Factorio Forums

Hello,
I would like to build a base that can produce 1.000 science per minute. I calculated the needed resources. The result is that I need 282 blue belts for the main bus (alone 106 for iron plates). Could this be possible? When I saw pictures of other megabases they don't seem to have that much belts.

Thank you.

Did you include productivity modules? I have no doubt those are involved, given their massive impact.

A quick use of the calculator gives ~50 belts input, and maybe 100 belt bus. That is, admittedly larger than the images I've seen, so I have no idea how they manage it.

Do you want to build it with a bus for the experience of doing that?

Honestly once you get on to anything big, a bus gets really unwieldy, and if when you get to 1,000 science per minute you say "you know what, lets go for 1,500, then 2,000" or such, its basically impossible to expand.


Instead I design independent "modules" and then build them as essentially separate bases. The modules themselves I have done with belts and logistic bots, connected by a train network (circuits can be really useful for controlling trains). I am looking to do the whole thing with belts, but the same basic concept. The result is more of a graph, and each component is only effectively a few blue belts.

Well, some of those belts shouldn't be on the main bus. For instance, in my 450-500 SPM factory, have 64 blue belts (32 iron, 32 copper) ... at my separate green circuit station/hub. The green circuits are then trained to the main area, my red circuit hub, and my blue circuit hub. That's what you need to do, separate out the various portions thereby reducing the number of belt lines at the main factory.

There's a lot of different approaches you can take to design a megabase. You can split up different parts of the factory so that all the resources don't have to be delivered to the same place as Mr. Tact mentions, which is one direction to go in (and then there's further choices about which things you deliver to any given location vs just delivering the raw materials they are made out of and making them on-site), but it's also perfectly possible to keep using a bus based design if you want - just build several copies of the entire thing. For example: you can design a completely centralised factory with a main bus which just takes in raw ores, crude oil and power, and researches at 100SPM (launching one rocket every ten minutes)... and then just blueprint the *entire factory* and build nine more copies of it. Voila: 1000SPM base. This is also modularisation, just with.. very large scale modules

Thank you for your feedback. To be honest, I didn't calculate with modules. That should be changed.
I want to build a big main bus because I love straightforward designs. But I want to have the possibility to expand in an easy way, too. Perhaps I will simply try the modular layout and look how it works to me.

Just another idea comes into my mind: Why not feed new materials to the main bus from the side if it dries out? Perhaps with trains. That way I can use the existing belts fully the whole way down and don't need to have belts available that are empty half the way.

What do you think? Have some of you already experience with this kind of main bus?

Sargas wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 12, 2019 1:52 pm

Just another idea comes into my mind: Why not feed new materials to the main bus from the side if it dries out? Perhaps with trains. That way I can use the existing belts fully the whole way down and don't need to have belts available that are empty half the way.

What do you think? Have some of you already experience with this kind of main bus?

I do this exact thing in my big base. I have in fact, the green circuits being re-feed twice, the copper and iron once each. When I first had the idea of doing it I just kind of slapped it in without much thought. But eventually, I worked on making a nice clean merge. This is what I came up with:

The empty blueprint:

In use:


And with splitter priorities they can be pretty useful -- I now use them at ore stations sometimes. If there are two medium sized patches near each other I'll place the train station near one and merge the ore from the two patches together with one of these.

Hi, I'm actually on the same project, the 1k/min, i like things to be small and compact, it's cute :p so for me to avoid big bus aka 20 line of green circuit and 24 line of iron, i do that way : i tried to make my base for when something got to be produce massively, its directly massively eat just after that to have the product you need, for my actual base, after makin red and blue circuit, not more than 4 bus line of green circuit are needed
it goes the same for iron and copper, after being eat by green circuit, low density and steel and red circuit, i need only 4 bus line of iron and 2 bus line of copper. to resume. the big reason of big bus is what is made out of ore and green circuit, but if its done in the good order, you dont need to do belt for long distance, you just need to find the way to have good positionning to avoid the big bus need

For me what i tried to do directly before my bus line : iron and copper into green circuit into red (with plastic) into blue circuit (i call him the vegan circuit, eat a lot of green with some vinaigrette, but seems trying to stop the red meat ) , iron into steel, copper/plastic iron for lowdensitity, and ofc rocket fuel., all of that done, my bus was handable