As a new player that just got the game this was the most helpful video i've seen so far. Most of the other tutorials are assuming people already know some of this basic stuff. Thanks man.
Excellent consise tutorial, you hit the main points of 4 wide groups, what to bus, and splitting. A quick followup mention is to add more parallel lanes for fluid feedstocks using UNDERGROUND pipe for suifuric acid and lubricant, and perhaps water and petroleum gas.
Thanks, good to hear I covered most the important points! Great point about the liquids as well, I should have mentioned that in the video. Having your liquids run along the bus is really nice and helps keep things cleaner too.
I made a factory where the main production core has a circular bus system, it feeds itself after making a full round, so when something uses more stuff, it has a buffer before shutting down
Yeah, I was exactly the same way for a very long time actually. But then realized how important it is to leave room for future expansion, and knowing what works well to make on-site and what doesn't. Just take some practice and such. :)
I ended up with that problem my first playthrough, because I didn't know yet what I would be able to make in the future. I had no idea that I would need oil to make plastics, and put them together with my circuits which I only used much earlier on in my base. I tried to do the 'main bus' thing, but since I didn't know what I would end up with later I still ended up with a spaghetti base, just one with single lines of copper, iron, and steel running down the middle. And I should note that I'm not done with my first play-through yet. Right now I'm having in issue with generating enough plates. I ended up ending my iron lane half way through my base and start another one from a different mine later on. Even now though, my first line is having trouble maintaining all the assemblers. My whole line suddenly empties out past the gears for my belts, every time I go over to fetch some more. Its getting annoying having half my factory shut down every time I need to produce a new resource I had no idea was even in the game before.
Dude, I make my entire bus underground belts. It's amazingly clean and organized, and super simple to split from. Yes, the total cost of iron can be a little crazy for an initial investment, but once you have it, it gives you much more space and flexibility
I watched a few Xterm and KoS videos before I got out of the campaign, so I’d like to think my first freeplay base isn’t as spaghetti as my campaign attempts were. But in reality, I’ve mangled my “bus” so much due to trying to cram way too much stuff laterally against it than it has any right. I think 80% of my iron has gone toward undergrounds at this point.
Hmm, I started this video, then thought to myself that first I should play the game and figure stuff out, before I try effecient stuff. So I'll come back latwr
I only have 50 hours on Factorio and never used a main bus. after doing so i started watching tutorials on different techniques. after 4 hours i think ive improved double than any improvement over the last 50 hours. You can see the older parts of my factory where are all messy and the new parts are super organised
That's great to hear! It's always a great feeling to know you are improving and look back in parts of your factory and see the points where that happened. :)
I didn’t even leave gaps between different resources it’s a nightmare of underground belts now it’s a block of 32 belts now and growing with different resources
Biggest problem/weakness with the main buss imo. is expandability. It is very hard to change a 2 lane main buss to say a 4 lane main buss. Bot factories in contrast are a lot easier to expand on. A hybrid base might be and look the best, allowing you to place the passive providers close to what needs the resource.
Thanks for explaining. A friend brought me into this game and he said "better do a mainbus" and I just wanted some more info on that, so again, thanks.
I see there are a lot of parts of your production that take ingredients from a chest, such as railway production. is that recommended? currently i also have to transport coal, stone, and stone bricks everywhere, as i can't make them on-site
Really nice tutorial. I don't know if you know a forum member called "dee-" but he has a main bus module based "plug-n-play" system that works really well and is really fun to play around with. his system uses almost entirely underground belts and you split off above them. it's really interesting I used that on my first base to learn the ropes... until now where I'm transitoning to all robots. I'm really looking forward to seeing your video on the robot based systems.
Thank you. :) I actually don't know of them, but that concept does sound quite interesting! I might have to look at that. Would you happen to have a link to somewhere he posted it? Glad to hear it! I'm quite looking forward to doing it. I love using bot based systems.
Null8fuenf10 has posted it above :) It's a really well thought out concept, and he has it setup so that each module you have for parts needs to be a maximum of 13 blocks high, but that can be ignored a little by spacing the modules.
Lately I've been building the main bus without spaces between groups of belts. While it takes a bit more underground pieces early on, later (with a longer underground belt mod) I can run branches underneath the whole bus. It actually looks much neater this way, just more time-consuming to branch off in the early game. But for me the aesthetics are more important. Best advice I've come across for keeping the bus connections neat (i.e. no spaghetti) is to only build production/science off one side of the bus. On the other side, place smelting, oil, and/or solar. I do put two belts of gears on the bus (and upgrade them to red belt asap). It just simplifies so many things: Science ingredients, inserters, assemblers, belts, and many of the one-assembler items like miners, pumpjacks, chem plants, etc.
Nice! Definitely good advice too about only building production on one side and then leave the other side empty aside from smelting and such. Does help a lot with the spaghetti bit. And yeah, gears on the bus do help simply other builds a ton as long as you can keep up with the gear demand via the bus system. I would agree as well that aesthetics are pretty important, but that varies more from player to player.
I have descent experience building main bus designs and I have a different idea of how to do them. I usually leave 4 spaces between each lane, so 4 spaces of resources followed by 4 spaces of empty space. The reason I build 4 spaces between them instead of 2 is because I usually put roboports in that area. 4 spaces is also usefull if you want to send resources on one side of the belt. That is not possible to do so if there is only 2 spaces, you will need to do that above or below the main buss. a third reason to leave 4 spaces instead of 2 is because there is enough space to put pipes. I have tried using both 4 spaces and 2 spaces and I much prefer the extra room. Another thing that I do differently is that I have 4 lanes of green circuits instead of 2. In the main bus design you showed you had 2 lanes of steel as well as 2 lanes of circuits. In my opinion that is very imbalanced since you use way more circuits than steel. 2 lanes of circuits will be enough for most people though but it does not hurt to add 2 more lanes. But of course there are many ways of doing a main bus, but having 4 lanes of iron, 4 lanes of copper, 4 lanes of circuits, 2 lanes of steel, 2 lanes of plastic, 1 lane of red, circuits and 1 lane of batterys works fine for me.
for the wire/gear belt thing, basically, 2 belts of copper wire would transport the same amount as 1 belt of copper plates and 1 belt of gears would equal 2 belts of iron plates. Since you would want as few belts as possible, it would be best to use plates for the wire and pre-make the gears.
I also like to throw gears into the basic setup. They can be produced easily, but they produce so fast, that having a factory for each thing you build is kinda overkill. A hand full of gear-factories can easily populate a belt and piping it in is a lot easier than another level of pre-processing.
Aliens and cliffs always make me build chaotic. One thing i learned is... do not be scared to demolish and rebuild. If you are playing with wonky set ups and alien hordes... early on you build what ever fast enough until you can defend yourself and then expand from there.
Ehrm, lol. I output everything on my main bus (and use undergrounds on the bus itself, rather than the crossing belts, cuz I think it looks better). Dunno' how efficient this is, but I find it lets me keep things more organized without having to worry about planning out layouts as much.
In xander's mod its really hard to pull off a main bus since the resources are tight and there are many things that need to go all over the place, but it pays off to have an organised factory, as always.
I think it might be a good idea to put certain liquids along a bus, too, like petroleum gas, lubricant, and maybe water. Oh, I also like to bus coal, though I didn't setup my last bus to do that so it got a bit messy adding in coal.
Why do you put the first splitter before the branch when branching of the bus? I only balance the bus belts after branching off from the side lane. If your inputs are balanced, you really don't need a full belt balancer to get a balanced output after a split off. For 2 belts, you only need 1 splitter after. For 4 belts, you only need to mix the lane from which you branched off with the 3 others just once to get a balanced output (i mix 1&2, then 2&3, underground 2&3 and mix 1&4)
It probably isn't necessary to be honest. I put the first splitter before the branch to balance it between both lines before it even splits. That way (theoretically) an even amount from both lines should be sent off to the branch.
Besides iron, copper, steel and green circuits, I like cogs, red circuits, plastic, stone, coal and stone on my bus. I also run pipes of lube and sulfuric acid parallel to the bus.
To be honest, this bus looks to me like a mixture of a proper bus and a spaghetti base. You do have a bus (a very short one) but after eachs split-off its just spaghetti. One thing I also like to do is to build my factories on just one side of the bus so I can always add more lanes to the other. Also, I leave 4 tiles between every 4 lanes for roboports. And I build my factories in a tileable pattern so they can always be extended easily. All of this requires more thought on where to place your bus because you actually need to have the space to expand into.
Is it a good idea to multiplex some lines of the bus ? For example instead of 1 line copper and 1 line iron plates, I make a single fast line with both, either side by side or mixed using splitters.
Im trying to learn how to efficiently split stuff out of a bus that has 2 belts with different stuff running alongside each other. Like in your example, you have batteries and plastic bars adjacent. How do you cleanly get plastic bars to the right side of the bus?
You can just underground part of the battery belt where you want to split off plastic and then there will be room to put the splitter and run a line off to the side.
Thanks! And do you mean like setups for making modules, or using modules? I plan to do one for using modules and how to calculate all that out, and actually I could do one on module builds for actually making the modules.
I always make an alpha base from which i Plan the real factory. Meaning that i skip the advancing and then rebuilding. I do kinda rush for robots and trains automising only green and red science. :) P.s. alpha base is always sphagetti cause its easier for the Start :P
Yeah, I noticed they're very tricky to set up, and break if one lane on your belt empties out (unless you're using hacked splitters which omg lag no). Thanks for the link, those are some nifty designs :)
It's a bit hard to put into written words, but in general I don't like them because they just seem unnecessary and possibly cause some issues. You can achieve the same thing or something very similar by just using normal splitters and belt mechanics. And, at least in my opinion, as with many things in the game, I feel like if you build things balanced and "properly" to begin with, you shouldn't really need to use them. I know Zuri and the other guys in the Earth campaign don't like them either, and may have different or better reasons, but I won't speak for them on that.
Yeah, I suck at keeping my lanes balanced. I really should learn to do it properly, I suppose. I used priority splitters in my last campaign, but I wasn't a huge fan, especially when I found out I'd messed up the signalling on my blueprint and had to go down my whole bus and change them all. Thank god for copy paste but still, not an easy task. Thanks for the replies :)
I honestly don't know how anyone can stand to build a factory that doesn't organise with something like this. A messy spaghetti that grows as required seems impossible to make. I usually go for a combination between rails and main bus, where I have a sub-factory with a main bus containing all the resources to make a type of item, like circuits. Which is supplied by trains that retrieve the resource from other sub-factories. The resulting circuits go in to an out station for trains from other subfactorys to stop by and retrieve circuits. So, essentially a sub-factory will have as many trains as resources which "belong" to it, retrieve their resource, the main bus and assemblers lined up, followed by the output station which is empty for any other train to use. Other subfactories would be a smelter factory, alloy factory, science factory, drone, player items (like belts and inserters), and a drone factory. Later on I'll usually have a defense factory to build turrets and ammunition to resupply the border. With vanilla you can get away with one large main bus, but with Bob's Mods you can't really have a tidy main bus.
Laser turrets are an essential main bus item he forgot! Ha, just kidding, though putting them in a red supplier box along with walls and repair kits makes for a self fixing defence with logistics bots. I didn’t get to the point of automated logistics bots being inserted into roboports, but that could be a future plan. I never tested it, but I w der if you could move boys between roboports the way you can move science packs between labs, mwahahahaha.
My main bus is way different. I use the compacter mod. So one belt equals 4. Then i uncompress on the way onto the factories. My belts consist of 4 iron, 4 copper, 4 iron , 2 green, 2 red, 2 gears, 2 copper wires. 4 spaces inbettwen them all so i can run gas, chemicals and water. Along with power and roo ports. I did not like using robots to move the plates on the belts like others suggest because it takes. Ton of energy to do and my way is much more efficient.
Hey I just wanted to ask a quick question. Is it normal to have lane balancers not working correctly if my production isn't high enough? Like I just started a new game so my iron production is coming from 4 stone furnaces feeding into a 4 lane section of the bus. I just can't seem to get the iron evenly distributed and I can't seem to figure out why. Any help would be appreciated.
Regardless of how high your production is, a 4 lane balancer should work to even out all the belts. Maybe you are using a balancer that isn't totally count perfect? A perfect 4 lane balancer can be found here: www.factoriogame.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/231116-8-1.jpg It will work with any level of belt as well. :) Hope that helped and fixes the problem!
I think my problem was I just misunderstood what the balancers do. Like I wanted an even amount of materials on both sides of the belts, but the balancers just balances the total amount of materials among the belts. I fixed it by simply having a higher throughput. Thanks for taking the time to reply though!
Liam Keough I agree, why do people not use this type of layout? It's so useful. I'm interested to see what happens to the amount of 'bases' with the new research system
I disagree with what you said about copper cables, it produces more (or faster depends how you see it) then a green circuit uses, so the setup you use is not space efficient, but that is everybody's own opinion
Kevin Andres That was the Spawn Belt Mod. However, I would actually suggest using the Creative Mode Mod sense it can do that as well, but easier and includes a ton of other stuff.
circuits need at minimum 4 belts on the bus lol. once you start red/blue/modules, etc... 2 isnt even going to make it half way across the buss before depleting.
Have you seen antielitez world record Factorio speedrun in 2 hours? He didn't really use a main bus but built copper and iron in a more modular way with a separate smelting and bus for each section (eg red/green science, blue science etc). Seemed a better way than one bus for the whole factory to me. He had though setup the map in peaceful mode with favourable resource settings.
Yeah I watch quite a lot of anti's stuff. The way he sets it up is definitely ideal for a speed run. But for a normal game, I don't think it's optimal, and would still be better off with a main bus system.
Here he is organizing things while I am panic producing ammo for my 10000 gun turrets that are connected via belts around my base trying to not get killed by bitters :/
Well, as long as you can make it to robots making terrible base is not end of the world - wall off a chunk of land and as long as you are defendend you can rebuild from scratch. But overall it is way easier to do with not messing it up completely from the start ';)
Nice, simple tutorial. I've been using the modular PnP main bus design pattern for my last few saves: forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8377&p=146142#p146142
Is their a good alternative to the main/production bus concept? I'd like to do something different but every time I play I keep going right back to it LOL
Haha I know that feeling! It is honestly pretty natural to just go back to it. Really the only main alternative is either bot based systems, or something like a Factorio Towns where you have lots of separate bases that each produce something different and have trains bring in and transport out the resources/items.
![GEEK TIMË [OFFICIAL AUDIO]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ry-6RvkH880/mqdefault.jpg)
As a new player that just got the game this was the most helpful video i've seen so far. Most of the other tutorials are assuming people already know some of this basic stuff. Thanks man.
Pfffft. who the hell organizes >.> Chaotic blind panic from beginning until bots XD! that's how i live :3
me, but unironically
Excellent consise tutorial, you hit the main points of 4 wide groups, what to bus, and splitting. A quick followup mention is to add more parallel lanes for fluid feedstocks using UNDERGROUND pipe for suifuric acid and lubricant, and perhaps water and petroleum gas.
Thanks, good to hear I covered most the important points!
Great point about the liquids as well, I should have mentioned that in the video. Having your liquids run along the bus is really nice and helps keep things cleaner too.
Nice nice.
I made a factory where the main production core has a circular bus system, it feeds itself after making a full round, so when something uses more stuff, it has a buffer before shutting down
Could u send me a screenshot?
Now you won’t know when something is fucked up until 15 minutes after, cool idea though
I made things on site and generally did the spaghetti thing.
I didn't get very far because I wasn't prepared for future considerationand expansion
Yeah, I was exactly the same way for a very long time actually. But then realized how important it is to leave room for future expansion, and knowing what works well to make on-site and what doesn't. Just take some practice and such. :)
I ended up with that problem my first playthrough, because I didn't know yet what I would be able to make in the future. I had no idea that I would need oil to make plastics, and put them together with my circuits which I only used much earlier on in my base. I tried to do the 'main bus' thing, but since I didn't know what I would end up with later I still ended up with a spaghetti base, just one with single lines of copper, iron, and steel running down the middle. And I should note that I'm not done with my first play-through yet. Right now I'm having in issue with generating enough plates. I ended up ending my iron lane half way through my base and start another one from a different mine later on. Even now though, my first line is having trouble maintaining all the assemblers. My whole line suddenly empties out past the gears for my belts, every time I go over to fetch some more. Its getting annoying having half my factory shut down every time I need to produce a new resource I had no idea was even in the game before.
deltoid 77 I also had the same problem until I made 150 yellow science packs and got robot chests. Robots op pls nerf
Dude, I make my entire bus underground belts. It's amazingly clean and organized, and super simple to split from. Yes, the total cost of iron can be a little crazy for an initial investment, but once you have it, it gives you much more space and flexibility
All of my bases are spaghetti bases.
That sounds pretty racist ;)
Death to liberals CHINA#1
I make a the a fettuccini with a the alfredo a saurce
or some a times i usea the choo choo!
I watched a few Xterm and KoS videos before I got out of the campaign, so I’d like to think my first freeplay base isn’t as spaghetti as my campaign attempts were. But in reality, I’ve mangled my “bus” so much due to trying to cram way too much stuff laterally against it than it has any right.
I think 80% of my iron has gone toward undergrounds at this point.
That is a spaghetti factory with a main bus...
I was thinking the same thing. Funny way to demo the bus system with what's basically a hybrid.
Hmm, I started this video, then thought to myself that first I should play the game and figure stuff out, before I try effecient stuff. So I'll come back latwr
You are taking your time man, appreciate it!
how is the effecient suff going after a year ? ;-)
I only have 50 hours on Factorio and never used a main bus. after doing so i started watching tutorials on different techniques.
after 4 hours i think ive improved double than any improvement over the last 50 hours.
You can see the older parts of my factory where are all messy and the new parts are super organised
That's great to hear! It's always a great feeling to know you are improving and look back in parts of your factory and see the points where that happened. :)
I didn’t even leave gaps between different resources it’s a nightmare of underground belts now it’s a block of 32 belts now and growing with different resources
Biggest problem/weakness with the main buss imo. is expandability.
It is very hard to change a 2 lane main buss to say a 4 lane main buss.
Bot factories in contrast are a lot easier to expand on.
A hybrid base might be and look the best, allowing you to place the passive providers close to what needs the resource.
What I do to overcome this is to build my factories on just on side of the bus so I can always add more lanes on the other side
Thanks for explaining. A friend brought me into this game and he said "better do a mainbus" and I just wanted some more info on that, so again, thanks.
Glad it helped, you are very welcome! Hope you enjoy playing. :)
Good tutorial, thanks a lot! My production lines are always a bit "organic" but I'm sure this will help me to keep things organized.
Thanks, and no problem! :) Having your lines be organic is totally fine, but a mix of both can work out pretty well.
I see there are a lot of parts of your production that take ingredients from a chest, such as railway production. is that recommended? currently i also have to transport coal, stone, and stone bricks everywhere, as i can't make them on-site
Really nice tutorial. I don't know if you know a forum member called "dee-" but he has a main bus module based "plug-n-play" system that works really well and is really fun to play around with. his system uses almost entirely underground belts and you split off above them. it's really interesting
I used that on my first base to learn the ropes... until now where I'm transitoning to all robots.
I'm really looking forward to seeing your video on the robot based systems.
Thank you. :) I actually don't know of them, but that concept does sound quite interesting! I might have to look at that. Would you happen to have a link to somewhere he posted it?
Glad to hear it! I'm quite looking forward to doing it. I love using bot based systems.
here's the link! ;)
looks awesome!
forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8377&p=146142#p146142
Null8fuenf10 has posted it above :) It's a really well thought out concept, and he has it setup so that each module you have for parts needs to be a maximum of 13 blocks high, but that can be ignored a little by spacing the modules.
Lately I've been building the main bus without spaces between groups of belts. While it takes a bit more underground pieces early on, later (with a longer underground belt mod) I can run branches underneath the whole bus. It actually looks much neater this way, just more time-consuming to branch off in the early game. But for me the aesthetics are more important.
Best advice I've come across for keeping the bus connections neat (i.e. no spaghetti) is to only build production/science off one side of the bus. On the other side, place smelting, oil, and/or solar.
I do put two belts of gears on the bus (and upgrade them to red belt asap). It just simplifies so many things: Science ingredients, inserters, assemblers, belts, and many of the one-assembler items like miners, pumpjacks, chem plants, etc.
Nice! Definitely good advice too about only building production on one side and then leave the other side empty aside from smelting and such. Does help a lot with the spaghetti bit. And yeah, gears on the bus do help simply other builds a ton as long as you can keep up with the gear demand via the bus system.
I would agree as well that aesthetics are pretty important, but that varies more from player to player.
I appreciate it, I already knew about busses, but I pull some good splitting advice outta the vid. Thanks
I have descent experience building main bus designs and I have a different idea of how to do them. I usually leave 4 spaces between each lane, so 4 spaces of resources followed by 4 spaces of empty space. The reason I build 4 spaces between them instead of 2 is because I usually put roboports in that area. 4 spaces is also usefull if you want to send resources on one side of the belt. That is not possible to do so if there is only 2 spaces, you will need to do that above or below the main buss. a third reason to leave 4 spaces instead of 2 is because there is enough space to put pipes. I have tried using both 4 spaces and 2 spaces and I much prefer the extra room. Another thing that I do differently is that I have 4 lanes of green circuits instead of 2. In the main bus design you showed you had 2 lanes of steel as well as 2 lanes of circuits. In my opinion that is very imbalanced since you use way more circuits than steel. 2 lanes of circuits will be enough for most people though but it does not hurt to add 2 more lanes. But of course there are many ways of doing a main bus, but having 4 lanes of iron, 4 lanes of copper, 4 lanes of circuits, 2 lanes of steel, 2 lanes of plastic, 1 lane of red, circuits and 1 lane of batterys works fine for me.
now in 0.15 you might want a lane of coal as well for military science.
for the wire/gear belt thing, basically,
2 belts of copper wire would transport the same amount as 1 belt of copper plates and
1 belt of gears would equal 2 belts of iron plates. Since you would want as few belts as possible, it would be best to use plates for the wire and pre-make the gears.
Vincent van Roosmalen Correct yeah.
I also like to throw gears into the basic setup. They can be produced easily, but they produce so fast, that having a factory for each thing you build is kinda overkill. A hand full of gear-factories can easily populate a belt and piping it in is a lot easier than another level of pre-processing.
Yeah I think for stuff like that it comes down to personal preference. Gears are definitely acceptable to have on the bus if you prefer it that way.
Aliens and cliffs always make me build chaotic. One thing i learned is... do not be scared to demolish and rebuild. If you are playing with wonky set ups and alien hordes... early on you build what ever fast enough until you can defend yourself and then expand from there.
Yup I completely agree on all those points for sure. :)
Great video! Thanks so much for all the tips bro :)
Ehrm, lol. I output everything on my main bus (and use undergrounds on the bus itself, rather than the crossing belts, cuz I think it looks better). Dunno' how efficient this is, but I find it lets me keep things more organized without having to worry about planning out layouts as much.
In xander's mod its really hard to pull off a main bus since the resources are tight and there are many things that need to go all over the place, but it pays off to have an organised factory, as always.
I think it might be a good idea to put certain liquids along a bus, too, like petroleum gas, lubricant, and maybe water.
Oh, I also like to bus coal, though I didn't setup my last bus to do that so it got a bit messy adding in coal.
Why do you put the first splitter before the branch when branching of the bus?
I only balance the bus belts after branching off from the side lane.
If your inputs are balanced, you really don't need a full belt balancer to get a balanced output after a split off.
For 2 belts, you only need 1 splitter after.
For 4 belts, you only need to mix the lane from which you branched off with the 3 others just once to get a balanced output (i mix 1&2, then 2&3, underground 2&3 and mix 1&4)
It probably isn't necessary to be honest. I put the first splitter before the branch to balance it between both lines before it even splits. That way (theoretically) an even amount from both lines should be sent off to the branch.
you made some really good points on this video, I smashed that like button and it broke, sorry, no more likes for this one
Besides iron, copper, steel and green circuits, I like cogs, red circuits, plastic, stone, coal and stone on my bus. I also run pipes of lube and sulfuric acid parallel to the bus.
Yup, definitely all viable things to put on there honestly. It really just depends on personal preference and how you set up your factory. :)
after about 1,5 years I did understand it just a bit better ^^"
My bases are completely unorganized until I start mass producing logistic robots
To be honest, this bus looks to me like a mixture of a proper bus and a spaghetti base. You do have a bus (a very short one) but after eachs split-off its just spaghetti.
One thing I also like to do is to build my factories on just one side of the bus so I can always add more lanes to the other. Also, I leave 4 tiles between every 4 lanes for roboports. And I build my factories in a tileable pattern so they can always be extended easily. All of this requires more thought on where to place your bus because you actually need to have the space to expand into.
Is it a good idea to multiplex some lines of the bus ? For example instead of 1 line copper and 1 line iron plates, I make a single fast line with both, either side by side or mixed using splitters.
I have a partial bus. It isnt spaghetti but it is one huge column of production. (for reference I am just getting to military science
And here I am trying to figure out how to bus enough copper cable when it's better to make them on site! Time to rebuild my bus!
Thanks SO MUCH!! I love you
whats the purple box? it doesn't seem to need inserters and looks different to regular logistics chests
Now better tier underground belts have expanded length, so they can go under 5-6 lanes
Yup, good thing to point out for sure!
I just want to know why there are random splitters in the middle, for example on the copper at 3:17.
I wish i could get pictures of pples factory to try them out for myself and see how well they work
How many lines of copper an iron do you need if you plan to build a full robot base?
Im trying to learn how to efficiently split stuff out of a bus that has 2 belts with different stuff running alongside each other.
Like in your example, you have batteries and plastic bars adjacent. How do you cleanly get plastic bars to the right side of the bus?
You can just underground part of the battery belt where you want to split off plastic and then there will be room to put the splitter and run a line off to the side.
these vids are awesome man, thanks
Awesome tutorial as always. Any chance you can do or link one you have done on module production set ups both with bots and belts?
Thanks! And do you mean like setups for making modules, or using modules? I plan to do one for using modules and how to calculate all that out, and actually I could do one on module builds for actually making the modules.
Module builds if possible X! either way I'll watch and like the video. Look forward to it
You can you not simply just add more copper, iron (ect) furnace set ups further down the bus?
Great video! Many thanks man!
I always make an alpha base from which i Plan the real factory. Meaning that i skip the advancing and then rebuilding. I do kinda rush for robots and trains automising only green and red science. :)
P.s. alpha base is always sphagetti cause its easier for the Start :P
Play couple hours on my personal world before my real world with my friend every day, make mistakes in my world and make the official world beautiful
Useful info, thanks mate
Everyone is talking about spaghetti bases and I'm wondering if there are other pasta options. What's a tortellini base look like?
Ahaha asking the real questions! Closest to a tortellini base I can think of is some sort of grid base or something.
explained well, thx!
Just wondering, why are you not a fan of the priority splitter? I heard this mentioned in the Earth campaign early on, too.
Yeah, I noticed they're very tricky to set up, and break if one lane on your belt empties out (unless you're using hacked splitters which omg lag no).
Thanks for the link, those are some nifty designs :)
It's a bit hard to put into written words, but in general I don't like them because they just seem unnecessary and possibly cause some issues. You can achieve the same thing or something very similar by just using normal splitters and belt mechanics.
And, at least in my opinion, as with many things in the game, I feel like if you build things balanced and "properly" to begin with, you shouldn't really need to use them. I know Zuri and the other guys in the Earth campaign don't like them either, and may have different or better reasons, but I won't speak for them on that.
Yeah, I suck at keeping my lanes balanced. I really should learn to do it properly, I suppose.
I used priority splitters in my last campaign, but I wasn't a huge fan, especially when I found out I'd messed up the signalling on my blueprint and had to go down my whole bus and change them all. Thank god for copy paste but still, not an easy task.
Thanks for the replies :)
hey xterminator, how do you make your factories show what material they are producing? (the icon) Thanks :)
Musicpins The ALT key turns that stuff on. :)
I honestly don't know how anyone can stand to build a factory that doesn't organise with something like this. A messy spaghetti that grows as required seems impossible to make. I usually go for a combination between rails and main bus, where I have a sub-factory with a main bus containing all the resources to make a type of item, like circuits. Which is supplied by trains that retrieve the resource from other sub-factories. The resulting circuits go in to an out station for trains from other subfactorys to stop by and retrieve circuits.
So, essentially a sub-factory will have as many trains as resources which "belong" to it, retrieve their resource, the main bus and assemblers lined up, followed by the output station which is empty for any other train to use. Other subfactories would be a smelter factory, alloy factory, science factory, drone, player items (like belts and inserters), and a drone factory. Later on I'll usually have a defense factory to build turrets and ammunition to resupply the border.
With vanilla you can get away with one large main bus, but with Bob's Mods you can't really have a tidy main bus.
Laser turrets are an essential main bus item he forgot! Ha, just kidding, though putting them in a red supplier box along with walls and repair kits makes for a self fixing defence with logistics bots. I didn’t get to the point of automated logistics bots being inserted into roboports, but that could be a future plan. I never tested it, but I w der if you could move boys between roboports the way you can move science packs between labs, mwahahahaha.
My main bus is way different. I use the compacter mod. So one belt equals 4. Then i uncompress on the way onto the factories. My belts consist of 4 iron, 4 copper, 4 iron , 2 green, 2 red, 2 gears, 2 copper wires. 4 spaces inbettwen them all so i can run gas, chemicals and water. Along with power and roo ports. I did not like using robots to move the plates on the belts like others suggest because it takes. Ton of energy to do and my way is much more efficient.
Hey I just wanted to ask a quick question. Is it normal to have lane balancers not working correctly if my production isn't high enough? Like I just started a new game so my iron production is coming from 4 stone furnaces feeding into a 4 lane section of the bus. I just can't seem to get the iron evenly distributed and I can't seem to figure out why. Any help would be appreciated.
Regardless of how high your production is, a 4 lane balancer should work to even out all the belts. Maybe you are using a balancer that isn't totally count perfect?
A perfect 4 lane balancer can be found here: www.factoriogame.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/231116-8-1.jpg
It will work with any level of belt as well. :)
Hope that helped and fixes the problem!
I think my problem was I just misunderstood what the balancers do. Like I wanted an even amount of materials on both sides of the belts, but the balancers just balances the total amount of materials among the belts. I fixed it by simply having a higher throughput. Thanks for taking the time to reply though!
robot, bus, OR TRAINS!
Liam Keough I agree, why do people not use this type of layout? It's so useful. I'm interested to see what happens to the amount of 'bases' with the new research system
Trains are really only good for long distance so it would be good to use trains to get the materials to the start of the bus.
How did you see what items were being smelted and stuff like that? I'm new to the game :)
Trist Oh, like the item icons over the machines and smelters? I had Advanced Info turned on. The default hockey to toggle it on/off is ALT. :)
I disagree with what you said about copper cables, it produces more (or faster depends how you see it) then a green circuit uses, so the setup you use is not space efficient, but that is everybody's own opinion
Why are u using red instead of blue belts?
Because it's just for demonstration purposes, throughput doesn't matter for this.
do you have a tutorial on belt balancing?
Not specifically. There are several Workshop videos that cover some belt balancers and pros/cons of them though.
I have gears but have throughput issues
Sick, thank
There is one more type of factory:
My messy factory
Ahaha, spaghetti all the way! :D Those are some of the best factories though, they are super interesting and challenging to play in and look at.
I think you dont even know what i mean.
@@zirax54 un-organized base,right?
@@Gelattonian20 I mean a factory that has 2 assemblers on opposite ends of it making green circuits and 0 room for others.
Luckily my arteries are fat and clogged up! That means I have good luck in Factorio.... RIGHT?!?
Can you do a review on train caller please mate
I can look into it and see, yeah. :)
Thanks mate
What addon is that which has chests that dump onto a belt?
Kevin Andres That was the Spawn Belt Mod. However, I would actually suggest using the Creative Mode Mod sense it can do that as well, but easier and includes a ton of other stuff.
Thanks for the quick response!
circuits need at minimum 4 belts on the bus lol.
once you start red/blue/modules, etc... 2 isnt even going to make it half way across the buss before depleting.
Dapper Gunman Depends how you build your base. Quite a few people don't make modules off their bus so 2 belts is enough.
then wouldnt you need to increase the other materials on the bus? either way looks like somethings missing?
maybe i just build bigger? i dont know.
Have you seen antielitez world record Factorio speedrun in 2 hours? He didn't really use a main bus but built copper and iron in a more modular way with a separate smelting and bus for each section (eg red/green science, blue science etc). Seemed a better way than one bus for the whole factory to me. He had though setup the map in peaceful mode with favourable resource settings.
Yeah I watch quite a lot of anti's stuff. The way he sets it up is definitely ideal for a speed run. But for a normal game, I don't think it's optimal, and would still be better off with a main bus system.
Here he is organizing things while I am panic producing ammo for my 10000 gun turrets that are connected via belts around my base trying to not get killed by bitters :/
Yo,is a 6 belt bus a Thing?coz I did that 🤔
It can be for sure. Just makes it a bit harder to run undergrounds across until you get red belt.
how do you get those matter sources?
Creative Mode.
new idea : spaghetti bus
Well, as long as you can make it to robots making terrible base is not end of the world - wall off a chunk of land and as long as you are defendend you can rebuild from scratch. But overall it is way easier to do with not messing it up completely from the start ';)
I started my first base as a all robot without making a main bus ;P
Damn, impressive! :D
i just had trains,and spagheti factorys
i have billions of blue circuits staking in chests
so if your cdo is crazy only do 4 betls.....
Je suis nouvelle sur ta chaine sofia
Why are you moving so fast?
My walking speed you mean? It's part of the Creative Mode mod I use, it increases my movement speed so I can get around faster. :)
I'm the 29k viewer
Whoohoo! :D
Nice, simple tutorial. I've been using the modular PnP main bus design pattern for my last few saves: forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8377&p=146142#p146142
Thanks!
It seems several people have mentioned they use that design, it looks quite interesting! I might try that in the future. :D
Is their a good alternative to the main/production bus concept? I'd like to do something different but every time I play I keep going right back to it LOL
Haha I know that feeling! It is honestly pretty natural to just go back to it. Really the only main alternative is either bot based systems, or something like a Factorio Towns where you have lots of separate bases that each produce something different and have trains bring in and transport out the resources/items.
++
youtube offers in 2017 videos of 2016 , youtube fails.
The video is only 6 months old, and not irrelevant.
if you are not modder sure its not irrelevant , i had butt ton of work to rewrite because of "6 month" changes