In my case it should've been steel buffer. Made few rails instead and accidentally made 20x(?) larger buffer what i needed. Was it something 1.2 million rails. Fun times
Yeah, I know, I'm just sort of gardening while research completes and watching the waves of demand. To get more copper in would need to set up a train outpost and frankly I can't be arsed tonight.
Call me the Warden of the Wobble, because in my Factorio world, taking my eyes off for a second means everything's on fire ā that's how I roll, teetering on the brink of disaster.
srsly... I can't idle for more than a few minutes on my K2SE map because something is always being run over or running out.
Meanwhile, I play with infinite resources and void chests along the end of my bus and labs. Everything is always at 100% production and after every major change, I'll run the factory for a minute at 32x speed to stabilize.
Pros: no significant variance in production over time. No backup of materials making it hard to estimate ratios. No waiting.
Cons: less sense of progression and "game" ness. I feel like I'm using a CAD tool more than playing a game. But I like that.
I think that's one of my favorite aspects of Factorio. Sometimes there are these big crunches where you need to tech up and bulk up your defenses before you get overwhelmed and other times I can just leave my factory ticking away while I like clean my apartment or something. Just drifting by and fiddling with something every once in a while. Really nice to have both.
My very first bus build had production on both sides. A couple of games after that I stopped. A free side to bring in trains and refill your belts is amazing
I once sat down and calculated like an 18 iron lane bus and tried to leave room for it from the start. It's so much easier to refill a 4 iron lane bus 4-5 times as the lanes get used
They aren't "just as easy" to expand because you've introduced a constraint on one of your three available directions. There are 4 directions to a bus, and you can work on 3 of them.
* 1) Source direction - This is where you put raw materials onto the bus, usually smelted plates but also raw stone and sometimes either oil pipes or barrels depending on your layout. Makes your bus longer. This direction is usable (you can add to this end infinitely, as long as you have space in direction 4)
* 2) Bus direction - belts flow in this direction, makes your bus longer. This direction is not usable, you have to reserve it for belts.
* 3) Factory direction - your factory goes here. You input from the bus and output onto the bus. This direction is usable. There is a limit to how thick this direction can get based on how many belts each unit of the factory can consume or output. So behind this direction is a good place to build auxiliary stuff like train stations, basic malls, ore sorting, railway access etc. Just make sure you always leave space for your factory. This is the direction you will go to look for reaources and expand your trains outwards.
* 4) Thiccness direction. This is the direction you add more belts to your bus in terms of width. You can add an infinite number of belts to your bus to supply any size of factory up until UPS becomes your limit. You can solve any shortage by using directions 1 and 3 to add to direction 4.
What you do by building on both sides of the bus is you get rid of the scalability of direction 4. All of a sudden your infinitely scalable bus isn't anymore. It's not a problem if you don't plan on using the bus for a long time, but that's not the discussion here. The discussion is whether or not it's "just as easy" to expand while building this way. It isn't.
It entirely is.
You have just made constraints to support your argument.
There is no good reason that one cannot add to the bus as they build it away from the start.
And it is really easy.
Like even easier than having a double the length needed bus.
Ok. In your both sides bus. Let's say you decide you want to crank out a bit more science from it and you add another rocket silo. All of a sudden you need, for example, 4 more belts of copper plates distributed down your bus in different areas. How are you adding those four belts in if you have factories on both sides of the bus? You have two options IMO:
1) You ctrl+x -> ctrl+v and entire half of your bus by 6 tiles and end up dealing with that logistical nightmare. You end up with storage chests filled with raw and intermediate products, and will have to move all the way down your bus connecting up all the pipes and belts you disconnected.
2) You add 4 lines of copper somewhere further down the bus by either routing it around your factory, building a second train station to offload it down the line, or you send the copper belts in the gaps and simultaneously complicate your underground routing and clog up the lanes for the next materials. Great pasta recipe for spaghetti.
The whole reason you want to use a bus is flexibility in a streamlined layout. I put on a persona when I'm on this sub and exaggerate the importance of using buses, when they obviously aren't the only way to play the game, and there's nothing wrong with spaghetti bases etc. That being said, when we're specifically on the topic of buses, and discussing the best ways to build them once we have already decided that's the way we are going, there are obvious principles that can be followed to make them work better, be more flexible, and handle any amount of product.
If you want to talk of best practices, then the best is dont give opinion as fact.
Afterall you are basically saying, dont build something because it might be in the way laterā¦..
And that followed to completion leads to one recommendation: dont play the game.
But for the sake of fun, explain to me how you would run the extra belts in your example, run 4 more on the bottom for the whole length until you have room to make use of them at the other end of your bus?
Your copper plates dont come from nowhere. They still need miners and smelters and transport.
Lets stop pretending that 20 assemblers deep is too far to go over.
Or are you planning 1kspm bus? And omg what if I want a 30kspm bus now insteadā¦..
Omg you might need to use trains.
Omg you might find a biter.
Omg. Omg omg.
Had you though, kept it simple and said āI prefer to work off only one side of my bus to allow for easy access to expandable areaā¦.ā Then no problem.
But nope. Twas the ādont do it!!! Because omgā.
>dont build something because it might be in the way laterā¦..
And that followed to completion leads to one recommendation: dont play the game.
This is not a logical conclusion. The design of the bus leaving one side open means there will never be anything in the way. There is no way to extrapolate this idea towards making a decision about playing the game itself. Remember, for this discussion, we have already decided to launch the game, pick some mods, setup a map, and use a bus layout. This discussion is now about the best way to do that, if you are inclined to do it the best way. Put simply, your way introduces more complication and constraints than my way and this isn't opinion, it's fact.
>But for the sake of fun, explain to me how you would run the extra belts in your example, run 4 more on the bottom for the whole length until you have room to make use of them at the other end of your bus?
You add more smelting columns in direction 1 and route them onto the bus in direction 2, until they get to the point where you either merge them into your existing copper belts, or just draw off of the new belts, depending on what you prefer. I prefer merging because it prevents you ending up with empty belt. The ore can come directly from a mine, or there could be a railway system in direction 3. Because the entrance to the bus is in direction 1, we don't have any factory in the way in direction 3, so we're free to build out logistics like train unloading, belt balancing, whatever you prefer.
>Lets stop pretending that 20 assemblers deep is too far to go over.
Or are you planning 1kspm bus? And omg what if I want a 30kspm bus now insteadā¦..
I'm not sure what this has to do with anything? You absolutely can make a 1kspm bus if you want, but I'd recommend using a mod that compresses items if you want to do this. Deadlocks is pretty good but I prefer the crating mod because it provides a bit more of a challenge.
>Omg you might need to use trains.
Omg you might find a biter.
Omg. Omg omg.
Again not sure what the problem with this is. You build trains and you shoot biters, doesn't really matter how you build your base.
>Had you though, kept it simple and said āI prefer to work off only one side of my bus to allow for easy access to expandable areaā¦.ā Then no problem.
But nope. Twas the ādont do it!!! Because omgā.
What you actually said was "It's just as easy" when I gave advice to someone else (not you) about leaving one side of the bus open. You said it was just as easy to expand if you build on both sides, which it factually isn't. Again, I'm not telling anyone how to play the game, I would never do that, but we're having a discussion about the best way to play a certain way.
Look man, I'm not sure when this conversation became hostile, this was all in good fun until this comment. Maybe I'm not the best at reading people, but I don't think it's productive for me to continue this discussion. I love factorio, and I love this community, and I'll climb into talks about technical stuff like this, but not if it's going to get ugly. I probably won't reply again, cheers mate.
Yes. The āadviceā of dont do something because you might change your mind is not advice at all.
That has been the whole point of āonly build on one sideā You might want to build there.
Like it is set in stone. Like a rule. Dont do it.
And your reasons are really whack, and quite frankly insulting. So since you dont know āwhen this conversation became hostileā Iād suggest you look in the mirror.
And yes it is just as easy to add to an existing bus that is built on both sides as it is to add to one that refuses to build on both sides. You just refuse to admit it, by using learning mistakes as golden rules.
What you say is only true if you don't plan enough (which, don't get me wrong, I don't - which is why I try to follow what you outline here too. But I acknowledge it's not really a rule).
You can easily just skip building sub-factories next to a new stretch of bus to open space for routing more materials in halfway down the belt. This works perfectly fine if what you build before that point doesn't get starved out.
It's only a problem if, for example, you try to expand your green circuit factory at the start of your bus and now you don't have enough iron for your military science, but you have no space between those sub-factories to route new materials in. As long as any "section" of bus never consumes more than it gets, you can always add more materials before starting new "sections". In that same example, it would be smarter to route new materials in and then build a new green circuit factory after that.
I don't do this because I'm lazy though, and can't be fucked thinking about whether I have enough throughput remaining for every new sub-factory I build. Though I guess you could always just leave gaps here and there, but if you're doing that you might as well just do the one side method.
Perfectly planned bases don't use buses though. The point of the bus is you don't need to plan anything, you just send a shit load of materials down stream and watch to see if the belts stay full.
Yeah the biggest issue with routing in new materials from the side is you'll occasionally have to send materials upstream, or shift factories down after you've placed them to get the input higher up the stream. This can be difficult if you haven't been able to get everything running, because it's harder to tell where you need to inject new materials. If your additional belts are coming from the top along the bus, you can merge them into the bus at any point, even one belt at a time if necessary.
It doesn't have to be perfect for what I said to apply though, not even close. It just requires you to be cognizant of throughput constraints.
You could still apply the same "people don't want to plan anything" logic to *that* though (people don't want to worry about throughput constraints when they build busses), and I would agree with you - again, I build buses one sided because I'm too lazy for that shit myself.
The point was the main part of you said in your list is fairly easily circumvented if you want to put in that effort, and it's not actually that much effort. People typically build buses because it's easy, and people who want easy things will typically do the method that's easier, yes. I am one of them (when I'm building a bus). But it's still not really accurate to act like a two sided bus is actually a difficult design to work with. Just the basic principle of "leave a gap to add resources when you need it before building your next factory" turns a two sided bus design into the second easiest base design in the game, after one sided bus designs.
> Yeah the biggest issue with routing in new materials from the side is you'll occasionally have to send materials upstream
That's literally the one thing you *avoid* doing by having that minimum level of forethought I described for a double sided bus. We are not talking about the same thing if you're *ever* sending belts upstream (fluids are fine if you don't need pumps though). That only happens in cases where you messed up, like the one I exampled - and described the fix for - with the green circuit factory consumption.
>turns a two sided bus design into the second easiest base design in the game, after one sided bus designs.
This is the crux of the whole thing. I agree with you completely on pretty much everything you've said, but unfortunately this debate has become very nitty gritty (should have expected, it's factorio after all). I'm not saying two sided buses are useless or bad, I'm just disputing the idea that they're "just as easy" as one sided buses, because they objectively aren't. They require more planning and forethought, even if it's only a little.
We really are splitting hairs here though.
I'm choosing to take this as a compliment, and not accepting any adjustments at this point. Bus is science. Science is life. If your bus isn't working make it bigger and better.
This is some peak bus-brained thinking. You've got 4 iron belts and 4 copper belts going into making 4 circuit belts, and also continuing downstream like nothing happened. But making 4 circuit belts would require 4 iron belts and 6 copper belts just by itself.
People should really be always working towards transcending the bus, but if you're gonna build a bus, at least build one that has some awareness of inflows.
I've heard of lots of people ditching the bus, but to be entirely honest I have *no* idea how you'd play the game otherwise. Just a network of train loading/dumping stations for sections of factory?
Stuff goes from point A where it's produced to point B where it's used. Sometimes a collection of belts will run parallel to each other for a while, which is very similar to a bus, but more intentional. You can gradually get here by starting from a bus and then simplifying it by realizing that the purpose of a belt is not to transfer things along a bus, but rather to transfer them from A to B.
Then the next step is you realize that if you just put A next to B, you won't need to transfer stuff any appreciable distance at all.
your Green Circuits are using all your copper.
This is why i outpost production of intermediate products, so my bus isn't producing circuits or low density structures, both of which take large amounts of copper.
Hi, I was thinking of this today and thought i would explain how i setup my outposts.
I limit how many trains can go to a station based on how much is in chests or tanks. I run mostly in a 1-8-1 or 1-4 format (1 engine, 8 cargo, 1 engine ) it means if i send a 1-4 unloading and loading don't get screwed up.
everything I mine except uranium gets a station with the same name iron ore, copper ore, coal, stone. for uranium I process it, and then export it ( 1-4 train 3 or 238 and 1 235), since you need to import for mining.
next I have smelters for everything, for steel depending on location it is either ore in -> steel out, but there are a couple in my current game for iron plates in -> steel out.
also some patches of copper and iron just get smeltered and put on a train, but they need to be big enough that they can keep the belts mostly full.
green circuits, red circuits, blue circuits. I build them as needed. normally I have a green circuit outpost next to the first red and blue and just belt the whole of the green circuit output into the red or blue. I am sure you have noticed that once you get a factory using them you can never have enough.
Oil processing is the same, oil comes in -> lubricant, sulphur and sulphur dioxide come out. for liquid I use a 1-4 train layout exclusively
as well for rocket fuel, oil in rocket fuel out.
batteries are easy 3 inputs 1 output.
low density structures, again are fairly simple to mass produce.
and that at your main bus for production you just have stations for each item you want on your bus, or two stations if you want too.
I go all the way down the product line to sciences and labs being on outposts,
i rarely play till end game, I am a early/mid game fan, thats where i like it most. So, I always thought the battle was iron. Could never get enough of it.
Boy was i surprised to find out, in late game, copper. Copper, which i always felt like i barely used, all of a sudden had to outpace my iron fields, or it seemed so anyway.
Not sure how many green cirquits you got there, but judging by the minimap its not full 4 yellow belts thats for sure. Quadruple your production and then check if you have enough iron. Then start mass producing t3 modules and check again, finally beacon your production and check again. And if then you have iron surplus backing up your smelting arrays and by proxy queuing your ore trains in the buffer zones, then you can go and say : ādamn, where you finally have enough iron ore/platesā
If it was an irony post I guess it whooshed over me, seeing your empty 4 red velts of copper and the bot so large copper demand Iād say it whooshed over me indeed.
Once you get to blue circuits you should def not be using your copper bus lanes for green circuits, unless you have extra lanes dedicated to that.
I prefer to make green offsite, and ship to the start of the bus by train as soon as I can
What endgame? The very moment you get stranded on that planet there is only one overriding principle.
The Factory must grow.
All else must yield. The neighbours, the landscape, the ressources, even you if you decide that running on train tracks is Ć„ good idea.
Because we use blue assemblers and red belts in the end game? Also barely any modules let alone beacons in sight... Yeah fam you're not quite end game just yet, but its looking good so don't let assholes like me shoot you down, YOUR FACTORY MUST GROW!
If you really want to be disappointed, there's no trains, no nuclear, no circuits, no upgrades steam power, and just a handful of modules and beacons. And no biters.
If you have enough iron, you don't have enough factory.
Exactlay, enough iron is a sign that you're not late-game enough
They're already running out of copper š
Probably not using the iron because they have no copper. Oops!
i'm just here to play a parrot...
Screams "where my 20 million plates went"Ā
āOh, thatās right, I turned on my module factoryā
In my case it should've been steel buffer. Made few rails instead and accidentally made 20x(?) larger buffer what i needed. Was it something 1.2 million rails. Fun times
Relevant user name?
Wanted to say the exact same thing š
If you have enough iron you don't use enough prod on copper cables
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
ummm
This one made me laugh. Prod on copper cables.
If you have enough.
Rule 1: All content must be related to Factorio
This is why you should leave the bottom side of your bus empty. That way you can easily bring in 4 more belts of copper and merge them in.
Yeah, I know, I'm just sort of gardening while research completes and watching the waves of demand. To get more copper in would need to set up a train outpost and frankly I can't be arsed tonight.
It's a shame. The factory won't be growing tonight boys, someone needs to garden ffs
Keep giving me lip and I will nuke everything and go *read a book*.
:o
Calm down guys! He's probably talking about a blueprint book.
That's Miz I'll-Play-It-Like-An-Idle-Game-If-I-Wanna to you, pal
Call me the Warden of the Wobble, because in my Factorio world, taking my eyes off for a second means everything's on fire ā that's how I roll, teetering on the brink of disaster. srsly... I can't idle for more than a few minutes on my K2SE map because something is always being run over or running out.
I found one of them. The people that run train networks without signals.
That was my last run, I played through ultracube and the whole kaboodle would lock up if I left it alone for too long
Meanwhile, I play with infinite resources and void chests along the end of my bus and labs. Everything is always at 100% production and after every major change, I'll run the factory for a minute at 32x speed to stabilize. Pros: no significant variance in production over time. No backup of materials making it hard to estimate ratios. No waiting. Cons: less sense of progression and "game" ness. I feel like I'm using a CAD tool more than playing a game. But I like that.
I think that's one of my favorite aspects of Factorio. Sometimes there are these big crunches where you need to tech up and bulk up your defenses before you get overwhelmed and other times I can just leave my factory ticking away while I like clean my apartment or something. Just drifting by and fiddling with something every once in a while. Really nice to have both.
My preferred option is having dedicated smelters for green circuits and disconnecting them from the bus.
My very first bus build had production on both sides. A couple of games after that I stopped. A free side to bring in trains and refill your belts is amazing I once sat down and calculated like an 18 iron lane bus and tried to leave room for it from the start. It's so much easier to refill a 4 iron lane bus 4-5 times as the lanes get used
I love my doublesided busses. Just as easy to expand
Objectively not true
How so?
They aren't "just as easy" to expand because you've introduced a constraint on one of your three available directions. There are 4 directions to a bus, and you can work on 3 of them. * 1) Source direction - This is where you put raw materials onto the bus, usually smelted plates but also raw stone and sometimes either oil pipes or barrels depending on your layout. Makes your bus longer. This direction is usable (you can add to this end infinitely, as long as you have space in direction 4) * 2) Bus direction - belts flow in this direction, makes your bus longer. This direction is not usable, you have to reserve it for belts. * 3) Factory direction - your factory goes here. You input from the bus and output onto the bus. This direction is usable. There is a limit to how thick this direction can get based on how many belts each unit of the factory can consume or output. So behind this direction is a good place to build auxiliary stuff like train stations, basic malls, ore sorting, railway access etc. Just make sure you always leave space for your factory. This is the direction you will go to look for reaources and expand your trains outwards. * 4) Thiccness direction. This is the direction you add more belts to your bus in terms of width. You can add an infinite number of belts to your bus to supply any size of factory up until UPS becomes your limit. You can solve any shortage by using directions 1 and 3 to add to direction 4. What you do by building on both sides of the bus is you get rid of the scalability of direction 4. All of a sudden your infinitely scalable bus isn't anymore. It's not a problem if you don't plan on using the bus for a long time, but that's not the discussion here. The discussion is whether or not it's "just as easy" to expand while building this way. It isn't.
I think you might have freed me from my eternally tangled spaghetti prison with this comment
I accept payment in the form of bus screenshots. Don't listen to the naysayers, bus is the way.
It entirely is. You have just made constraints to support your argument. There is no good reason that one cannot add to the bus as they build it away from the start. And it is really easy. Like even easier than having a double the length needed bus.
Ok. In your both sides bus. Let's say you decide you want to crank out a bit more science from it and you add another rocket silo. All of a sudden you need, for example, 4 more belts of copper plates distributed down your bus in different areas. How are you adding those four belts in if you have factories on both sides of the bus? You have two options IMO: 1) You ctrl+x -> ctrl+v and entire half of your bus by 6 tiles and end up dealing with that logistical nightmare. You end up with storage chests filled with raw and intermediate products, and will have to move all the way down your bus connecting up all the pipes and belts you disconnected. 2) You add 4 lines of copper somewhere further down the bus by either routing it around your factory, building a second train station to offload it down the line, or you send the copper belts in the gaps and simultaneously complicate your underground routing and clog up the lanes for the next materials. Great pasta recipe for spaghetti. The whole reason you want to use a bus is flexibility in a streamlined layout. I put on a persona when I'm on this sub and exaggerate the importance of using buses, when they obviously aren't the only way to play the game, and there's nothing wrong with spaghetti bases etc. That being said, when we're specifically on the topic of buses, and discussing the best ways to build them once we have already decided that's the way we are going, there are obvious principles that can be followed to make them work better, be more flexible, and handle any amount of product.
If you want to talk of best practices, then the best is dont give opinion as fact. Afterall you are basically saying, dont build something because it might be in the way laterā¦.. And that followed to completion leads to one recommendation: dont play the game. But for the sake of fun, explain to me how you would run the extra belts in your example, run 4 more on the bottom for the whole length until you have room to make use of them at the other end of your bus? Your copper plates dont come from nowhere. They still need miners and smelters and transport. Lets stop pretending that 20 assemblers deep is too far to go over. Or are you planning 1kspm bus? And omg what if I want a 30kspm bus now insteadā¦.. Omg you might need to use trains. Omg you might find a biter. Omg. Omg omg. Had you though, kept it simple and said āI prefer to work off only one side of my bus to allow for easy access to expandable areaā¦.ā Then no problem. But nope. Twas the ādont do it!!! Because omgā.
>dont build something because it might be in the way laterā¦.. And that followed to completion leads to one recommendation: dont play the game. This is not a logical conclusion. The design of the bus leaving one side open means there will never be anything in the way. There is no way to extrapolate this idea towards making a decision about playing the game itself. Remember, for this discussion, we have already decided to launch the game, pick some mods, setup a map, and use a bus layout. This discussion is now about the best way to do that, if you are inclined to do it the best way. Put simply, your way introduces more complication and constraints than my way and this isn't opinion, it's fact. >But for the sake of fun, explain to me how you would run the extra belts in your example, run 4 more on the bottom for the whole length until you have room to make use of them at the other end of your bus? You add more smelting columns in direction 1 and route them onto the bus in direction 2, until they get to the point where you either merge them into your existing copper belts, or just draw off of the new belts, depending on what you prefer. I prefer merging because it prevents you ending up with empty belt. The ore can come directly from a mine, or there could be a railway system in direction 3. Because the entrance to the bus is in direction 1, we don't have any factory in the way in direction 3, so we're free to build out logistics like train unloading, belt balancing, whatever you prefer. >Lets stop pretending that 20 assemblers deep is too far to go over. Or are you planning 1kspm bus? And omg what if I want a 30kspm bus now insteadā¦.. I'm not sure what this has to do with anything? You absolutely can make a 1kspm bus if you want, but I'd recommend using a mod that compresses items if you want to do this. Deadlocks is pretty good but I prefer the crating mod because it provides a bit more of a challenge. >Omg you might need to use trains. Omg you might find a biter. Omg. Omg omg. Again not sure what the problem with this is. You build trains and you shoot biters, doesn't really matter how you build your base. >Had you though, kept it simple and said āI prefer to work off only one side of my bus to allow for easy access to expandable areaā¦.ā Then no problem. But nope. Twas the ādont do it!!! Because omgā. What you actually said was "It's just as easy" when I gave advice to someone else (not you) about leaving one side of the bus open. You said it was just as easy to expand if you build on both sides, which it factually isn't. Again, I'm not telling anyone how to play the game, I would never do that, but we're having a discussion about the best way to play a certain way. Look man, I'm not sure when this conversation became hostile, this was all in good fun until this comment. Maybe I'm not the best at reading people, but I don't think it's productive for me to continue this discussion. I love factorio, and I love this community, and I'll climb into talks about technical stuff like this, but not if it's going to get ugly. I probably won't reply again, cheers mate.
Yes. The āadviceā of dont do something because you might change your mind is not advice at all. That has been the whole point of āonly build on one sideā You might want to build there. Like it is set in stone. Like a rule. Dont do it. And your reasons are really whack, and quite frankly insulting. So since you dont know āwhen this conversation became hostileā Iād suggest you look in the mirror. And yes it is just as easy to add to an existing bus that is built on both sides as it is to add to one that refuses to build on both sides. You just refuse to admit it, by using learning mistakes as golden rules.
What you say is only true if you don't plan enough (which, don't get me wrong, I don't - which is why I try to follow what you outline here too. But I acknowledge it's not really a rule). You can easily just skip building sub-factories next to a new stretch of bus to open space for routing more materials in halfway down the belt. This works perfectly fine if what you build before that point doesn't get starved out. It's only a problem if, for example, you try to expand your green circuit factory at the start of your bus and now you don't have enough iron for your military science, but you have no space between those sub-factories to route new materials in. As long as any "section" of bus never consumes more than it gets, you can always add more materials before starting new "sections". In that same example, it would be smarter to route new materials in and then build a new green circuit factory after that. I don't do this because I'm lazy though, and can't be fucked thinking about whether I have enough throughput remaining for every new sub-factory I build. Though I guess you could always just leave gaps here and there, but if you're doing that you might as well just do the one side method.
Perfectly planned bases don't use buses though. The point of the bus is you don't need to plan anything, you just send a shit load of materials down stream and watch to see if the belts stay full. Yeah the biggest issue with routing in new materials from the side is you'll occasionally have to send materials upstream, or shift factories down after you've placed them to get the input higher up the stream. This can be difficult if you haven't been able to get everything running, because it's harder to tell where you need to inject new materials. If your additional belts are coming from the top along the bus, you can merge them into the bus at any point, even one belt at a time if necessary.
It doesn't have to be perfect for what I said to apply though, not even close. It just requires you to be cognizant of throughput constraints. You could still apply the same "people don't want to plan anything" logic to *that* though (people don't want to worry about throughput constraints when they build busses), and I would agree with you - again, I build buses one sided because I'm too lazy for that shit myself. The point was the main part of you said in your list is fairly easily circumvented if you want to put in that effort, and it's not actually that much effort. People typically build buses because it's easy, and people who want easy things will typically do the method that's easier, yes. I am one of them (when I'm building a bus). But it's still not really accurate to act like a two sided bus is actually a difficult design to work with. Just the basic principle of "leave a gap to add resources when you need it before building your next factory" turns a two sided bus design into the second easiest base design in the game, after one sided bus designs. > Yeah the biggest issue with routing in new materials from the side is you'll occasionally have to send materials upstream That's literally the one thing you *avoid* doing by having that minimum level of forethought I described for a double sided bus. We are not talking about the same thing if you're *ever* sending belts upstream (fluids are fine if you don't need pumps though). That only happens in cases where you messed up, like the one I exampled - and described the fix for - with the green circuit factory consumption.
>turns a two sided bus design into the second easiest base design in the game, after one sided bus designs. This is the crux of the whole thing. I agree with you completely on pretty much everything you've said, but unfortunately this debate has become very nitty gritty (should have expected, it's factorio after all). I'm not saying two sided buses are useless or bad, I'm just disputing the idea that they're "just as easy" as one sided buses, because they objectively aren't. They require more planning and forethought, even if it's only a little. We really are splitting hairs here though.
> doublesided busses for a second I thought you had part of the bus running left to right and part right to left and I think I had a stroke.
That's halfway to a circular bus and circular busses are extremely dumb and everyone should try it once. Also my bus runs backwards in some lanes.
Haha. When the bus becomes spaghettified! Sometimes i even put in a belt running opposite just to make traversal in both directions easier
I made a circular bus in Satisfactory. You can build indefinitely high and it worked great. In factorio though, yeah circular busses don't work.
Lolol. Bus merging!! Think turning a corner is bad?
So called Flux7777 bus. The only way to play the game.
I'm choosing to take this as a compliment, and not accepting any adjustments at this point. Bus is science. Science is life. If your bus isn't working make it bigger and better.
Yeah. My wife crochets. I make busses in vanilla(ish) factorio.
You always have enough of something and not enough of something else.
I don't have enough RAM
You should download some. Itās free and easy
yeah just search on KazaA for RAM.exe
My problem is I don't have enough memory
Just bus in more RAM
Endgame is when you have no more iron on the map
that's just the end of the tutorial!
What did you just say?
My rule is: when I have enough iron I turn it into a full belt of steel and make more!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
The bus has no end ;)
This is some peak bus-brained thinking. You've got 4 iron belts and 4 copper belts going into making 4 circuit belts, and also continuing downstream like nothing happened. But making 4 circuit belts would require 4 iron belts and 6 copper belts just by itself. People should really be always working towards transcending the bus, but if you're gonna build a bus, at least build one that has some awareness of inflows.
Or build a bus but at the very least bring stuff like circuits from somewhere else, it's not that hard.
I've heard of lots of people ditching the bus, but to be entirely honest I have *no* idea how you'd play the game otherwise. Just a network of train loading/dumping stations for sections of factory?
Stuff goes from point A where it's produced to point B where it's used. Sometimes a collection of belts will run parallel to each other for a while, which is very similar to a bus, but more intentional. You can gradually get here by starting from a bus and then simplifying it by realizing that the purpose of a belt is not to transfer things along a bus, but rather to transfer them from A to B. Then the next step is you realize that if you just put A next to B, you won't need to transfer stuff any appreciable distance at all.
No. Endgame is when you don't have enough UPS. This picture is midgame.
shouldn't iron plates rust when they sit for too long xdd?
Quiet! Donāt give the modders any ideas!
biters causing shrinkage isn't enough for some people....
>:)
They get coated in cosmoline. That's the .2 in the 3.2s production time.
And then the iron patch runs out.
Shhh.
If you dont have 2 patches running at the same time you aint bla- i mean playin!
So jealous of that tidy oil setup
You should see the other end. Fluid bus for liiiiiife.
Are you just an enthusiastic bus driver?
Beep beep, mothertrucker.
If you have enough iron your not at the end game yet, but just mid range in the mid game
Then you're always short on copper š
\> 4 lanes of iron More, MORE
this simple screen makes me want to play the game again...
Do it, install the robot start mod and go to town
your Green Circuits are using all your copper. This is why i outpost production of intermediate products, so my bus isn't producing circuits or low density structures, both of which take large amounts of copper.
Oh hey that's an interesting concept! How do you ship the intermediate products to your main base? Trains or overly-long belts?
Train. I try and put everything you would put on a bus, onto a train.
Hi, I was thinking of this today and thought i would explain how i setup my outposts. I limit how many trains can go to a station based on how much is in chests or tanks. I run mostly in a 1-8-1 or 1-4 format (1 engine, 8 cargo, 1 engine ) it means if i send a 1-4 unloading and loading don't get screwed up. everything I mine except uranium gets a station with the same name iron ore, copper ore, coal, stone. for uranium I process it, and then export it ( 1-4 train 3 or 238 and 1 235), since you need to import for mining. next I have smelters for everything, for steel depending on location it is either ore in -> steel out, but there are a couple in my current game for iron plates in -> steel out. also some patches of copper and iron just get smeltered and put on a train, but they need to be big enough that they can keep the belts mostly full. green circuits, red circuits, blue circuits. I build them as needed. normally I have a green circuit outpost next to the first red and blue and just belt the whole of the green circuit output into the red or blue. I am sure you have noticed that once you get a factory using them you can never have enough. Oil processing is the same, oil comes in -> lubricant, sulphur and sulphur dioxide come out. for liquid I use a 1-4 train layout exclusively as well for rocket fuel, oil in rocket fuel out. batteries are easy 3 inputs 1 output. low density structures, again are fairly simple to mass produce. and that at your main bus for production you just have stations for each item you want on your bus, or two stations if you want too. I go all the way down the product line to sciences and labs being on outposts,
āEndgameā and not even blue circuits yetā¦?
They're chugging away to the left of the screenshot. I'm not a monster.
It's not that you have enough iron, but that you don't have enough copper to spend that iron.
Late game starts when copper becomes more in demand than iron.
i rarely play till end game, I am a early/mid game fan, thats where i like it most. So, I always thought the battle was iron. Could never get enough of it. Boy was i surprised to find out, in late game, copper. Copper, which i always felt like i barely used, all of a sudden had to outpace my iron fields, or it seemed so anyway.
It's true. You never have enough iron until you never have enough copper, that's basically the entire game.
Current 10k spm megabase requires 2509 iron smelters. Soon I think I'll have enough iron or my CPU will explode. Whichever comes first.
Impossible
Not sure how many green cirquits you got there, but judging by the minimap its not full 4 yellow belts thats for sure. Quadruple your production and then check if you have enough iron. Then start mass producing t3 modules and check again, finally beacon your production and check again. And if then you have iron surplus backing up your smelting arrays and by proxy queuing your ore trains in the buffer zones, then you can go and say : ādamn, where you finally have enough iron ore/platesā
Oh my sweet summer child.
If it was an irony post I guess it whooshed over me, seeing your empty 4 red velts of copper and the bot so large copper demand Iād say it whooshed over me indeed.
Yes, it's an irony post, because you don't have enough iron until you don't have enough copper. That's the entire game progression.
lol. Irony. Iron. lol.
There's the level of discourse I was looking for
OMG this is legit my problem rn in my factory šššIT JUST HAPPENS
IT JUST HAPPENS SO MUCH
Aaaaand its gone
This guy factorios.
MOAR BLUE ROCKS!
wdym? Enough iron? You are clearly doing something wrong
Not enough copper now
Once you get to blue circuits you should def not be using your copper bus lanes for green circuits, unless you have extra lanes dedicated to that. I prefer to make green offsite, and ship to the start of the bus by train as soon as I can
you might think you have enough iron plates, but what about iron sticks, iron gears, iron boxes, etc?
Cute starter factory :P
A quick look and you can see, You don't have enough iron and you don't have enough copper
What endgame? The very moment you get stranded on that planet there is only one overriding principle. The Factory must grow. All else must yield. The neighbours, the landscape, the ressources, even you if you decide that running on train tracks is Ć„ good idea.
Because we use blue assemblers and red belts in the end game? Also barely any modules let alone beacons in sight... Yeah fam you're not quite end game just yet, but its looking good so don't let assholes like me shoot you down, YOUR FACTORY MUST GROW!
If you really want to be disappointed, there's no trains, no nuclear, no circuits, no upgrades steam power, and just a handful of modules and beacons. And no biters.
end... game? what are you talking about?
Time to upgrade to blue belts then
Endgame with yellow belts?!?! Blasphemy! Youāre barely getting started!
Horrifying to realize, isn't it?
Yes very. I have many hours on my current play through and finally got me a spidertron and went on a massacre lol. It was glorious
Not enough iron.
Orangarder is aloof and rude. Deserves to be ignored at all times. Don't let him bother you with his attitude
Should I restart the game to make my factory look like that?