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I am a pretty new player. By now I know enough to recognize that the bus is core to a good base. But even though I've read a lot and watch many great videos I have several questions.

The answers will of course be very useful to me, but I suspect this thread will become useful to many new players as the concepts are critical to making a good base.

1) How wide should it be? Most of the information I found seems to recommend 7-8 lanes of 4 tracks each, so my plan is for 8. Is that right, or should I reserve more?

2) Of those, I the consensus seems to be for a minimum of these tracks: 4 green circuits, 4 iron, 4 copper, 2 steel. But I see hints that suggest putting more of those ores/products on the bus. What is the best-practice number of those lanes?

3) Since a well designed smelter set will saturate a bus lane, I am planning one smelter sets per lane coomposed of 16x2 stone furnaces / yellow belt that I will later upgrade to electric furnaces and red belt (using a design that allows direct replacement). On the back side of the smelter sets I plan to setup a railway so that they can receive ores that way once I exhaust the local deposits. Does this sound right?

4) For green circuit production I've seen that to saturate 4 belts I'll need 4 tracks of iron plate and 6 of copper. That almost would exhaust my bus!!! Is it safe to say that green circuit production needs its own dedicated smelter sets and iron/copper supply?

5) For other products on the bus there seems to be a lot of disagreement of what it should be. For example, some say to include a lane each of raw stone and stone bricks, others say no. So, what other products need to be on the bus and why?

6) My initial red/green Research is fully self-contained with its own small supply of ores and smelting. When I build the new "all research types" setup, should I hang it off the bus, or also make it self-contained?

7) Oil seems far from my bus (4-6 chunks away). Should I build the Oil/Chemical processing plant near the oilfield or off the bus, or some things locally and some off the bus? For transport, pipe the products to the bus, or by train and offload it at a Chemical plant near the bus?

8) I know I will eventually want a "build everything" mall hanging off the bus. But I noticed that I need certain resources a lot (like track, yellow inserters. ammo, green circuits, small electric poles, furnaces, etc) long before I reach the point of building the main mall. Would it make sense if I planned my bus before I even get off the stone/manual age, use it early, and hang a mini-mall off it? My thought is that each time I notice I need something routinely I'd build a quick assembly setup for it, with all the chests hanging off to the same side for easy access.

I realize this is a lot, please don't feel obliged to try to answer all the questions. Loose answers work too

I always build my factory only on one side of the bus. As time goes on I add more lanes on the other side. So the width of my bus is unlimited.

The reason for having 4 belts and then a gap of 2 is that underground belts are that long. Similar 4 belts of iron allows for a simple 4 belt balancer to be used. With more of 4 lanes of something balancing gets complicated and I would suggest not even trying.

Instead if you need more than 4 lanes of something, like iron plates, make dedicated lanes and smelters. By that time you have some idea that you need a lot of green circuits continiously. So why not give them their dedicated iron and copper smelter and lanes.

Note: not all green circuits have to come from dedicated lanes. You can mix it so you get a base supply of green circuits from dedicated lanes and fill demand spikes from shared lanes.

Note2: You can also do 2 separate 4 lane iron plate strips and balance them separately. Then later in the bus when iron plates have been taken from both sets merge them into a single 4 lane set and balance that. You can thin out the bus as it gets longer.

zOldBulldog wrote:1) How wide should it be? Most of the information I found seems to recommend 7-8 lanes of 4 tracks each, so my plan is for 8. Is that right, or should I reserve more?

2) Of those, I the consensus seems to be for a minimum of these tracks: 4 green circuits, 4 iron, 4 copper, 2 steel. But I see hints that suggest putting more of those ores/products on the bus. What is the best-practice number of those lanes?

One piece of steel consumes 5 iron plates. Therefore one belt represents 5 iron belts.
Unless you can compress 10 iron belts, one steel belt is fine and you probably won't be able to compress it.
Green circuits wise, you can get away with 2.
4 copper and iron is fine unless you also want to put gears on the bus which eat 2 iron belts, in that case 2 iron will do.
For science, you also need coal and stones on the bus, 1 each will do since they are not commonly used.

zOldBulldog wrote:3) Since a well designed smelter set will saturate a bus lane, I am planning one smelter sets per lane coomposed of 16x2 stone furnaces / yellow belt that I will later upgrade to electric furnaces and red belt (using a design that allows direct replacement). On the back side of the smelter sets I plan to setup a railway so that they can receive ores that way once I exhaust the local deposits. Does this sound right?

32 won't do.
You need 48 stone furnaces to fully compress a yellow belt, 48 steel furnaces for a red one.
Try something like this:

It's easily upgraded to red belts by simply turning all the yellow red and placing steel furnaces over the stone ones.
Afterwards, just deconstruct the entire thing with the bots that you then have once you get to electric furnaces, which you will need 72 of to compress 1 blue belt.

zOldBulldog wrote:4) For green circuit production I've seen that to saturate 4 belts I'll need 4 tracks of iron plate and 6 of copper. That almost would exhaust my bus!!! Is it safe to say that green circuit production needs its own dedicated smelter sets and iron/copper supply?

5) For other products on the bus there seems to be a lot of disagreement of what it should be. For example, some say to include a lane each of raw stone and stone bricks, others say no. So, what other products need to be on the bus and why?

You only need a separate big greens production zone if you start going ax crazy on t3 modules.
Just for chugging along, building your things and doing research, making your 2 belts on the bus using the bus will do, including reds and blues production.

You need stones and coal on the bus because military science needs grenades which need coal and purple science needs electric furnaces which needs stones, which you can bake on-site using electric furnaces.
You will also need coal for plastic and stones for rails. Red and blue circuits also go on the bus.

zOldBulldog wrote:6) My initial red/green Research is fully self-contained with its own small supply of ores and smelting. When I build the new "all research types" setup, should I hang it off the bus, or also make it self-contained?

7) Oil seems far from my bus (4-6 chunks away). Should I build the Oil/Chemical processing plant near the oilfield or off the bus, or some things locally and some off the bus? For transport, pipe the products to the bus, or by train and offload it at a Chemical plant near the bus?

8) I know I will eventually want a "build everything" mall hanging off the bus. But I noticed that I need certain resources a lot (like track, yellow inserters. ammo, green circuits, small electric poles, furnaces, etc) long before I reach the point of building the main mall. Would it make sense if I planned my bus before I even get off the stone/manual age, use it early, and hang a mini-mall off it? My thought is that each time I notice I need something routinely I'd build a quick assembly setup for it, with all the chests hanging off to the same side for easy access.

If you make a bus, it makes sense to use it, no?

Oil can be done in many ways, I like to turn it into petroleum and lubricant on the field and use trains to transport that to stations on the bus.

Maybe don't build assembly lines for every little thing other than belts and get to work on the belt factory where it's meant to stay asap.
You can tack the mall onto that since iron, gears and circuits are already all in 1 place for your convenience.

For my 2 cents: If you want to go to trains then I would build the bus just for the mall. Plan to move everything else off the bus.

Once you have trains start building satelite factories. For example make a science camp that gets iron, copper, stone, coal by train and builds all the science stuff. You know the exact ratios of everything you need to make science packs so you can make a dedicated factory line for this where everything runs continiously.

Awesome feedback and only hours after I posted! Thank you guys.

zOldBulldog wrote:I am a pretty new player. By now I know enough to recognize that the bus is core to a good base. But even though I've read a lot and watch many great videos I have several questions.

The answers will of course be very useful to me, but I suspect this thread will become useful to many new players as the concepts are critical to making a good base.

1) How wide should it be? Most of the information I found seems to recommend 7-8 lanes of 4 tracks each, so my plan is for 8. Is that right, or should I reserve more?

Depends on what you want to do. Do you bus purely copper and iron? Or do you add a line of Gears, Steel and Electronics? Or even Plastic and Advanced Circuits? Coal? There's no right answer, everyone has their own preferences. Myself, I started off my base with 4 Copper, 4 Iron, 1 Gear, 1 Steel and 1 Electronics line. Later adding 1 Plastic, 1 Coal and 1 Battery line, and a pipe of Acid and Lubricant. This fed a starting base with a Seeder/Mall on the right side of the bus, and a small research facility on the left side of the bus. Fed from the south (initially from a direct smelter, lateron that smelter was replaced with a train station for train-ing in smelted materials). and terminating at the yellow research production at the north. For me, that setup sufficed to get the non-infinite research done, and the seeder factory then started to produce materials to build up a large rail grid, defenses etcetera.

2) Of those, I the consensus seems to be for a minimum of these tracks: 4 green circuits, 4 iron, 4 copper, 2 steel. But I see hints that suggest putting more of those ores/products on the bus. What is the best-practice number of those lanes?

Depends how much production will be drawing from the bus, and wether or not you replenish the bus at certain spots. A main bus is intended to satisfy the material needs of nearly all production, so it should at least meet the needs of any continuous production you got going. There is no right answer, but the amount of lines you are citing suggests to me that there's already too much going by bus and that a rail system/offsite production should be considered instead. But that's my personal opinion

3) Since a well designed smelter set will saturate a bus lane, I am planning one smelter sets per lane coomposed of 16x2 stone furnaces / yellow belt that I will later upgrade to electric furnaces and red belt (using a design that allows direct replacement). On the back side of the smelter sets I plan to setup a railway so that they can receive ores that way once I exhaust the local deposits. Does this sound right?

Again, no right answer, but you seem to have the right general idea. Eventually even that smelter will become overloaded, you can consider adding smaller auxiliary smelters further in your factory to replenish the bus. Move ore in by train, or draw it directly from nearby orefields if available. If you're going to move ore in by rail, consider moving the smelter itself away from your main base so that you can expand it easily lateron. Then move the smelted products in by train instead. Added advantage: You can pre-build that offsite smelter and have some ore going in there already, so it's buffering up some ore while you decommission the old smelter and connect up the railway to your main bus start.

4) For green circuit production I've seen that to saturate 4 belts I'll need 4 tracks of iron plate and 6 of copper. That almost would exhaust my bus!!! Is it safe to say that green circuit production needs its own dedicated smelter sets and iron/copper supply?

Generally, you put that kind of preproduction at/near your smelter or main bus start exactly for this reason. The reason you belt in steel, electronics and gears is that they require fewer belts that way. One belt of gears equates to two belts of iron after all. One belt of steel equates to five belts of iron. And so on. So yes, your smelter needs to be able to supply these in addition to supplying your main bus.

5) For other products on the bus there seems to be a lot of disagreement of what it should be. For example, some say to include a lane each of raw stone and stone bricks, others say no. So, what other products need to be on the bus and why?

Again, there's no right answer. Some people prefer just sending the raw iron/copper and doing all preproduction locally. Some people go as far as to create a belt of Processing Units or Speed Module 1's. Try some stuff out, see what suits you. For me it's Copper, Iron, Gears, Steel, Electronics, Plastic, Batteries, Coal and the fluids. And some Stone Bricks, but I use so few of those, they went by bot in my seeder factory. I did it this way because it keeps the main bus relatively compressed in width. I prefer a rail-heavy setup after the initial bus is done.

6) My initial red/green Research is fully self-contained with its own small supply of ores and smelting. When I build the new "all research types" setup, should I hang it off the bus, or also make it self-contained?

Bus. And you should hook up your initial research to the bus as well. One of the main reasons for a bus is to have a centralized smelter area.

7) Oil seems far from my bus (4-6 chunks away). Should I build the Oil/Chemical processing plant near the oilfield or off the bus, or some things locally and some off the bus? For transport, pipe the products to the bus, or by train and offload it at a Chemical plant near the bus?

Build a refinery somewhat near your base, then move the oil to the refinery by tanker train. It's very easy to do this way. Remember, the refinery facility will need quite a bit of water (acid production, oil cracking, advanced refining), so make sure a lake is near.

8) I know I will eventually want a "build everything" mall hanging off the bus. But I noticed that I need certain resources a lot (like track, yellow inserters. ammo, green circuits, small electric poles, furnaces, etc) long before I reach the point of building the main mall. Would it make sense if I planned my bus before I even get off the stone/manual age, use it early, and hang a mini-mall off it? My thought is that each time I notice I need something routinely I'd build a quick assembly setup for it, with all the chests hanging off to the same side for easy access.

Belts and yellow inserters are components of green research. Try to overproduce those a bit and feed the surplus into 2 chests past your green research production facility. That way you'll have plenty of yellow belts and yellow inserters early on. One of the reasons I prefer building on both sides of the bus is that I can slowly expand the "mall" as more recipes/buildings become available, while expanding research production as it becomes available on the other side.
An added advantage is also that your "seeder" factory/small research plant can become a garbage collection facility too. It should have small amounts of production for anything, so if you break a part of your factory down and send the resources to the seeder plant for sorting and recycling, those should eventually be used up. A few well-placed Buffer chests and Requestor chests can dump all half-products back into consumption, meaning they won't clog up storage chests, or worse have you destroy them by stuffing them into a wooden box and then destroying that box.

Aeternus wrote:Eventually even that smelter will become overloaded, you can consider adding smaller auxiliary smelters further in your factory to replenish the bus.

That one little bit is pure genius and I just had to say it. Terribly simple, obvious in hindsight, and most people (me included) would not think about it. As it dawned I had a serious "duuuh!!!" moment, complete with forehead slapping

The question how wide should my bus be is incorrect by its nature. Remember Alice in wonderland? She asked "Where should I go?" and rabbit replied "That depends on where you want to come in the end".

So first of all you have to set some goal for your base. For example you want say 2 science/sec (recipe time, which will be actually less as you will use 0.75 speed assemblers and upgrade to 1.25 later on).
Now you can start planning your bus. Generally you should calculate how much resources will this production consume and plan your base accordingly.

Most of times your bus will consist of :

2 belts or gears (or 4 iron plates instead if you want to craft gears in every spot autonomously) [4 Iron]
2 belts of steel [10 Iron]. You will most likely use only up to 2 steel smelting lines out of 10 until rocket silo.
4 belts of iron plates [4 Iron]
4 belts of copper [4 Copper]
4 belts of green circuits [4 Iron, 6 Copper]
2 belts of plastic dedicated to red circuit production. Those may bypass the bus somewhere around.
1 belt of red circuits [these can draw from main bus]
1 belt of blue circuits [these can draw from main bus]
1 belt of stone, bricks, coal, batteries

Also there might also be a "liquid bus" which will consist of Lubricant and Surfuric Acid.

The bus should consist of groups of 2-4 belts with 2-4 tile gaps between those groups. Thes is dictated by underground belts which can cross 4 tiles and use 2 tiles to expand further.
Most of times gaps of 2 tiles are enough as they give you space for splitting, underground crossing and big power poles. But you might want at least 1 gap of 4 for placing roboports or creating a concrete road for yourself.

You can use two scenarios. You can build your production lines on one side of your bus and your smelting on another. Or plan your smelting somewhere before bus start and place assembly lines on both sides..
First scenario lets you reserve space for train stations for unloading ores in the future to expand your smelting while your base grows. And the second one is more adopted to outsourceing smelting to another location.

One of the best advices here - start your production lines pretty far from the bus itself. Like at least 10 tiles from it. Believe me something will come up later that you will absolutely need to fit in there

Have in mind that gears, steel and green circuits should have their own smelting supply and should not draw resources from main bus and should have their own smelting lines supply.
So for the bus I described you will need 14 Iron lines (2 of them being steel) and 10 copper lines.
This setup is quite enough for most of your needs up until rocket silo where you should expand steel smelting.

zOldBulldog wrote:

Aeternus wrote:Eventually even that smelter will become overloaded, you can consider adding smaller auxiliary smelters further in your factory to replenish the bus.

That one little bit is pure genius and I just had to say it. Terribly simple, obvious in hindsight, and most people (me included) would not think about it. As it dawned I had a serious "duuuh!!!" moment, complete with forehead slapping

You make the bus so many belts wide so you transport enough material for the entire production though and so you have a centralized smelter/train unload station.
If your belts don't transport enough materials, rather than spaghetti -ing in more of them, a wider bus would be the answer.
Though I dare you to constantly and fully consume the 4 belt based one you're planning to do first.

PacifyerGrey wrote:One of the best advices here - start your production lines pretty far from the bus itself. Like at least 10 tiles from it. Believe me something will come up later that you will absolutely need to fit in there

That's why I only build on one side of the bus. On the other side I can add more lanes as needed.

Player choice. Aux smelters for replenishment allow for a smaller bus, but requires transporting in ore to those smelters. If you've got a mines -> ore depot -> smelters kind of rail configuration, that kind of setup is viable (or a mines -> offsite mega-smelter -> metal/copper back to replenishment stations at your bus). Personally I dislike an excessively large bus. For mass transport across vast distances trains are more efficient. 16 belts of iron -> 4 belts of iron + 2x iron refill station further down the bus + one or two rail lines as part of the bus. Problem solved.

Can't take credit for the aux smelter idea though, couple of "lets play factorio" Youtube vids I watched for inspiration led me to those.

For me the problem has always been to decide where to replenish. Or where to merge 2 partially filed lines into a single one.

At the moment you might need a lot of green circuits so iron is taken of the bus early. But later on you might need less green circuits and then suddenly where you merged 2 partially filed lines there is too much iron left. Or you need more creen circuits and at the place where you refill the bus from a train stop there is practically no iron left and the assembly line just before the refill is starving. You want to refill the bus earlier.

With trains that's why I like to separate different use cases. Put science in one corner and the mall in another. Both supplied by train. The mall is totaly random and depends on what you are building. The science on the other hand is very predicatble with fixed ratios of use. Easy to design units that consume full belts and output a full belt and connect those to train stops. And so on. For complex things each can have their own main bus.

Note: With 0.16 the priority option for splitters is great to move all iron plates to one side of a 4 lane belt, to always split of from that and replenish that lane from the others. Makes a main bus much simpler.

As I think I mentioned I am quite new. I read and watched a lot of tutorial videos. In the end I ended up *mostly* following Nilaus "Base in Book" series (which seems to be very popular) with some tweaks and adjustments when someone else had a great idea.

But the Base in Book series confused me on a couple things and I have not had luck communicating with him. I am hoping that someone here is familiar with the series and can answer:

He seems to use only 4 iron lines in his bus AND in the tutorial he seems to draw from the bus itself to generate green circuits (2 belts of it!). From everything I saw and read that seems to be insufficient iron to work. My gut and most videos I watched seem to tell me that Green Circuits need to be produced before even entering the bus. What am I missing?

Probably nothing. It's perfectly fine to supply green circuits with iron from the bus. Just know that then you have less iron on the bus.

But as said above demand for stuff in the mall totally depends on what you build. If you go to the mall and pick up 1000 yellow belts then suddenly you need lots of iron plates and iron gear wheels and all the iron disappears there. Later then you come back and pick up 50 splitters. Suddenly you need green circuits. Having everything draw from the same bus means that the iron goes to whatever needs it. With a dedicated setup you end up having lots of iron plates sitting on belts and not moving at all. On the other hand if everything draws from the same bus you probably want more lanes. And then you need to balance it to adapt to changing demands.

That's why I like to separate stuff, as said. Split the basically constant demand factors like science packs from the random demand factors like the mall for example. Unless you tend to pause between research goals.

You can consider other optimizations too. For example if you look at the research tree you might see that military science packs and iirc logistic packs rarely go together. So you can have both of them draw from a common iron plate lane.. On the other hand red science is always needed so that probably wants it's on iron plate lane.

With red undergrounds you can bridge 6 belts now. 4 iron can be a bit lacking, but 8 can be too much. So 6 is a decent compromise. Depends on the size of your base of course.

Even when I do 4 copper, 4 iron, 4 blue, I make the section with coal/batteries/stone/blue circuits/plastic 6 belts wide. That finds nicely and you can either put 2 plastic belts there or maybe add something else you find you suddenly need

The bus is a building style for convenience and expandability, not efficiency or cost effectiveness. Items on a saturated belt are never used. For every item consumed on one end, one is directly produced on the other end (otherwise the belt would not be saturated). It is a huge buffer to instantly transport items over large distances.

Therefore when using the bus design, keep in mind that the cost of each transport belt section is increased by the cost of all (eight) items on it. In other words, you want to keep saturated belts short.