How many main bus lines do you generally use?

[Trebor]

Some people has build some big belt bases, but I personally think that is done for the sake of doing it.

Yea I did a 22 iron and 15 copper base once (but they were yellow so divide by 3) just for grins. But I’ve heard of larger.

[Krazykrl]

I tend start with 20 belts in 5 sets of 4 with 2 tiles of padding. This also fits neatly with 2 tiles of padding within a chunk.

4x Iron Plate

2x Gear
2x Copper Plate

2x Electronic Circuit
1x Steel
1x Stone Brick

1x Plastic
1x Advanced Circuit
1x Processing Unit
1x Battery

4x Misc

This setup tends to support 120ish SPM, and is a good starting point to get some decent production. You may also run belts in the padding areas, along with reversing some belting (depending on where you put production areas).

By the time the belts cannot support production, I usually have moved the more demanding items (electronic circuits, advanced circuits, processing units) off-site to be fed via trains.

[Rakshasa]

I've never been a fan of the central bus. Instead, I have a decentralized system where separate modular areas have inputs/outputs delivered/retrieved by train.

This pretty much, as demand increases things get processed in dedicated places outside of the central location.

Don't fall for the 'central bus' meme, it's not the solution to all your problems.

[HurkWurk]

i use mods for stack sizes and for resource creation along with factorissimo buildings, so no classic bus. rather direct runs from a warehouse (6x6 size chest) to the factory buildings that need the material.

[xng]

I find a main bus is really hard to expand beyond midgame, so I start with a tiny main bus to get things going and build train stations and network as soon as possible.

[Ranjohl]

I find a main bus is really hard to expand beyond midgame, so I start with a tiny main bus to get things going and build train stations and network as soon as possible.

Same thoughts...
Step1: i build my belts way too close...
Step2: The next game i leave space between them!!!
Step3: repeat Step 1 & 2 for about 4 times
Step4: repeating the same with trains

[xng]

Same thoughts...
Step1: i build my belts way too close...
Step2: The next game i leave space between them!!!
Step3: repeat Step 1 & 2 for about 4 times
Step4: repeating the same with trains

This is the evolution of a factorio player. There's a limit to both approaches, the max throughput and modularity is just higher with trains.

[Ranakastrasz]

I've been trying a "new thing", which lets me expand as needed.

I setup 4 groups(To Start) of 4 lanes, and pull only to the top. Iron, Copper, Circuits, and then "Stuff" (Steel, Brick/Stone, Coal)
Expands to include oil stuff later, as needed.
Copper isn't used a lot, but circuits are. And I am not sure if I should send gears down or not. I also don't think I need full amount of copper, given it is only really used for the raw circuits, and a few other things. Probably important when I get to those 30 wires for science packs, but that is changing, so whoknows.

If I need to, say, double iron, I would end up pushing everything down with robots, which is messy, but at least I don't have to move all the factories on the bottom too. might make lanes that are 6 or 8 wide later, but I don't think it will really matter for a long time.

Plus I decided on approximate spacing. a 6 wide walkway of bricks, then concrete, then fancy concrete with hazard stripes.
a 2 tiles between each sub-bus, for pull off and tunnel. 4 tile wide between the last buss and the road, for the minimal spaghetti required to line up with the actual factories.
I am not sure whether to put the liquid bus on the top or the bottom, but I tend to go with the top. Obviously water, Acid, Lubricant, and Oil. Light and heavy aren't needed elsewhere generally.

No screenshots yet. I've stopped playing til 0.17 comes out.

[Selvek]

Hmm, I think I had 32 blue lanes of iron, 24 of copper, and maybe 8 of green circuits in my last base

[CDarklock]

And I am not sure if I should send gears down or not.

I lean in the direction of "yes" because the alternative to sending one gear down a belt is to send two iron plates that need to be loaded into an assembler later. So with an actual belt full of gears, you get double the throughput.

Similarly, I don't do a belt for copper cable (I used to) because it's the opposite: one copper plate becomes two copper cables and you have half the throughput.

[Ranakastrasz]

I lean in the direction of "yes" because the alternative to sending one gear down a belt is to send two iron plates that need to be loaded into an assembler later. So with an actual belt full of gears, you get double the throughput.

Similarly, I don't do a belt for copper cable (I used to) because it's the opposite: one copper plate becomes two copper cables and you have half the throughput.

Yea. I originally always did gears, but, well.... A lot of things that use gears also use Iron plates, and vise versa. having to always merge those two, instead of having dedicated gear making inside the subfactories. I don't know which is better.

After all, with this design, the bus can keep expanding. IF i have to double iron lanes, I can do that.

And yes, I never lane copper cables. Direct feed all the way. They just take up too much space on belts. Direct feed, 3:2 ratio. Or whatever is needed for high tech science.

[CDarklock]

Yea. I originally always did gears, but, well.... A lot of things that use gears also use Iron plates, and vise versa. having to always merge those two, instead of having dedicated gear making inside the subfactories. I don't know which is better.

I don't either. I don't think there's a "right" answer, really, unless you very tightly define your goal. And I never, ever, EVER have a tightly defined goal. I strive for what has been called "expressive fertility" - the purpose of my bus is to make whatever pops out of my diseased imagination easy to implement whenever it strikes.

Which is why I have a four-lane bus of assembler/inserter, power poles/lights, belts, and underground/splitter. I set this up really early and just extend the line as I go; it's not really something I pull off of to automate anything, but having that one saturated bus of all the stuff I need to install a new production line means I go from new idea to working prototype really fast. I don't like waiting for the logistics network to bring me things.

It probably borders on crazy, but it's convenient.

[caHarkness]

On the world I am currently working on which also happens to be my first, I use 0. After messing around with trains, I scrapped the idea of having some massive "L.A. freeway" of resources in favor of having a smart locomotive traffic. Every train is either a cargo wagon or fluid tank sandwiched by two, opposite facing locomotives.

Although, because of this, I try to load and unload the cargo wagons with a compressed, 6-lane wide bus of just one resource so the trains aren't hanging out in one spot for too long. I am constantly dealing with jams, but I ended up solving my problems by ensuring that any "shared path" consists of two tracks and that a train must have at least two routes to get to their destination at any given time. I can usually achieve this with long track segments and generous amounts of roundabout-like interchanges.

[sarcolopter]

Why have an arbitrary number of belts that you stick to? If a recipe calls for 10 iron and 5 circuits and makes 1 product, then you do 10 belts iron and 5 belts circuits for each belt of product you want. every assembler line whose products have indefinite demand, ie anything for science, gets dedicated belts

[Xuhybrid]

4 iron, 4 copper, 4 green circuit, 1 coal, 1 stone, 1 brick, 1 steel
2 plastic, 2 battery, 2 red circuit, 2 blue circuit

[Rjskeet]

Why have an arbitrary number of belts that you stick to? If a recipe calls for 10 iron and 5 circuits and makes 1 product, then you do 10 belts iron and 5 belts circuits for each belt of product you want. every assembler line whose products have indefinite demand, ie anything for science, gets dedicated belts

For quickly starting out having 4 lines of iron and copper down the center of your factory helps by condensing your feeding lines into 1 places to easily split off to expandable production lines bounces is you can upgrade those lines very easily. Later on when your running out of resources on those lines you can inject plates or whatever with trains.

Or you can start a small main science bus then when you reach capacity you link it with another "secondary bus" and split off part of the factory until everything is just individual segments, for a good example I usually have: a main science bus that also makes my resources, an oil refinery ,a smeltery somewhere on my network, then a weapons factory for all my outposts supply and repair /combat bots, and lastly a rocket bus that strictly makes rockets and then exports the science. All of them are busses btw besides oil which is just another story altogether.

[Italian Cuisine]

I view these divisions of production as the major independent units I need to connect, using belts/pipes as needed:

• Miners
• Smelters
• Oil/plastic/battery center
• Circuit production
• Mall
• Research

Tons of iron/copper belts go into circuit production. 1 lane of each intermediate product (2 lanes of gears) goes into the mall. 1 blue belt of each intermediate product (extra iron/copper for military) feeds basic 75spm research including space science (at least in 0.16, I haven't done all science in 0.17 yet).

I have a large balancer (8 or 16 belts) at my smelter & intermediate production sites, feeding more output belts than there are input, since not all outputs need a full belt. If I build something new, I string a new belt from the balancer to it, and if the balancer starts outputting non-full belts I feed more into it.

I think this system provides good decoupling. A bus is entirely too intertwined with current needs, and is way more difficult to evenly extract from than a large balancer, which wraps all the required complexity in one compact blueprinted place. Adding another balancer and routing directly where new production needs to go is much easier than trying to expand a bus that runs through the middle of a central design.

[Hiladdar]

For me, I start out with a one mixed line of copper and iron for the pre-base build. That is mostly to build the tools to build a base.

The actual base will end up with

6 lines of iron (2 on one side of the bus and 4 on the other side)
6 lines of copper (2 on one side of the bus and 4 on the other side)
2 lines of steel, and two lines of green circuits
1 of engine which turns into electric engine at some point
1 of red circuits
1 of blue circuits
1 mixed belt of grenades and AP ammo
1 of raw Uranium
1 of brick
1 of iron ore
1 of stone
1 of coal
1 of batteries
1 of plastic
1 of sulfur
1 of petroleum
1 of sulfuric acid
1 of lube
1 of water
1 belt of LDC
1 belt of RCU
1 belt of rocket fuel

In the middle, I leave room to add logistical chests, medium poles, and roboports

The big change with .17 is this

I now have added 1 line of solid fuel.

At some point, usually around the time I need to mass produce large numbers of productivity and speed modules this build becomes inefficient, especially for red, green, and blue circuits, and I just keep the belts, and start generating intermediates in outposts. I usually end up with about 24 or so copper plate, 20 iron plate , 10 steel outposts, 10 green circuit , 5 red circuit, 2 blue circuit, 1 battery, 1 sulfur, 1 sulfuric acid, 8 plastic, 1 LDC, 1 RCU, 1 Rocket Fuel outposts. Initially I design each outpost and start them out at 1/4 - 1/3 capacity, eventually expanding them as needed. Each outpost will start out with 500+ standard logistic bots.

For .17.xx the big change is that I need to have a solid fuel outpost, as well a lot more lube. I can meet the additional lube requirement by having the rocket fuel and solid fuel outposts also producing lube.

About the time of the first rocket launch it is no longer efficient to use belts, or to add more belts to the main base, and robots are used to augment the existing belt based bus. Eventually, the main base is has about 10k logistics bots, and pulling in from the outposts what is needed to support not less then 1 rocket launch per minute, as well as stocking a war train that has 2 artillery wagons, and 4 cargo wagons loaded up with weapons and ammo. I also have 1 train with 5 cargo wagons that have enough material to build an average outpost, as well as several logistical trains that are programmed with specific routes that I can jump into about once per 10 hours of play time in a game to check the various raw resource field.

If I play a game longer, I set up outposts, one for each of the sciences, as well as one for the labs. One thing I am playing around with right now is setting up outposts for distribution intermediary products. I found that with my current build some of the outposts are idled for part of the time which is not very efficient. Setting up a transshipping outpost for copper plates, I can have each copper plate outpost running at just about full time, and drop the number of needed copper plate outposts from about 24 to about 12.

Base defense consists of a double stone wall, with both ammo and laser turrets. In hot spots, I'll double, triple, up on laser turrets, and add dragon teeth. I keep an eye on pollution, and expand the perimeter beyond the range of pollution. My plan for perimeter defense is to be sufficient to keep any swarm of biters from moving in to set up a new base. If pollution is hitting biter bases, that is an indicator that the outer perimeter of the base is to small and needs to be expanded. Once an area is cleared, I don't build anything in there, for a bit and just monitor it to make sure there are no "lone-wolf" biters who end up establishing new bases.

Regarding trains, I start out with a 2 lanes one in each direction, and at some point transition to 2 lanes in each direction. The main base will have 3 stations. One is for liquids, such as crude oil, sulfuric acid (both in and out), and lube if needed, although in all the play time, I have never had to import lube to the main base. Crude oil will have up to 4 1x4 trains and sulfuric acid is 1 1x4 train for incoming, and a few trains, 1 per uranium mine for outgoing. The outgoing sulfuric acid trains are 1x1. The second station is for raw iron, copper, stone, coal, and uranium. As a rule, I set up 5 1x4 trains for copper and iron, 4 1x4 trains for coal, and 2 1x4 trains for stone and uranium. The third station for the main base is set up for bot delivery, and mostly set up for 3x8 trains for intermediary products.

Big change for this for .17 is to set up a few 1x4 trains for coal, iron ore, and stone due to increase need of those resource for science production.

Hiladdar

[DustFireSky]

Much as needed!

A player who build small, don't need many buslines. If u always build really big, u cannot say u need X number of Lines. Because it's always too few. Normally i build 8 Iron 8 copper 4 steel. But i expand the lines from time to time. So, much as needed is the right answer.

[Rjskeet]

Much as needed!

A player who build small, don't need many buslines. If u always build really big, u cannot say u need X number of Lines. Because it's always too few. Normally i build 8 Iron 8 copper 4 steel. But i expand the lines from time to time. So, much as needed is the right answer.

Not asking for the right answer just asking what others do. It gives me insight and different views on how to build out my factory.