Bus or not to Bus

[Dramegno]

I started playing using Angel's mods with bobs after seeing Arumba start his series on it so I am confused about what is a good idea to bus and what needs to be taken care of locally with this mod. I am currently not using petrochemicals but I am thinking I will pick it up on my next restart. Also is their a handy list of every liquid and gas that are products of this mod? Sorry if their is a better spot for this question and if I sound confused and lost.

[jcranmer]

I've got a local script that lets me ingest the lua data into simple data formats. The complete list of 86 fluids (all angel's + all bob's) is:
gas-benzene, nitroglycerin, nitrogen, liquid-nitric-acid, gas-carbon-monoxide, hydrogen-chloride, heavy-oil, water-floatation-waste, liquid-multi-phase-oil, gas-hydrogen-sulfide, liquid-mineral-oil, sulfuric-acid, gas-nitrogen-dioxide, gas-melamine, liquid-air, water-saline, oxygen, liquid-condensates, gas-oxygen, crude-oil, nitric-acid, gas-epichlorhydrin, gas-ammonium-chloride, liquid-sulfuric-acid, gas-ethylene, gas-carbon-dioxide, crystal-slurry, gas-hydrogen-chloride, gas-methanol, liquid-naphtha, sulfur-dioxide, water, gas-glycerol, gas-sulfur-dioxide, glycerol, lubricant, gas-chlorine, liquid-chlor-methane, gas-ethylbenzene, chlorine, gas-propene, slag-slurry, crystal-matrix, sulfuric-nitric-acid, gas-butadiene, gas-ammonia, gas-hydrogen, gas-styrene, alien-goo, gas-phenol, gas-synthesis, alien-acid, gas-residual, gas-urea, liquid-ngl, gas-butane, crystal-seedling, gas-nitrogen, gas-natural-1, liquid-fuel, gas-methane, liquid-fuel-oil, gas-polyethylene, alien-fire, alien-explosive, water-purified, gas-acid, hydrogen, gas-chlor-methane, gas-raw-1, liquid-hydrofluoric-acid, tungstic-acid, nitrogen-dioxide, thermal-water, water-mineralized, gas-formaldehyde, liquid-hydrochloric-acid, gas-allylchlorid, gas-compressed-air, lithia-water, light-oil, alien-poison, mineral-sludge, ferric-chloride-solution, petroleum-gas, gas-ethane

(This is using the internal names, not the l10n'd names, sorry. It's also not sorted, not that it helps much.)

As for what to bus, that's a harder question for which I don't have a good answer. My list for just bob's mods amounts to 40-odd things, and that's not counting electronics, gears, or bearings. In vanilla, I would bus iron and copper plate, stone and brick, coal, plastic, sulfur, gears, batteries, and all three circuit types. That's just way too much to extend to Bob's mods, so I've mostly been playing around with different alternatives to main bus routines.

[hoho]

I've played with both of the mods for quite a while and have yet to come up with a decent idea of mainbus and have usually ened up with a spaghetti to get robots and then just using bots for almost everything.

In my current playthrough I'm trying to have a mainbus of sorts. I'm not very far in but it looks like it'll have dozens of types of items on it eventually. I might segment out smaller parts (circuids, electronics) and put them down "on demand" into places that require these things at higher throughput. I've also thought about building "trees" - branch off a few lines at 90 degree angle to one side in order to do something more specific without cluttering the bus too much.

When including the petrochem mod, there will be a ton of fluids. I have no idea how to build a decent oil/gas area and what stuff should be mainbussed from there yet but it seems there too will have to be a TON of things. I'll just build a small "test setup" somewhere to figure out what to pipe/belt where and only then try to figure out how to fit it to the mainbus. Trying to directly build things connected to the bus will probably be a rather difficult thing to do.

TL;DR - bus is probably the best way to organize any base but with bob's+angel's but it will be MASSIVE. It'll be trivial for it to devolve into a regular spaghetti

[Dramegno]

thanks for the quick reply I was mainly looking for if their was any fluid equivalent to copper coil as far as just make it locally like I might be able to do for saline electrolysis sense the gas outputs can instantly be combined into something else. In that same vein of thinking does it make sense to bus gems? Also does anything need the ore chunks/crystals/purified/etc. outside of the processing area. and should I bus any gem/geode or should I liquefy them on site?

[hoho]

Copper coils? You mean the vanilla wires or the items that get added by Research Overhaul mod?

For stuff like copper wires that take no time to construct, use few types of ingredients and especially, "multiply" item count I try to craft them in-place. E.g copper wires satisfy all of these - they are 0.5s craft, use only one resource type and for each ingredient you get 3 resulting items.

I also craft things like gears and bearings that don't take fluids in-place. In-place crafting of tin wires and even basic electronic components and transistors also makes sense in my opinion. They are all items that take a LOT of belt throughput and are relatively simple to construct.


Here's how my current electronics production area looks like:

electronics.PNG (1.33 MiB) Viewed 14505 times

It's not exactly highly optimized either in terms of throughput or assembler count, it's just something I threw together to get enough stuff produced for the initial base. You can see I'm producing copper cables in-place. That setup can be compressed quite a bit once I'm deeper in research and it would make sense to have it all in place where I e.g produce solar panels or science packs (I use science overhaul mod that drastically alters what's needed for science packs, blue packs require a metric ton of first two tiers of electronic boards and it wouldn't make much sense to belt them through the entire bus).


I don't think I'll be busing gems or any of the intermediate ore products.

I can't remember there being any recipe that uses the intermediates and gems aren't used in that many recipes (IIRC main use is in higher tier modules and laser turrets). One can send gems specifically to the areas that produce those items.

[Dramegno]

I used copper coils as an example because it is an item that can quickly be produced in such numbers that belts are not fast enough, the same with electronic components of Bobs mod fame. Should all filters be made/recycled to where they are being used or does it make more sense to bus them to and foe?

[hoho]

I tend to recycle filters in-place as then I won't need to have a huge number of them traveling around belts.

"In place" here means that I won't belt them to other side of the factory, I'll just have the recycling station near the place the filters are used, not that I have an assembler for each machine using the filters. E.g when I built the stuff requiring filters inside a Factorissimo factory, I recycled the filters inside the same factory. In my current game I plan on not using factories for producing things but I still intend to have filter recycling near the spot they are used.

[Arch666Angel]

You probably want to do a bus for each major feature: Bus for everything happening in refining, bus for everything happening in petrochem, bus for bobelectronics and then the "main" bus with everything else.

And there is this awesome mod now, which will help learning my mods a lot: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/MrDoomah ... t-used-for

[hoho]

You probably want to do a bus for each major feature: Bus for everything happening in refining, bus for everything happening in petrochem, bus for bobelectronics and then the "main" bus with everything else.

This is basically the "tree of buses" idea I talked about earlier


Also, for the mainbus, with Bob's + Angel's it needs to be insanely wide to fit the major stuff on it. I'd suggest you only build on one side of the bus for almost all the time. I originally left about 4 chunks of space for the bus but ran out of it fast by the time I reached third tier electronic chips

[Breith]

You probably want to do a bus for each major feature: Bus for everything happening in refining, bus for everything happening in petrochem, bus for bobelectronics and then the "main" bus with everything else

I use something similar. Multiple areas dedicated to smelting / petrochem / angel's ore processing and moving to my main bus only a minimum amount of stuff. I also try to add 4-6 tides before I really start my assembling machines line to be able to move easily a few component from one line to another without having to bus it. For now, the results are quite good.

[Nilaus]

I personally find a main bus very useful for a while. Angels is primarily before the bus area and Bobs in on the bus area.
At a certain point I find that the number of materials I need to keep on the bus due to Bobs outweighs the benefits when you need to cross 15+ belts to get it to the machine. I have opted for lots and lot of robots end game (pushing 10k now) to keep everything available everywhere. If you want inspiration on what to do and not to do you can take a look at how I mess it up in my campaign in the signature

[aeros1]

Secret of bussing is knowing how long you need this or another buss, and not prolifirate it too far. Like iron gears at some point become useless and got replaced with other gears. So you don't need to buss them too far. Same with ores. Might help with buss reduction.

[Requia]

Something to keep in mind with a bob's bus: you never need more than one lane per item. I've pushed one rocket/minute off a single lane. I've not penetrated too far into Angel's but I think that'll be the same outside of petrochem stuff because of the loops.

[Hannu]

I used copper coils as an example because it is an item that can quickly be produced in such numbers that belts are not fast enough, the same with electronic components of Bobs mod fame. Should all filters be made/recycled to where they are being used or does it make more sense to bus them to and foe?

Bus depends on your personal opinions. Bot based logistics is probably the most effective in terms of material and area costs and player labor. Especially because Bob have very fast bots and charging stations. But at least in my opinion it is very boring solution and I want to make belts and buses. I make separate units for functions, which have own internal bus systems. Ore processing units process Angel's ores to crush, chunks etc. Metal ore refineries process them to metal ores. Several metal refineries process them to metal plates, which are transported to my main base. I make also other high volume intermediate products, chemicals and oil products separately.

I have three rows of cells (about 60 x 60) and two 16 belt wide bus areas between them in my main base. Other bus is mainly for electronics and modules. It have copper, tin, gold, aluminium, glass, silicon and plastic input and later components, circuits and module boards. I use divided belts for low volume stuff (like aluminium, glass, green and blue circuits etc.) Only copper and solder have two belts and I should make second belt for transistors too. Other bus have iron, gears, steel, titanium, aluminium, circuits, stone and stone bricks etc. entity manufacturing stuff. I have automated building cells for highers tear of every production entity.

Rarely used stuff is transported by bots. Like gems, tungsten, many alloys and intermediates from them. Circuits, metals and intermediates are also in logistic system so that I do not have to make belt for one piece per hour. I have divided entity manufacturing by tiers. First group have iron, iron gears, steel, two lowest cricuits etc. Next group have steel gears, bearings and little more advanced stuff. Then comes aluminium based stuff, titanium based stuff and tungsten based stuff. Bots transport low tier entities to next level and bring rarely used items. I have circulating belt with up to 8 ingredients and circuit mechanism to keep reasonable amounts of everything on belt.

[Northgate]

I really like the bus system in Factorio and specially with Bobs and Angels. It's the main fun for me to figure out what to bus and for how long.

I'm currently using a 32 lane bus system that is extendable if necessary.:



I'm currently also experimenting with a ore bus to bring the raw ore to the refining states and the refined ore to the sorters and the sorted to the smelting. But I haven't decided on a setup yet. Anyone having a good setup?

[Breith]

Mmm... It's really limited.... The point to have a bus is to be able to build a factory where you can easily increase the production by expending the processing area in one direction (whatever the direction). With your design, your processing area is limited in all four direction, so... how do you expand?
I guess you can add a processing block, which you have to do anyway because of the limitation of the throughput of the belt that can be extended only to a certain point (e.g. it's hard to have more than 25 electronic assembly machine that make copper wire without running dry of copper in the middle of the line), but in the screenshot you posted, the available place for extension is way too limited.

I'm currently using something similar to what I described weeks ago. With some modification: I had to add robots and request chests to resupply the main bus at some point and some "income" lanes (e.g. the iron line I was talking about for copper wires).
My bus is currently more than 30 tiles tall... I think I'll try to use hybrid line to resupply my main bus without having to add more lanes (I did that for the Trains - Ore Processing area highway and it works well).

[Northgate]

Mmm... It's really limited.... The point to have a bus is to be able to build a factory where you can easily increase the production by expending the processing area in one direction (whatever the direction). With your design, your processing area is limited in all four direction, so... how do you expand?
I guess you can add a processing block, which you have to do anyway because of the limitation of the throughput of the belt that can be extended only to a certain point (e.g. it's hard to have more than 25 electronic assembly machine that make copper wire without running dry of copper in the middle of the line), but in the screenshot you posted, the available place for extension is way too limited.

Not sure whether that came through in the post, but I can extend the bus to the left. That area is free and it's soon moving into a nonforested desert area. And if I feel it's getting too long, I will do a 90 degree corner towards the south with the whole bus. I can do that pretty much infinitely and it will result in a spiral form. So there plenty of room to scale in case I need it.

The border you see to the left is just because I had to crop the picture at some point, but the area isn't ending there.

[Breith]

Yes, I understood that. From my point of view, the issue is that the expansion should be bi directional: to the left to add more blocks and to another direction to increase the number of assembly machines on a given block (until the belt throughput is not enough to sustains more production).
You do not have the second dimension. The only way you can extend is to the left. And... well on my opinion, it's not efficient because with only 18 tiles tall your Processing Area 1 will never reach the limit of the belt.

Why add a additional block when you can just extend the existent? It's way better for logistic and bus management.

I'm not sure I'm really clear... I'll post a screenshot of my bus to show what I'm mean as soon as I'm back home.

[Northgate]

I think I get your point. Your saying it's more efficient to add additional assemblies vertically than add a second column of assemblies next to the first one.

I actually try to keep my production of each product as low as possible since I'm automating pretty much everything (I'm playing with BasicKit). I want to avoid overproduction as much as possible because I'm playing with RSO and I still haven't discovered additional Saphirite deposites. I feel the current amount of space is sufficient for pretty much anything. I will need 2 columns for the blue science production.

If I would want to be able to also expand vertically I would have to resign on walking paths anyway since they are constraining as well. How do you deal with that?

[Light]

I believe this is what Breith means:



However, one answer is kind of apparent. By doing a zig zag within the processing area to expand upon it.



It makes for a very condensed but still functional processing line, as the work is condensed into blocks rather than lengthy rows.