Factorio Forums

When setting up a central bus factory, does it make sense to convert the smelted iron / copper at once into steel & copper line and feed this by belts into the central bus line?
And if so - what would be the exact ratio smelter / machine for a setup - anyone?

Putting copper cables on a belt has been a bad idea for a long time – maybe that needs a reevaluation now that inserter stack size bonus has gone, but still: since a copper plate produces two cables you are essentially halving your transportation capacity for no good reason. (You still DO have to transport copper plates because some recipes require them directly.)

Putting steel and green circuits on the bus however is definitely not silly. They both consume significantly more raw materials than they output, and they are both used in a wide variety of recipes. Of course, more things on belts weakens the idea of a central bus somewhat, and they are both not too complicated to produce on-site, so you will find different opinions about this.

For steel production, the ratio is actually exactly one (iron ore smelter per steel smelter).

brunzenstein wrote:When setting up a central bus factory, does it make sense to convert the smelted iron / copper at once into steel & copper line and feed this by belts into the central bus line?
And if so - what would be the exact ratio smelter / machine for a setup - anyone?

I wouldn't do that because I sometimes find myself low on copper on the bus, usually during bursts in circuit production. Not saying that my design is well-though-out, but I tend to have two belts for iron plates, two belts for copper plates and single belt for everything else (steel, green circuits, red circuits, batteries, plastics). Here's the picture (for some reason batteries were not put on a bus). Blue circuits are ok for bots to handle. Gears and copper cables are always crafted on-site.

This is what I have on my very first bus ever (in nr of belts, some blue, mostly red but might upgrade later):
2x iron plates
2x copper plates
2x green circuits
1x red circuits
2x steal
1x plastics (but it ends at red circuit prod. this might be a mistake)
1x batteries
2x gears
1x blue circuits
1x tube of lub
1x tube of acid

and I have 1 empty line going in the other direction upstream for me to run on.

My bus:


So gears are mostly taken from the buss (except for right at the beginning, for the transport belt and inserters for red science) and copper wire is produced on-site.

Things I would change if doing it again (there is more, but that's unrelated to your question or earlier comments):
- Weirdly enough I'm not having trouble with that trainline + "end of bus" PAX station running right through my bus. The trainline was there first so my belts just go underneath it. No problems. PAX station itself could have been just a tad lower or higher though.
- I think 1 line for gears should be enough, not 2. Produce them on site as suggested before. Not sure if better.
- 1 steel line is probably enough but I haven't gotten to rocket building yet. So this might change drastically :p
- I would upgrade copper and iron to 3 blue belts each. Actually, I'm going to do this in this game also since I have the space for it. Biggest consumer of both is green circuits.

As for my smelter area:
For copper and iron I have 2 long smelter arrays. 1 array consists of 1 blue output belt with 21 electric furnaces on each side. That means I have 42 smelters per array and 84 smelters per resource. For steel I have just 24 smelters in total. Same setup but just 1 short smelting array.
All smelters have speed mods (lvl 2 for now, need to get more artifacts). I didn't do any math on the number of smelters, I just built more as I needed them. There are no beacons (no space).