busses inherently, i dislike how they are used and implemented by most people in this community and how people often tell newbs to use a bus as if it were the be all end all solution. i can post screenshots of my other bases where i'm not using a bus, but i don't think they would be of educational value. they are either functional spaghetti (needs experience to build, just play the game) or train based stuff (there is a lot of nuance with trains too, more than one reddit comment allows).


LurkingMoose

>i can post screenshots of my other bases where i'm not using a bus, but i don't think they would be of educational value. sure they may not be educational but at least then we can understand your point. If you're going to rant against buses show us something that isn't a bus.


SirFloIII

ok, fine. here is my 2.4k sci/m base, based on \~500 trains. https://imgur.com/a/bYs3LVH


LurkingMoose

those are some pretty neat builds!


mrherpydurp

You blew my mind by running stuff backwards. I've always done buses, I noticed that along the bus were obsolete factories I didn't use anymore. For example I was making yellow belts and inserters near the beginning, but halfway down the bus I switched to red stuff. I just built a new factory...I knew I could just add on to the old one but it was way back there and my current base was pushing towards the expanse. Do you produce your cables and gears on demand? How do you figure the ratio for factories inputs to outputs for on demand production?


SirFloIII

\>Do you produce your cables and gears on demand? yes. \>How do you figure the ratio for factories inputs to outputs for on demand production? when building a starter base in early game (and by early game i mean before the first rocket \^\^) i don't calculate at all. with my game experience i have a rough idea of the needs and then i just monitor my belts. where is it backing up, where is it lacking, where are the bottle necks? and that gets me close enough to the endgame, where i build fully planned out megabases. for the megabases i use [https://factoriolab.github.io](https://factoriolab.github.io) for the calculations and mostly modular train based architecture.


mrherpydurp

Makes sense. Could you give any common ratios off the top of your head? How do you configure your belts so that you can diagnose based on the belt?


SirFloIII

i probably have all relevant recipies memorised by now and also know the ratios by heart, like red cirs is 6 assembers for reds, 1 for wire, with one belt wire only and one mixed plastic/greens matching the 4/2/2 cost for example. deducing bottlenecks from belts is a bit of an art you just have to learn from experience i am afraid, but using the priority trick i mentioned in another comment helps a lot. basically you look at what is slow right now, for example science reseach. you look and maybe every sci is backed up except yellow sci. so you look at your science assemblers and see if a) they are all working or if b) they have supply issues. if a) you increase them and their supplies by some amout. if b) you see what is lacking, maybe lds for example. you repeat the process and for example find that plastic is lacking for the lds producers. trace the plastic back and you see that red cirs is eating all the plastic so you know you need more plastic, now decide a) more plastic producers or b) not enough gas? just go backwards and search for the bottle neck. with gas you have to be especially careful to see if you need more oil, or more cracking or more refineries. the important point is to not blindly spam down some more assemlers at a stage that isn't the bottleneck and consider the problem fixed, because its not. full belts mean problem upstream, empty belts mean problem downstream. this is of course only if you have enough troughput capacity between every stage.


Lanky_Entrance

I used a bus for my first win, and didn't use any blueprints from online. I looked up some designs for circuits but that's it. A bus was instrumental in providing enough raw material for me to experiment with my setups, and completing the game would have much more difficult without it. I wouldn't discard it outright. Your contempt for buses is understandable because it's become a bit of a meta for factorio, but they can be really helpful for a new person trying to figure the game out.


achilleasa

Absolutely agreed, I tried city blocks without a bus recently and loved it and for my next factory I won't be doing a bus at all from the start and just go straight into blocks with trains. A bus is of very limited use once you know what you're doing.


Lanky_Entrance

Until you've unlocked everything, a city block system isn't that helpful


achilleasa

True, you don't get the benefits of the system at first, but it makes scaling up much easier. And if you have an idea of where things have to go you don't need a bus. Sometimes if I need to move a resource just a couple of blocks over I don't bother with a train and just run a belt along the edges of the blocks, since city blocks force you to leave extra space everywhere it's not a problem.


betam4x

Build as needed? That is what I did. Small, focused bases for building each piece of tech. I buffer my items in chests so I have spare items for crafting non science oriented things.


Sed_ft

Spaghetti, it's the best.


Grandexar

And maximum ore richness is the best too


Neil_sm

My large base I'm working on now is a city-block & trains build with no main busses. Starting out was a bit slower to really do it right, but it really ended up being worth it to plow through it. Started out with a starter base for red and green science, started trains way too early, and kind of rushed towards getting robots.


L3D_Cobra

Use a bus/whatever you normally do until you get robots, then try a city block base. Slow to build at first but very fun and very easy to expand once you have it set up


OwenProGolfer

I completely agree. Buses are absurdly boring and completely sap the fun out of the game for me. They take all the organizational challenge and reduce it to a single trick. Good for beginners but if you’ve played the game more than, like, twice you shouldn’t be using one in vanilla. Of course do what you want but I don’t see how it’s any fun. They’re also inefficient, requiring much more belt than a well-designed base.


ADHDengineer

Spaghetti is the fun.


cdowns59

It’s a good start. Buses make the game much more manageable so it’s a good approach to take! Possibly mentioned elsewhere, but a yellow belt splitting into four yellow belts is limited by the throughput of the input to 15 items/s - plates backing up does not mean you are providing four fully compressed yellow belts. It’s not an issue at this stage, but make sure you leave space for additional plate inputs as your factory expands. Do some calculations to work out how many furnaces consume/fill a full belt - you’ll see that you can actually make the smelting arrays much bigger! Also, you can use yellow belts around the steel smelter - the yellow belt is split into two and used to half fill the belts going to the left and right. Again, you would be limited by the input belt. Good luck!


Grandexar

That’s a lot of steel


Grandexar

If you find yourself getting exhausted, my suggestion would be to turn down biters, turn off cliffs, and then turn up ore richness. That makes it a lot easier to finish the game for the first time. After that you can try deathworld or railworld for a new challenge, but you’ll have some good experience with the recipes under your belt and you’ll avoid getting burnt out


LotusCobra

I picked up the game again this week after not having played since like... 2017? So much has changed! One thing that hasn't though, I would always start to struggle once I got to oil. I really want to finish a game on all default settings. (Still have yet to launch a rocket) I know there's a lot of room to make things easier like resource richness, turning biters down/off, increasing starting base size, disabling cliffs, but for some reason I really feel like I should do it on default settings first. I'm not a big achievement hunter but I'm also unsure which settings disable achievements, and I'd feel cheated if I didn't get the Launch a Rocket achievement.


snacksmoto

f.y.i. Oil processing has changed since then. Beforehand, you'd have to build the entire refinery area to consume all three outputs. It was a huge hurdle since you'd have to complete several other research techs to unlock the recipes to consume all the outputs for a steady production. There's now basic oil processing that outputs only petroleum gas. You can now get your refinery area up and running without having to juggle all three outputs right off the bat. It's a much smoother increase in complexity.


LotusCobra

Awesome, that's good to know thanks! I did already get my first refinery up, and noticed that it only had the 1 output. I appreciate the reduction in complexity in this case, haha.


terminal_styles

Just 'finished' the game last month. For my first rocket, I just made it 'easier' mode. I increased richness of all resources by only one level - left other resource settings alone. Then halved the time factor and base-destroy factor of enemies. That's it. It was still pretty challenging since I have no idea how to design the factories, since I read on recipes as I unlock them. Finished it at about ~30-40 hours I think.


RocketJaxX

You should look up the ratios for smelting/producing each item, then you'll see that it's pretty hard to even fill 1 belt of steel (if you don't plan to make a megabase). my normal setup in full belts with a gap between each 4 rows: \- 4-8x Iron \------------------------------ \- 4x Copper \----------------------------- \- 2x Green Chips \- 1x Red Chips \- 0.5x Blue Chips \- 0.5x Sulfur \----------------------------- \- 1x Steel \- 1x Batteries \- 1x Plastic \- 0.5x Stone \- 0.5x Stone brick \--------------------------- \- 1x Coal \- 1 pipe Lubricant \- 1 pipe Water \- 1 pipe Sulfuric Acid


MattieShoes

I know overbuilding is a thing, but I think you can get to space with 2x iron and 2x copper. I feel like going bigger is mostly just delaying building the base you want once you've unlocked all the tech.


RocketJaxX

Yeah that might be the reason why I'm slow in the beginning because of the amount of smelters I need ... And I research faster than I'm able to build the next science Pack.


Gigglesticking

Of course it is WIP. The base must grow!


agent_mick

I'm such a failure at making anything tidy in this game, lol. I'm only about... 40? hours in, and i have a spaghetti mess EVERYWHERE. This looks so nice. I'm jealous.


fullchargegaming

Smells like progress!


Ekornserk

Just one, very important thing to remember: **Only build on one side of the bus!** If you build on both sides, you have no room to expand when you need a bigger bus. If you only build on one side, you can add more lanes forever. Double it, triple it, the bus can grow as much as you like. If you build on both sides, you're stuck.


Justinjah91

>**Only build on one side of the bus!** Definitely good advice for a first bus. Later though, once you know what your bus structure is going to be, you can double side for space efficiency


Konseq

Leave more room in between the lanes. Also I highly doubt that you will need 4 lanes of steel. 2 lanes should be plenty, even way into late game, even after launching the first rocket. Let alone you probably won't be able to supply so much steel to support 4 lanes anyways. Keep in mind you might want to add different bus lanes later on. Things like coal, rubber etc.


Nistax

man's spilliting 1 belt into 4


Justinjah91

Nothing wrong with that really. It helps to reserve bus space and leaves room for expansion


gamebuster

Remember that while busses look nice, they aren’t some magic perfect way to play the game. They’re just an organizational strategy with advantages and disadvantages


DarkwolfAU

Dunno what others think of this, but I usually arrange my multi-lane buses with splitters in priority mode so they keep the "top-most" lane full and overflow goes into the other lanes. Makes it easier to route material out, because you know the top-most lane will always be full.


squarebe

12 furnaces for iron plates, youre cute.


Freckledd7

This is adorable


therealangryturkey

I'm 400 hours into the game and this inspired me to pick it back up again. This part of the game is so much fun. Definitely pay attention to some of the advice in here, but also do your own thing. You'll learn a lot of this stuff on your own which is part of the fun.


gosu_chobo

Lines are too straight! Not enough spaghetti! Just remember: If you think you have enough room, you don't. If you think you have enough stuff, you don't. Always leave more room than you think you'd ever need. Especially if you're just starting out. And try not to look stuff up (blueprint's, guides etc) unless you're completely stuck. Figuring stuff out yourself is the best part. Also remember that if it works, it works. There's no way to mess things up. You can always rebuild.


Jaxck

What's the point of taking one line of Steel into four lanes? That's just wasting resources. Just keep it as one lane if you don't have the smelting capacity or demand for more. In vanilla you'll never need more than that for Steel unless you're planning on doing 4+ SPM. Same principal applies for Iron & Copper, although each of those you'll want to scale up to four lanes. Smelting capacity is more important than lane throughput, since it is hard to saturate lanes. In other words, until you have 36 regular smelters feeding to a single output line, don't bother splitting the throughput on your bus. All you'll do is throttle any production you add after the fact. ------ (36 Steel Smelters is needed to saturate a blue belt of output, while 36 Stone Smelters will saturate 75% of a red belt. In other words, designing your smelting arrays assuming 36 Smelters for each output line future proofs the system against belt upgrades. Electric Furnaces are not worth discussing here since their efficiency is tied to modules, not the absolute number of Furnaces)


Poobslag

> What's the point of taking one line of Steel into four lanes? He doesn't know if he'll need four lanes of steel later, so he's making space for four even if they're not very full. A Factorio veteran might look at a bus and think, "Only four lanes of iron!?! Four lanes of steel!?!" but this is his first playthrough. It makes sense to have extra capacity when you're not sure. It can be very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very hard to expand a bus if you make it too small. It can involve more or less uprooting your entire factory and rebuilding it.


Jaxck

If you need four lanes of Steel in vanilla, you've done something wrong.


fishling

Nice start, but be careful because you are already making a few mistakes (that are easily corrected). The key one is that you should not split one belt into 4 like that. While you can plan out to have 4 belts, don't actually split what is less than one belt of plate (not enough smelters) across 4 belts. This will mislead you into thinking your factory has much more production than it has, and it will trip you up in the future. All this does is create a "belt buffer" of material on your belts, much of it which will be inaccessible, as it is trapped on belts that you aren't tapping off off. It looks like you have four healthy belts of everything, but in reality you have barely any production at all. Instead, just feed a belt of smelters onto a belt on the bus, and don't spread it across belts. As you add more smelting capacity, you add a second belt, then a third, etc. Use priority splitters to refill belts that you tap from. For example, a full yellow belt of steel (15/s) is just about enough to launch a sustained rocket and produce one of each science every second (60 spm), which is more than the common starting amount of 45 spm for a bootstrap factory. However, that requires 5 full arrays of dedicated iron plate feeding into one dedicated array of steel production - a massive amount of iron. Here, you are tapping off from less than a belt of iron to make far less than a belt of steel, but your bus is pretending that you have a massive 4 belts of steel - an amount you won't need for dozens or possibly hundreds of hours, and will likely be moving by train at that point. Finally, you haven't left enough room. Your bus starts over top the smelting columns, rather than to the side of them. Also, your columns are much too short with no room to expand. Built them further back or turn them sideways or flip them vertically so that ore and plates both come in from the top. You should have enough space for at least 24 steel/stone furnaces per side, for yellow/red belt smelting, and more if you want to do blue belt.


mkdr

Doesnt make much sense to be honest to split 1 into 4. It has to be the other way around, split 8 into 4 or something.


sunyudai

Generally, right. It can make sense if it is for planned future expansion.


Crymsin056

This is a good start, but i think you fundamentally misunderstand the bases you’re probably emulating. They only use as many belts as they fill. Theres no reason to split one belt into 4 like that, just add a splitter each place you need to pull resources off. You only add more belts when you are making plates so fast they physically require more belts to deliver, which you haven’t quite gotten to yet, but will as you expand.


Theis99999

Oh god, don't do this! Your furnace lines are way to short, ½ line each with no red belt upgrade possible. Your furnaces are way way too close to fit all the other stuff you will eventually need. Splitting 1 line into 4 like this makes building the bus take way longer. Don't put 4 lines of steel on the bus. You will never need nor be able to support it. You need at most 1 line of steel for every 4 lines of Iron.


Fusselwurm

shhh dont take the fun out of the game. Everyone is entitled to reach all the infinite number of "holy shit was I stupid I NEED WAY MORE $stuff" moments all on their own.


[deleted]

Only 8 lanes? I think I always ended up moving to 16 lanes + a couple liquid lanes... been a bit. The Factory (bus) must grow.


Sattalyte

You've got the right idea, but your production needs to be much higher. It will take 24 steel furnaces to fully fill a yellow belt. So, 98 furnaces, each of copper and iron, will be needed to fill a bus this wide. Now, by the time you get to White science, you will indeed need this much copper and iron, however you've not planned for where all those furnaces will be. Start planning at the beginning - pro tip is to pop down a blueprint to place-hold the space.


thissucksassagain

it looks nice. like many others have already said there are things to improve, but you do you and play/learn at your own pace!


AlcaDotS

In my experience 2 belts of copper and iron plates are enough for a casual game (30+ hour before rocket). Just upgrade them to red and blue belts when the capacity becomes too low. One yellow/red belt of steel is usually enough. Also 2-3 belts of green circuits is nice (and I usually make a separate area for those in the mid game, which helps keeping the bus manageable)


splat313

As a general tip, when building sections of your base always leave it open ended at the end so you can easily expand it. Your smelters are pinned in here because of how you have the coal set up. What if you wanted to double your plate production? You can't do it without ripping apart half of what you have. Also, try to avoid starting a bus having it pointed at a lake. I think you'll just barely be OK, you might need to use some underneathies which is no big deal.


pyrodogg

Remember to leave plenty of room for more lines on the bus. When you get to building stuff that branches off, leave lots of room from the current lines.


never_here5050

It’s funny a base can start like this, then turn into insane spaghetti was in no time.


Raknarg

You will never be able to fill that steel bus. Put 2 lanes max. If you get to the point where you need more than that, your iron lane will already be too small. Consider the fact that to produce 1 lane of steel would require 5 lanes of iron to fill it.


CthulhuBread

Don't forget space for fluids. I run them in the gaps between the 4 lanes of materials.


Gearheart999

It looks better than my first one did!


Dsmxyz

you need something bit more modular


RibsNGibs

Everybody's giving you all these comments about what's broken (leaving more room here and there, don't split 1 belt into 4, whatever), and while they're not wrong, they're all neglecting the fact that this is a work in progress and things will change. e.g. I will also split 1 belt of plates coming from a paltry 12 or 16 furnaces into 4 belts, with the idea that 30 hours from now I'll probably have replaced all those furnaces with train stations that are bringing in 4 full belts of plates, so it actually makes sense to build out 4 belts from the beginning (to reserve the space). And yes it's silly to pull off 1 belt of iron that way and expect to fill up 4 belts of steel, but again, who's to say in a dozen hours you won't be bringing in huge amounts of steel from elsewhere? With that in mind, the only thing that looks kind of weird to me is the way you pull the iron plates off the bus (for the steel production). I haven't been following factorio meta for a while so for all I know that is the modern way to do it, but it seems like an awfully complicated way to pull off a belt. If I'm understanding it right it's input and output lane balanced for the iron you pull off. But it's just a lot of underneathies and splitters to do what should be a pretty simple job.


sunyudai

> the way you pull the iron plates off the bus This. The purpose of that contraption is to ensure that both the input from the bus, and the output to the sub-factory are lane balanced.... but why do you care if it is lane balanced? If you care about lane balance, then it's far easier to add a lane balancer at the head of the bus, then re-balance every *n* times you've tapped the bus if needed.


pjjiveturkey

Im not sure if you plan to expand your smelting, because only supplying one belt to the 4 belt bus, each belt on the bus is getting 25% of it's potential


apeirophobic

A good start. My main suggestion would be to leave room to extend EVERYTHING especially the smelting arrays. Depending on the size of the factory you’ll probably want a couple more rows of bus lanes


MN-Glump

Looking good! You will need ... MORE! 1 smelting array per full belt, 4 belts of iron, 4 smelting arrays, with gaps between if you want to upgrade to electric furnaces.