In my first playthrough, my factory wasn't just spaghetti, it was a Lovecraftian, non-euclidian, labyrinthine mess of belts and pipes. The bus has helped quite a bit, I must say
Here I am having played factorio several 100 hrs and still enjoy watching something as basic as a main bus tutorial. That's how much I love this game. It all started with awesome videos like this though. Another great video
Haha, glad to hear you still enjoy tutorials after quite a while playing. I'm the same way. Always something new to learn! And thank you, that means slot. :)
@@PabloEscobar-ws8rz as a 50 hour player (aka noob), I can confirm that restarting is easier as the foundation of your spaghetti base will probably be very bad.
@@PabloEscobar-ws8rz I just store everything in dozens upon dozens of steal boxes after ripping everything down. Anything I don't need to keep will be destroyed using a woodeb box. It takes time but it gives you all the tools you need to get right into making a better base.
@@CraftingTableMC I disagree. My jumpstart base is always a mess, but it's just a base designed to get me basic resources so I can build a proper base. Once I've got a good enough supply of the materials I need to build a proper base(inserters, miners, smelters, assemblers, etc) I can properly plan out my base, but I hate trying to build a larger factory if I don't have everything I need or have to worry about breaking an existing working design to fit something new in. Also lets me jump to red belts for resources which means I don't need to wait for them to filter down to where I need them if I boost production.
As a rule of thumb, if a build has a short crafting time (like Iron Gear Wheels or Copper Cables) it is generally better to craft them locally where needed rather than added to the bus.
@@ragreff5603 Unless you want an entire bus full of copper cables, it's more efficient to bus copper plates to the green circuits and crafts cables there locally for direct insertion.
@@cfworthy I know this is an old comment BUT how do you get green circuits on the bus without complicating things?? Arent green circuits made from copper and steel which are also on the bus? Do you just craft them near the furnaces and put them on the bus?
@@capncook2006 Yes, green circuits are made from copper cables and iron plates, the former being made locally at your circuit production, the latter should most definitely be on your bus already. Nothing complicated about it. Perhaps I'm misinterpreting your question, but your main bus should grow as your factory does. You don't need all your factories producing goods at the beginning of the bus. Add lanes as needed. Ahah! After thinking it over, I think I understand your complication. Although the green circuits have a short crafting time, the demand for them will be so great that for most people it's nice to have the circuit production in one place. You absolutely could craft circuits locally, wherever they are needed. Bare in mind that depending on the size of your factory, you may need multiple full belts of copper and/or iron dedicated directly to your circuit production.
Liked, commented and subscribed for the simple fact that you said in the beginning that everybody should play the game their way instead of talking down inefficient playstyles
That honestly makes me really happy to hear! It is my goal to explain things an easy to understand manner, so it's great that it's the case for you! To growing the factory!
Another aspect useful to keep in mind is in what order along the bus (starting from your furnaces) you should put your builds, I usually try to put earlier along the bus those items that are used in most advanced recipes, for instance, green circuits are used in a lot of later more complex products, so that is probably the first build I'll set up along the bus, you are also going to need tons of rails, but that is either an end product (destined to be used in base construction) or fed straight into science and nothing else, so my rail build will most likely be towards the end of the bus near that science build. This reminds me I don't see stone ore or brick in that bus, you are going to be building a bunch of rail and wall at some point so I would set up one bus belt for half ore and half brick stone. Gears quite honestly I produce in-situ always so no belt for that, and plastic is used almost exclusively in red circuit so I usually just produce it near to where the red circuit build is. I do bring along oil gas and lube parallel to the main belt bus with underground pipes, this allows me to produce oil derived products like batteries near their respective consumption builds.
that's an awesome tip. i'm on my first playthrough so i didnt know what would be used where..., i have way too many things on the bus, going in both directions 😆😆
my lightbulb moment was when you said, in reguards to spacing, "we would need to underground the copper" or something to that effect. I had always been worried to do 4 lanes because I couldn't understand how to get things from the middle lanes. It never occured to me to drop the bus lanes I wasn't pulling off of down and once theyre down you have room a plenty. I only ever thought of underground lanes as a way to go under an obstacle, not a way to reposition an entire section of something. still the same "thing" but i think you get wat i mean
I could really use a short tutorial on prioritizing what to build in the early game and maybe a blueprint for items needed for expansion in the early game (inserters, assemblers, belts, etc)
As a new player some time ago, I struggled with balancing the draw of materials from a multi-belt bus. It might be good to give people a steer on balancers - for me at least the optimum configuration of splitters to achieve what I wanted was not obvious, and one still sees several different strategies from different players. The simplest is, I believe, always to split off the nearest side (that would be the righthand side in this video) and then use splitters upstream to bring material from the further belts. Also, it's often the case that a production unit will need a mixed belt of e.g. green and red circuits. There are neat ways of mixing the belt mid-bus, without drawing two full lanes off and mixing them at the "roadside".
Thanks for the comment and thoughts! It seems you aren't the only one who would like a video on balancing and splitting off the bus, so I'll do one on that in the near future. I even struggle with it myself sometimes. It can be tricky. You are right though, that splitting from the the close side and then using more Splitters upstream is the way to go. But the configuration in which you do that is important for it to work properly. I'll definitely cover that in my video on it. :)
Last year, something occurred to me: Factorio is to some extent about compressing low-value materials into higher-value materials. 2 Belts of Iron Plates becomes 1 Belt of Gear Wheels. So 2:1. 1.5 Belt of Copper Plates and 1 Belt of Iron Plates, 2.5 Belts in total, becomes 1 Belt of Electronic Circuits. So 2.5:1, 5 Belts of Iron Plates becomes 1 Belt of Steel Plates. Thus 5:1.
Ahh, but what's the ratio of iron+copper+coal:satellites-with-also-supplied-silos? :D [Hmm, now I want to do a factory where I have a compressed blue belt of satellites, feeding constantly-launching silos, and just emptying out at the end. Hmmmmmmmm. Will I bother? We'll see!
@@DavidLindes One blue Belt of Satelites (45)s) = 27862.5 yellow Belts Copper, 25305 yellow Belts Iron (including the Iron Plates, needet for Steel), 2100 yellow Belts Steel, 1350 yellow Belts Coal, 1311538.462 units of crude Oil and 3144038.462 units of Water. Have fun with that xD.
1) because blue undergrounds can travel 8 spots, If you INTEND to play past the first rocket launch, or build a megabase, you should triple/quadruple your initial-width needs of the bus: If you plan to start with 4 lines of iron and copper each, give your safe SPACE for 12 or even 16 lanes of each. And when intending to go for mega-base-size saves, I suggest either having single-side production (where the side opposite of factories/utilization is used is for insertion-balancing and rail network), or utilizing a split bus (where you use almost twice the size of a normal/early-mid-game bus, and where you put Iron/Copper/Green Circuits on the outside lanes of each, and rarer materials and liquids are sent through the middle lanes, which can be shared with space for roboports and power distribution. Also, something a lot of people forget is to give themself SPACE for traveling up and down the bus. A dedicated single-lane or double lane rail for a train shuttle can be useful here, but you need to plan for it. Also, leave yourself room for roboports. 2) Leave space between factory areas to limit the times you have to demolish and re-place because you didn't leave yourself room for something you'd like to change. also, getting into the habbit of leaving yourself space helps when you do have spaghetti factories-, especially leaving space between/around large builds to enable insertion-balancing of rail-delivered resources. Also, setting up a clean power distribution line along your bus makes logic-driven control of sections of your factory easier, and can be useful for setting up a dashboard.
I think I'll enjoy your videos like this because I literally have not played through to finish a vanilla game. A lot of videos about Factorio claiming to be tutorials and guides presume a lot of prior experience and seem to be aimed more at refreshing memories of past victories. Like I've never set up a train station or played with the combinators to detect the state of things and a video about trains that claims to be a tutorial better not start assuming I know how to string the red and green wires to count the quantity in a tank or something unless that was covered in the previous episode. Like that. I've been to train "tutorial" videos that just say "download my blueprint and plop it down and you're done!" That doesn't teach me a thing.
You made me chuckle with your road analogy for the "Main bus" i always assumed it was called Main Bus because of the computing term "Bus" which is the main data/ power route on a component board or in computer hardware, e.g. USB - Universal Serial Bus... I like your Highways analogy more haha
manufacturing/crafting (whatever anyone calls it) on one side leaves the other side open for more smelting to refill iron/copper/steel lanes. gave me a good idea for a next factory. thanks!
There are many ways to do things. I do build stuff on both sides, but not randomly. Circuits and oil industry all goes on one side. That way I can feed things directly into each other. The green circuits or plastic for red and blue circuits for example don't even go on the main bus. That's also stuff that will get beacons later. Whereas with science I use 3 PM3 and 1 SM3 instead.
In my first playthrough I actually started designing with a "main bus" in mind, I had the right core idea but didn't execute probably I didn't know what Matt's I'd need and totally put all my lanes together. =) This helpede clean it up thank you!!!
* One thing I find very useful is to not run the copper and iron for circuit production over the main bus. That way you don't need necessarily need 8 lanes of iron and 8 lanes of copper or whatever some people have. At the beginning I still do it, but when I scale up they get their own belts. * It's also nice to have a fluid bus with water, crude oil, lubricant and acid
Very good point! Giving circuits their own dedicated lines separate from the bus is usually a really good idea. A fluid bus can be quite good too depending how your base is later out.
My last base i build i did a dedicated green circuit build in front of the bus with dedicated smelters so i could produce 4 full red belts of green circuits with steel smelters and then pushed it into the bus. Was massive, had a huge space requirement and made it insane with trains and train stackers but was incredible to see swing in action. If i can find it again, i'll post a picture off the map for that area of the base.
I liked the idea for a while but never really thought it worked out well in practice outside about purple science. Building a more distributed, modular factory has always worked better for me. The macro transport level of linking together those small production facilities is really easy with trains.
Thanks. I just started Factorio. Never played a game like this before, so my for my first bike I just one big transport that snakes through all of my buildings. It was a mess.
the 4 wide gap also means you can fit artillery in the middle so it protects a radius aroubd the entire bus, fed by a belt or by robit, whichever youd prefer
Thank you for making this video! I watched Nilaus masterclass on main buses but it seemed more like an overview, unlike this video which is more in-depth!
Perhaps for another tutorial: How to route things off and onto the bus in an optimal way, such as if its in the middle two of four lanes, how would i build that splitter? balancing etc. what's a good way to create a shared belt? how to avoid spaghetti
I'm also wondering what the best way to lay out the production of the materials to go onto the bus should be? And how do you get a consistent flow of 4 lanes of a material
Putting Gears on the bus is only useful if you're building everything off of a single bus. I tend to separate my bases (starting in the mid-game and beyond) into two areas: research and infrastructure. Each base has its own main bus, eventually fed by trains that will drop off material to whichever one needs materials. If you do that, what you find is that most uses of gears are for infrastructure: belts, inserters, etc. Research materials only need gears for Green and Red packs, which are not what's going to be slowing down your research. You can easily build gears in the places where you use them, rather than funneling them on down the bus.
I always build my facilities on one side of the bus so i can expand my bus on the other side if needed, or I can get end-game resources to the beginning of the bus (for whatever reason).
These are great, keep them coming. Something I think you should add to all the tutorial, is to say in the start or in at the end, is to remind them that its okay to restart now and then, and its totally normal to do so, if you f*cked up, or can see a improvement in your setup.
I stopped using a Main Bus for my starting base when I realized that I cannot transport enough material on it for my science needs (60science/minute). I switched to feed every science production just as needed (the calculator helps a lot for that). It detangled my production/science layout and made it easier to transition to a megabase.
If you always build production on one side of the bus, you can always expand the bus the other way. If your bus is up and down, production to the left, and expand the bus to the right.
As someone who consistently never leaves enough room for anything, I'd also suggest that you leave a good amount of space between the bus and the various productions lines, just in case you need to route something around that doesn't fit on the bus. At least 10 spaces but probably more in reality.
@@schwarzerritter5724 these days I just do a small bus to get going and then use trains for big volumes. Klonans Transport Drones Mod can also move amazingly high volumes of material without having to worry about putting things in a straight line. It suncs up well with train deliveries too.
@@scottsummers819 The bus of my first factory was one lane for iron, one for copper and one half lane for steel, gears, green chips an copper wire. After realizing there was no reason to put copper wire on it, I made one full belt of green chips and added another lane to copper and iron. Then all this other stuff came, so I completely abandoned my first factory and just build a new one somewhere else.
I like to do a mix. I don't like one ridiculous factory to use one bus with 8 belts of copper and such. So what I do is I do modules and connect those modules by train. Inside those modules I use the bus concept. For example for the gray science module I import bricks, iron, copper, coal and steel, put those things on a bus of kinds and then out comes my science packs. This eliminates a large part of the spacing problem. Also it's not efficient at all. You have a lot of useless belts doing nothing when they could be short. What it allows you to do is mainly organization and make sure things stay extendable. You have a common way of doing things that will always work the same. You can always add more to your offshoots if you need to, allowing for infinite extension (so long as the belt capacity is great enough) It also has the benefit of making sure that every factory at least at some point gets some resources, even though something earlier in the bus may gobble things up at a pace that exceeds the inflow of items. It also is a good indicator if you have enough resources to begin with. If the belts are empty you need more. The bus also comes with some fairly substantial drawbacks: The main one is space requirement. You need a lot of belts to run past machines that don't use the resources on them. For example your plastic belt is going to run past red, green, gray, blue and purple science only needed for the yellow one as well as any helper assembly machines that produce logistics items (belts, inserters, machines that don't go into science, etc). This has a lot of plastic sitting on the belt, not being used. Then if you find yourself not having enough throughput and you are already at blue belts (say you found out that 2 blue belts of copper plates aren't enough and you need more) it can become very hard to widen the bus. If you have machines on either side of the bus it can get very messy to split the belts off. If you misplanned and want to add an additional item to the bus (say you decided to ship plastic in after researching oil), it can be again very hard to widen the bus. It bottlenecks throughput for high demand items such as circuit boards through belts. Having your entire factory be fed off one bus will make it (the bus) enormous. to the point where you have more floorspace dedicated to high volume material transportation than actual assembly machines. And belts use a lot of resources to make, especially the higher tier ones. It also creates a lot of delay. An item has to travel down the belt before it can be used. If you have a fresh shipment of ore coming in, the iron plates will need a substantial amount of time, possibly even minutes before any iron is seen at the end of your bus. It also creates a lot of buffer that you might not want, unless you smartly control it with the circuit network. For example if you have a belt full of nuclear fuel you have a massive stockpile of it just sitting on a belt if you run it to your reactor. For this specific instance logistics robots might be useful. I however hate them (they are just cheating, avoiding all throughput and routing problems at the cost of power and initial material cost), so I opted for the circuit network solution for that specific case. Buses have their convenience in organizing things neatly. But now I like to make a little module type base for smelting, mining and every type of science pack. Just name all the supply stations the same and disable them whenever a train can not be fully filled with signals and have one train for every unloading station ferrying in goods. Use small buses inside those mini factories to make things convenient and extendable. It also helps with planning your factory. You can assume the train has infinite throughput and then just build however many buildings you want to get the desired item output per second and have the exact right ratio of machinery for your requirements a lot easier since everything is nice and contained without dozens of machines using the same resource. Trains are cheap and have basically infinite throughput.
Gears on the bus was more useful when science needed an extreme amount of gears. You used to have gun turrets and mining drills there. With those removed the gear needs for most things are pretty modest. Now most gears are needed in belt production and that can simply receive its own dedicated iron belts
@@DavidLindes Yes, but you still don't need that many of them in most places. I give green circuits and possibly belt production its own iron lines. That way 4 belts for the rest are more than enough. I simply don't need to optimize things that much
That is a lot of pressing the button (in which ever way your going). I assume you have to stop every so often and build/refine more fuel. That said I don't think any one is going to build a factory that uses 4 million square tiles of space. Even if they could their computer would melt.
@@scottsummers819 100% you will run out of ram before anything else, every single tile that you explore has to be loaded into RAM, so as you build out further and further your ram requirements go up!
For me the smelting is built as the end cap for my bus. The materials come off the smelters in the same direction as the bus and they all merge down into the size as the bus. I also build on both sides of the bus. Though it is usually an oil processing area for the beginning of the other side and eventually science and rocket. After that I start to work on my real base. Anything up to launching the first few rockets is just a starter base for me
Great video! The structure is a lot better than the previous video, keep up the good work! I usually don't go for a bus but go for spaghetti and I can tell you spaghet bases can be more or equally efficient as main busses. I usually have a dedicated mal and smelter for each science pack which makes it super messy but makes it easier to have perfect ratios and easier to expand. I liked the part where you covered the steel smelting ratios bc newer players might overestimate their steel production. I also learnt why having your items in a specific order is more effecient. I hadn't really thought of that. Last do you have a separate green circuits production for red circuits or do you use the main bus. I think having a separate production is better and healthier for the main bus but I'm not sure. Anyways hope to see more of these videos.
Thank you! I'm glad most people (including myself) consider this to be better than the previous episode. I do want improve on each one of possible. The form of spaghetti you build with sounds like it certainly can be quite efficient. What I had in mind when mentioning spaghetti not being as efficient, was the style where you have all your smelting in one place and then just run like 1 or 2 belts from it throughout the whole base without splitting off or evening distributing the resources. But that's what I love about Factorio, there are so many different ways to play and methods to build even within the same "category". There will definitely be more videos in this series in the near future!
I feel like im a freak. I put just about everything on the bus. Yes its massive and probably inefficient but its so nice being able to line up assemblers and not worry about making the intermittent parts every time. And to me its just eye candy seeing a massive main bus
hey this might be a stupid question but how do i get resources from the belts in the middle? not of the whole thing but lets say you have 4 iron belts, how to i get resources off the middle 2? ive tried to figure it out on my own but i either stop the belt i need completely or stop the outside belts. any solutions?
In good cities there are no 10 lane highways. That is terrible city design. Run a train or tram down that road instead and you have a room for a row of houses now.
You probably figured it out by now - but for anyone else reading this, you use three splitters. Splitter one swaps the two lanes, so that the one you need is on the outside, and accessible. Then you do the standard splitter + underground belt thing to take it. Then, the third splitter puts it back to normal. I made an image so you can see: imgur.com/a/I1XLsBB
i'm on my first playthrough and i intuitively made a main bus, but my mistake was to put EVERYTHING on there 😆 the thing got like 30 lanes wide and ran out of space to expand
brand new to the game and 2 questions I had that weren't answered in this: i see you used the splitter to pull from the outer belts on a 4 lane bus, how do you get from the middle 2 lanes? extended robot arms? obviously you dump from smelters/assemblers into the bus and thats how things initially get on the bus, does teh bus loop? like at the start of the bus is there a joining of a belt from the creation of the materials and a loopback from the "end" of the bus? or do you just put all that stuff in boxes at the end? i just got through the tutorial and up to the train station level so i am new to using splitters at all and being able to organize arms dropping/pulling specifically from left/right of a single belt is perplexing
If you make your bus 4 lanes wide, how are you supposed to use splitters to get resources from the middle two lanes? That makes no sense to me and you didnt explain it
You use splitters from one of the middle lanes to the outside lane you want balanced. You should be using splitters across all 4 lanes to keep the belt balanced out.
I'm just starting to play and today I started my BUS with only copper and Iron with coal being limited to the smelters and energy production, It's pretty neat and I left plenty of space for several rows of belts. Now I wonder If in the future I could mix BUS and spaguetti, like having a BUS in spiral with the rocket base in the center and factories in the outer border, I bet it would take a lot of space.
I think probably my let's play series first. This video isn't really complex and is can be applied to all parts of the game, but I think the concepts will make a bit more sense if you go through the let's play tutorial series first. :)
How do you allocate the red and blue chips off the main bus when they're sandwiched between steel and plastic? There's no space to put a splitter or an off lane.
I found doing 3 space between each band of resources on the buss allows me some creativity and fault tolerance when diverging resources to where they need to go along the bus. After trying it, there is no way I am going back to just two empty lanes
Still in my first play through and I’ve automated blue science and have started researching stuff with it, but red circuits and oil and stuff and blue circuits just doesn’t work with my factory set up. My setup is too squeezed and there’s automation everywhere instead of long belts leading to an away area where I would make a specific product
Great Content. Did get some pointers. Having said that, its a bit waffle. Considering that we're talking efficiency as the main goal, maybe that should extend to explanations. On the other hand Nilaus fits in too much content, and I have "wait.....what?" moments. The Goldilocks zone would be somewhere in between...
Hey, I'm a new player as of just 2 weeks ago and I'm running into a numbers issue. As you say you will eventually need 48 furnaces for iron on a yellow belt. 48 furnaces puts out 48 iron BUT if a yellow belt only carries 15/s, don't you need a faster belt to handle the load?? Only other way would be to separate the belts inside your smelter array and that looks funky splitting or just breaking furnaces up inside an array to make room for 3 belts to exit. This isn't like satisfactory where you can go vertical when you exceed a belt capacity. That would be a massive bottleneck of iron that just cant get thru to where it needs to go because the belt capacity is 300% overloaded. Just from the start... So what's the gist here? The numbers just don't match from where I'm looking at it.
Hey, welcome to the game! So it's 48 stone furnaces total to fill a yellow belt with iron, so 24 per side of the belt. Remember to factor in the craft time of the item (in this case iron), a long with the machine/smelter speed. So a stone smelter has a speed of 1, but iron takes 3.2 seconds to smelt. So 48x3.2x1 is 15. :) Hope that helps clear things up! If/when you upgrade to red belt, since it's conveniently twice the speed of yellow , that means you can just do double the amount of stone furnaces to fill it, or better yet, just upgrade the 48 you had for yellow belt, into steel furnaces since they are twice the speed of stone ones.
my main question is I never see how the bus is fed and where they end. I also find it complicated to try to build one due to where the resources are and the terrain. Once you start a base, its hard to get a bus going. and until you get your base started and have resources, its hard to think about where or how you will build the bus. For me, the difficulty is more about the planning part and getting it started in a way to support what I am trying to build and where I put things. I also like trains so I have been trying to figure out how to create a proper train depot to drop off all the materials to try to start a bus.
the bus doesn't "end" anywhere everything is done on the side and the beginning is just a train depo or smelting setup. terrain isn't an issue because you can deconstruct or land fill as needed.
The bus won't contain all the materials you plan for it at the beginning. Most things beyond plates get created from materials on the bus and then routed back onto the bus. Usually they only need to go further down the bus, but occasionally you need to use a splitter and run them the opposite direction up the bus to get to something you built earlier, like a mall.
Something missing from this that I would consider important: How much is a lane of X worth? Okay yeah you need 4 lanes of iron/copper, but is that factoring in the shitload you're going to be consuming building green circuits? Does that factor in constant production of intermediate items like gears as well? What about stuff getting built at a mall? How do you quantify this stuff without getting lost in a calculator? This is what I tend to struggle with the most when I play, even after 650 hours, and it eventually just grinds my desire to keep playing to a halt. :(
Stuff built at a mall should not be a big concern, it is used more sporadically than what goes into science which can be consistently consumed, I usually leave the mall at the end of the bus for this reason, so it consumes only what other builds didn't, and a full 4 red belt bus worth of iron and 4 of copper should be quite enough for any main science /starter base, if you need more than that this will only come up in late mid game and by then you can start plotting a whole second base elsewhere if you need to go big. That is playing mostly vanilla, this does not apply to complex mods like bobs or angels.
I give dedicated iron and copper lines to green and red circuits. That cuts down a lot on what needs to be on the main bus. The mall also eventually gets dedicated iron lines for part of the gear production (for belts).
What's this 117/234 thing? I'm pretty sure it's 120/240... exactly 5x what it is for iron. I think that's probably residual from old ratios, before they changed smelting to match the new (yellow) belt speed of 15 items per second instead of 13.333... ratios changed then, so I could easily imagine 117/234 being correct before, but I'm pretty sure it's just 120/240 now. Open to being corrected, though!
Hmm I was under the impression that with the belt changes, they also changed the smelting time of stuff so the ratios wouldn't change. I'll have to check up on that though! I could definitely be wrong!
Xterminator I think that's mostly true, but it used to be that the 24/48 number was an approximation. It was closer to 23.5/47 or something? But people didn't want to do asymmetric builds, so they rounded up. And then your steel numbers are just without (or with less) rounding. But I think when they made these changes, they evened it out. I could be wrong, though... do the math. :D
If copper and iron are 4 lanes and you're only pulling from the outer most lane, what's the inner 2 lanes for? I'm assuming you just add splitter/balances farther down to recover the 50% split?
Ok but with the line with the steel, red circuit & blue circuit, how would I get the blue circuit out of that bus you made? If I put a spliter it'll encroach on the other belt.
@@TrueXiarno good question! You would use an underground belt on the line where the splitter would encroach on, that way you could place the splitter on the blue circuit line without it encroaching on the other belt. Hope that makes sense written out lol
i dont understand how you tap into the middle 2 lanes of the 4 lane "highway". i see you use a splitter to tap into the outside, but what about the middle?
Basically yes. Or using certain split off designs that pull from all lanes equal each time you pull off for a build. The more you add to your factory the harder it will be to supply it with just 1 lane worth of resources.
It just takes time. I’ve built around 10 factory’s. I’m telling you. By the time you build that many that launch rockets, you will get it. It takes a lot of planing.
Next time, can you make a video going over train bases? I'm having trouble transitioning from a smaller base to a larger base with that being the main transportation.
Now I see how to pull off something from the side like steel or plastic in the column of (plastic, blue, red, steel) but how do you easily pull off the middle ones? Just go with undergrounding the main bus for a while? Also for the iron and copper ones wondering if you go with some splitter checkpoints along the bus to even out and keep them all filled. I will check out some of your later game videos to try and see the answers myself but this video got me wondering.
Good questions! For pulling from the middle, you may need to underground a little bit of the main bus, but then should be able to just underground your pull off line across the bus using the two spaces left between each set of 4 lanes. I'll try to show it in my tutorial let's play on EP10. As for splitter check points, I usually don't bother. Once I get 4 lanes of a material, everytime I do a split off, I make sure it's balanced, so I don't need to do it again until next time I split off. Hope that makes sense. :)
In my first playthrough, my factory wasn't just spaghetti, it was a Lovecraftian, non-euclidian, labyrinthine mess of belts and pipes. The bus has helped quite a bit, I must say
But some how you were able to look at that horror and see it's true form and not go mad.
i just used the resources frome the spaghetti factory to build a main bus one
But was it Kafkaesque?
Me on the tutorial
Same bro before realizing concept of main bus i was just a monkey with a stone 😢
Here I am having played factorio several 100 hrs and still enjoy watching something as basic as a main bus tutorial. That's how much I love this game. It all started with awesome videos like this though. Another great video
Haha, glad to hear you still enjoy tutorials after quite a while playing. I'm the same way. Always something new to learn!
And thank you, that means slot. :)
Played 600+hours and never did a bus, now I am just starting to collect information for building my first one :D
Me, 30h in my first gameplay: Well, guess it's time to throw all that out and start again!
You probably should've ripped everything up an restarted with the stuff you already had
@@PabloEscobar-ws8rz as a 50 hour player (aka noob), I can confirm that restarting is easier as the foundation of your spaghetti base will probably be very bad.
@@CraftingTableMC ok
@@PabloEscobar-ws8rz
I just store everything in dozens upon dozens of steal boxes after ripping everything down. Anything I don't need to keep will be destroyed using a woodeb box. It takes time but it gives you all the tools you need to get right into making a better base.
@@CraftingTableMC
I disagree. My jumpstart base is always a mess, but it's just a base designed to get me basic resources so I can build a proper base.
Once I've got a good enough supply of the materials I need to build a proper base(inserters, miners, smelters, assemblers, etc) I can properly plan out my base, but I hate trying to build a larger factory if I don't have everything I need or have to worry about breaking an existing working design to fit something new in. Also lets me jump to red belts for resources which means I don't need to wait for them to filter down to where I need them if I boost production.
As a rule of thumb, if a build has a short crafting time (like Iron Gear Wheels or Copper Cables) it is generally better to craft them locally where needed rather than added to the bus.
But then you-ll have to manually keep resuppying them and that's no bueno.
@@ragreff5603 Unless you want an entire bus full of copper cables, it's more efficient to bus copper plates to the green circuits and crafts cables there locally for direct insertion.
I can get crafting copper cables but gears are so widely used that it's nice to have them on 2 lanes
@@cfworthy I know this is an old comment BUT how do you get green circuits on the bus without complicating things?? Arent green circuits made from copper and steel which are also on the bus? Do you just craft them near the furnaces and put them on the bus?
@@capncook2006 Yes, green circuits are made from copper cables and iron plates, the former being made locally at your circuit production, the latter should most definitely be on your bus already. Nothing complicated about it. Perhaps I'm misinterpreting your question, but your main bus should grow as your factory does. You don't need all your factories producing goods at the beginning of the bus. Add lanes as needed.
Ahah! After thinking it over, I think I understand your complication. Although the green circuits have a short crafting time, the demand for them will be so great that for most people it's nice to have the circuit production in one place. You absolutely could craft circuits locally, wherever they are needed. Bare in mind that depending on the size of your factory, you may need multiple full belts of copper and/or iron dedicated directly to your circuit production.
another thing to consider about taking lots of space, is that if you're playing with biters you need to defend all that space you're taking
They usually target turrets first (even if out of range) so that's a good thing to keep in mind
Liked, commented and subscribed for the simple fact that you said in the beginning that everybody should play the game their way instead of talking down inefficient playstyles
Thanks! Glad you appreciate that. I think there are unfortunately quite a few people who look down on inefficient play styles ans builds.
You explain things in a way I can understand. I appreciate that! Here's to a more efficient factory.
That honestly makes me really happy to hear! It is my goal to explain things an easy to understand manner, so it's great that it's the case for you!
To growing the factory!
Another aspect useful to keep in mind is in what order along the bus (starting from your furnaces) you should put your builds, I usually try to put earlier along the bus those items that are used in most advanced recipes, for instance, green circuits are used in a lot of later more complex products, so that is probably the first build I'll set up along the bus, you are also going to need tons of rails, but that is either an end product (destined to be used in base construction) or fed straight into science and nothing else, so my rail build will most likely be towards the end of the bus near that science build.
This reminds me I don't see stone ore or brick in that bus, you are going to be building a bunch of rail and wall at some point so I would set up one bus belt for half ore and half brick stone.
Gears quite honestly I produce in-situ always so no belt for that, and plastic is used almost exclusively in red circuit so I usually just produce it near to where the red circuit build is. I do bring along oil gas and lube parallel to the main belt bus with underground pipes, this allows me to produce oil derived products like batteries near their respective consumption builds.
that's an awesome tip. i'm on my first playthrough so i didnt know what would be used where..., i have way too many things on the bus, going in both directions 😆😆
You have the BEST tutorials. It seems like everyone else just makes these videos to flex their knowledge, but you really take your time to make sense
Thank you, I really appreciate that! I'm happy to hear you find them so helpful too!
Easily the best video on main buses I’ve seen! Thank you for the fantastic tutorial!
my lightbulb moment was when you said, in reguards to spacing, "we would need to underground the copper" or something to that effect. I had always been worried to do 4 lanes because I couldn't understand how to get things from the middle lanes. It never occured to me to drop the bus lanes I wasn't pulling off of down and once theyre down you have room a plenty. I only ever thought of underground lanes as a way to go under an obstacle, not a way to reposition an entire section of something. still the same "thing" but i think you get wat i mean
I could really use a short tutorial on prioritizing what to build in the early game and maybe a blueprint for items needed for expansion in the early game (inserters, assemblers, belts, etc)
Everyone needs a good Mall!
I leave myself 3 spaces between each lane group, mostly because i think the basic power poles fit nicely in the middle free space
Well, that makes running the undergrounds a lot harder when doing it by hand... no more click and run! But if it works for you, cool!
The concepts of the main bus are so well explained in this video. Thanks.
Bro, you're crazy!
Never seen this concept being explained as good as u did.
nice
As a new player some time ago, I struggled with balancing the draw of materials from a multi-belt bus. It might be good to give people a steer on balancers - for me at least the optimum configuration of splitters to achieve what I wanted was not obvious, and one still sees several different strategies from different players. The simplest is, I believe, always to split off the nearest side (that would be the righthand side in this video) and then use splitters upstream to bring material from the further belts.
Also, it's often the case that a production unit will need a mixed belt of e.g. green and red circuits. There are neat ways of mixing the belt mid-bus, without drawing two full lanes off and mixing them at the "roadside".
Thanks for the comment and thoughts! It seems you aren't the only one who would like a video on balancing and splitting off the bus, so I'll do one on that in the near future. I even struggle with it myself sometimes. It can be tricky.
You are right though, that splitting from the the close side and then using more Splitters upstream is the way to go. But the configuration in which you do that is important for it to work properly. I'll definitely cover that in my video on it. :)
Last year, something occurred to me:
Factorio is to some extent about compressing low-value materials into higher-value materials.
2 Belts of Iron Plates becomes 1 Belt of Gear Wheels. So 2:1.
1.5 Belt of Copper Plates and 1 Belt of Iron Plates, 2.5 Belts in total, becomes 1 Belt of Electronic Circuits. So 2.5:1,
5 Belts of Iron Plates becomes 1 Belt of Steel Plates. Thus 5:1.
Ahh, but what's the ratio of iron+copper+coal:satellites-with-also-supplied-silos? :D [Hmm, now I want to do a factory where I have a compressed blue belt of satellites, feeding constantly-launching silos, and just emptying out at the end. Hmmmmmmmm. Will I bother? We'll see!
@@DavidLindes One blue Belt of Satelites (45)s) = 27862.5 yellow Belts Copper, 25305 yellow Belts Iron (including the Iron Plates, needet for Steel), 2100 yellow Belts Steel, 1350 yellow Belts Coal, 1311538.462 units of crude Oil and 3144038.462 units of Water.
Have fun with that xD.
harry68784 sounds like a project! I like it! xD
@@DavidLindes ah yes. 27 thousand full belts of copper and 25 thousand belts of iron is "a project"
Legend Creeping yup! A big one, mind you. :)
I personally like 4 spaces between lanes. Leaves me a bit more wiggle room for On-Off ramping, and merging.
1) because blue undergrounds can travel 8 spots, If you INTEND to play past the first rocket launch, or build a megabase, you should triple/quadruple your initial-width needs of the bus: If you plan to start with 4 lines of iron and copper each, give your safe SPACE for 12 or even 16 lanes of each. And when intending to go for mega-base-size saves, I suggest either having single-side production (where the side opposite of factories/utilization is used is for insertion-balancing and rail network), or utilizing a split bus (where you use almost twice the size of a normal/early-mid-game bus, and where you put Iron/Copper/Green Circuits on the outside lanes of each, and rarer materials and liquids are sent through the middle lanes, which can be shared with space for roboports and power distribution. Also, something a lot of people forget is to give themself SPACE for traveling up and down the bus. A dedicated single-lane or double lane rail for a train shuttle can be useful here, but you need to plan for it. Also, leave yourself room for roboports.
2) Leave space between factory areas to limit the times you have to demolish and re-place because you didn't leave yourself room for something you'd like to change.
also, getting into the habbit of leaving yourself space helps when you do have spaghetti factories-, especially leaving space between/around large builds to enable insertion-balancing of rail-delivered resources. Also, setting up a clean power distribution line along your bus makes logic-driven control of sections of your factory easier, and can be useful for setting up a dashboard.
I think I'll enjoy your videos like this because I literally have not played through to finish a vanilla game. A lot of videos about Factorio claiming to be tutorials and guides presume a lot of prior experience and seem to be aimed more at refreshing memories of past victories. Like I've never set up a train station or played with the combinators to detect the state of things and a video about trains that claims to be a tutorial better not start assuming I know how to string the red and green wires to count the quantity in a tank or something unless that was covered in the previous episode. Like that. I've been to train "tutorial" videos that just say "download my blueprint and plop it down and you're done!" That doesn't teach me a thing.
You made me chuckle with your road analogy for the "Main bus" i always assumed it was called Main Bus because of the computing term "Bus" which is the main data/ power route on a component board or in computer hardware, e.g. USB - Universal Serial Bus...
I like your Highways analogy more haha
manufacturing/crafting (whatever anyone calls it) on one side leaves the other side open for more smelting to refill iron/copper/steel lanes. gave me a good idea for a next factory.
thanks!
There are many ways to do things. I do build stuff on both sides, but not randomly. Circuits and oil industry all goes on one side. That way I can feed things directly into each other. The green circuits or plastic for red and blue circuits for example don't even go on the main bus. That's also stuff that will get beacons later. Whereas with science I use 3 PM3 and 1 SM3 instead.
In my first playthrough I actually started designing with a "main bus" in mind, I had the right core idea but didn't execute probably
I didn't know what Matt's I'd need and totally put all my lanes together. =) This helpede clean it up thank you!!!
This is such a well thought out, quality video. Thank you so much for making this
My pleasure! Thanks for the kind words!
* One thing I find very useful is to not run the copper and iron for circuit production over the main bus. That way you don't need necessarily need 8 lanes of iron and 8 lanes of copper or whatever some people have. At the beginning I still do it, but when I scale up they get their own belts.
* It's also nice to have a fluid bus with water, crude oil, lubricant and acid
Very good point! Giving circuits their own dedicated lines separate from the bus is usually a really good idea. A fluid bus can be quite good too depending how your base is later out.
My last base i build i did a dedicated green circuit build in front of the bus with dedicated smelters so i could produce 4 full red belts of green circuits with steel smelters and then pushed it into the bus. Was massive, had a huge space requirement and made it insane with trains and train stackers but was incredible to see swing in action. If i can find it again, i'll post a picture off the map for that area of the base.
here is a link to just the smelter setup and the integrated Gren Circuits build steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1672678083
I liked the idea for a while but never really thought it worked out well in practice outside about purple science. Building a more distributed, modular factory has always worked better for me. The macro transport level of linking together those small production facilities is really easy with trains.
Thanks. I just started Factorio. Never played a game like this before, so my for my first bike I just one big transport that snakes through all of my buildings. It was a mess.
the 4 wide gap also means you can fit artillery in the middle so it protects a radius aroubd the entire bus, fed by a belt or by robit, whichever youd prefer
Thank you for making this video! I watched Nilaus masterclass on main buses but it seemed more like an overview, unlike this video which is more in-depth!
Thank you! Having a hard time trying to figure out logistics in this game and this answered quite a lot.
Perhaps for another tutorial: How to route things off and onto the bus in an optimal way, such as if its in the middle two of four lanes, how would i build that splitter? balancing etc. what's a good way to create a shared belt? how to avoid spaghetti
I'm also wondering what the best way to lay out the production of the materials to go onto the bus should be? And how do you get a consistent flow of 4 lanes of a material
@@MnemonicHeadTrip Balancing/Making sure the belts start full. It doesnt matter if they are not full later down the line.
I use a 3 bus system, main, science pack backwards bus, and a product bus to bring everything to science pack production areas.
Interesting strategy! I can't say I've ever done that myself, it I don't doubt that it works pretty well.
Putting Gears on the bus is only useful if you're building everything off of a single bus.
I tend to separate my bases (starting in the mid-game and beyond) into two areas: research and infrastructure. Each base has its own main bus, eventually fed by trains that will drop off material to whichever one needs materials.
If you do that, what you find is that most uses of gears are for infrastructure: belts, inserters, etc. Research materials only need gears for Green and Red packs, which are not what's going to be slowing down your research. You can easily build gears in the places where you use them, rather than funneling them on down the bus.
Nice video, really helped me as a beginner! 😄👍🏻
I always build my facilities on one side of the bus so i can expand my bus on the other side if needed, or I can get end-game resources to the beginning of the bus (for whatever reason).
Yup, that's basically my thought process too. Much easier to expand your bus when you haven't build stuff on both sides along the whole thing.
These are great, keep them coming. Something I think you should add to all the tutorial, is to say in the start or in at the end, is to remind them that its okay to restart now and then, and its totally normal to do so, if you f*cked up, or can see a improvement in your setup.
Thanks, will do!
That is a good idea too. I'll see how I can factor that in.
I stopped using a Main Bus for my starting base when I realized that I cannot transport enough material on it for my science needs (60science/minute). I switched to feed every science production just as needed (the calculator helps a lot for that). It detangled my production/science layout and made it easier to transition to a megabase.
how many lanes I probably need then double it. 12 lanes it is!
That's the spirit!
If you always build production on one side of the bus, you can always expand the bus the other way. If your bus is up and down, production to the left, and expand the bus to the right.
As someone who consistently never leaves enough room for anything, I'd also suggest that you leave a good amount of space between the bus and the various productions lines, just in case you need to route something around that doesn't fit on the bus. At least 10 spaces but probably more in reality.
And when you build your first factory, leave space for more bus lanes. You need a lot more material than you expect.
@@schwarzerritter5724 these days I just do a small bus to get going and then use trains for big volumes. Klonans Transport Drones Mod can also move amazingly high volumes of material without having to worry about putting things in a straight line. It suncs up well with train deliveries too.
@@scottsummers819 The bus of my first factory was one lane for iron, one for copper and one half lane for steel, gears, green chips an copper wire. After realizing there was no reason to put copper wire on it, I made one full belt of green chips and added another lane to copper and iron. Then all this other stuff came, so I completely abandoned my first factory and just build a new one somewhere else.
I like to do a mix. I don't like one ridiculous factory to use one bus with 8 belts of copper and such. So what I do is I do modules and connect those modules by train. Inside those modules I use the bus concept.
For example for the gray science module I import bricks, iron, copper, coal and steel, put those things on a bus of kinds and then out comes my science packs.
This eliminates a large part of the spacing problem.
Also it's not efficient at all. You have a lot of useless belts doing nothing when they could be short. What it allows you to do is mainly organization and make sure things stay extendable.
You have a common way of doing things that will always work the same.
You can always add more to your offshoots if you need to, allowing for infinite extension (so long as the belt capacity is great enough)
It also has the benefit of making sure that every factory at least at some point gets some resources, even though something earlier in the bus may gobble things up at a pace that exceeds the inflow of items.
It also is a good indicator if you have enough resources to begin with. If the belts are empty you need more.
The bus also comes with some fairly substantial drawbacks:
The main one is space requirement. You need a lot of belts to run past machines that don't use the resources on them. For example your plastic belt is going to run past red, green, gray, blue and purple science only needed for the yellow one as well as any helper assembly machines that produce logistics items (belts, inserters, machines that don't go into science, etc). This has a lot of plastic sitting on the belt, not being used.
Then if you find yourself not having enough throughput and you are already at blue belts (say you found out that 2 blue belts of copper plates aren't enough and you need more) it can become very hard to widen the bus.
If you have machines on either side of the bus it can get very messy to split the belts off.
If you misplanned and want to add an additional item to the bus (say you decided to ship plastic in after researching oil), it can be again very hard to widen the bus.
It bottlenecks throughput for high demand items such as circuit boards through belts. Having your entire factory be fed off one bus will make it (the bus) enormous. to the point where you have more floorspace dedicated to high volume material transportation than actual assembly machines. And belts use a lot of resources to make, especially the higher tier ones.
It also creates a lot of delay. An item has to travel down the belt before it can be used. If you have a fresh shipment of ore coming in, the iron plates will need a substantial amount of time, possibly even minutes before any iron is seen at the end of your bus.
It also creates a lot of buffer that you might not want, unless you smartly control it with the circuit network. For example if you have a belt full of nuclear fuel you have a massive stockpile of it just sitting on a belt if you run it to your reactor. For this specific instance logistics robots might be useful. I however hate them (they are just cheating, avoiding all throughput and routing problems at the cost of power and initial material cost), so I opted for the circuit network solution for that specific case.
Buses have their convenience in organizing things neatly. But now I like to make a little module type base for smelting, mining and every type of science pack. Just name all the supply stations the same and disable them whenever a train can not be fully filled with signals and have one train for every unloading station ferrying in goods. Use small buses inside those mini factories to make things convenient and extendable. It also helps with planning your factory. You can assume the train has infinite throughput and then just build however many buildings you want to get the desired item output per second and have the exact right ratio of machinery for your requirements a lot easier since everything is nice and contained without dozens of machines using the same resource.
Trains are cheap and have basically infinite throughput.
I do not do gear when I use a bus since when you need iron gears you for the most time also need iron.
Gears on the bus was more useful when science needed an extreme amount of gears. You used to have gun turrets and mining drills there. With those removed the gear needs for most things are pretty modest.
Now most gears are needed in belt production and that can simply receive its own dedicated iron belts
Yup that totally makes sense. I vary from factory to factory for putting gears on the bus haha.
The thing to be aware of here: 2 belts of gears == 4 belts of iron. Do with that information what you will.
I rarely do gears on bus, but they do make sense. 1 gear is 2 iron so you save a full belt.
@@DavidLindes
Yes, but you still don't need that many of them in most places. I give green circuits and possibly belt production its own iron lines. That way 4 belts for the rest are more than enough. I simply don't need to optimize things that much
Hes we do have 1 or 2 lane roads weaving all trough the city, it is efficient and thats why we (non americans) do indeed have that.
Still doesn't outweight the cons of having highways and awfull roads in cities
Thank god, someone who can explain this in a way my simple monke brain to understand
17:15 |Holds up hand| Has Hit the limit of the map TWICE!
Wait really? The like 1 million times or whatever it is? Damn that's crazy dude!
@@Xterminator Yep mate, been there Twice and streaming the 3rd attempt... a RACE 2 teams north vs south! We are around 900K tiles to their 600K tiles!
That is a lot of pressing the button (in which ever way your going). I assume you have to stop every so often and build/refine more fuel. That said I don't think any one is going to build a factory that uses 4 million square tiles of space. Even if they could their computer would melt.
@@scottsummers819 100% you will run out of ram before anything else, every single tile that you explore has to be loaded into RAM, so as you build out further and further your ram requirements go up!
For me the smelting is built as the end cap for my bus. The materials come off the smelters in the same direction as the bus and they all merge down into the size as the bus.
I also build on both sides of the bus. Though it is usually an oil processing area for the beginning of the other side and eventually science and rocket.
After that I start to work on my real base. Anything up to launching the first few rockets is just a starter base for me
I don't miss any of your videos! keep it up :)
Thank you! I really appreciate your support. :)
So, how do you get items onto a belt, how do you distribute them evenly and most importantly how do you get items off the inner lanes?
Great video!! Using time stamps would make them even better
Great video! The structure is a lot better than the previous video, keep up the good work! I usually don't go for a bus but go for spaghetti and I can tell you spaghet bases can be more or equally efficient as main busses. I usually have a dedicated mal and smelter for each science pack which makes it super messy but makes it easier to have perfect ratios and easier to expand. I liked the part where you covered the steel smelting ratios bc newer players might overestimate their steel production. I also learnt why having your items in a specific order is more effecient. I hadn't really thought of that. Last do you have a separate green circuits production for red circuits or do you use the main bus. I think having a separate production is better and healthier for the main bus but I'm not sure. Anyways hope to see more of these videos.
Thank you! I'm glad most people (including myself) consider this to be better than the previous episode. I do want improve on each one of possible.
The form of spaghetti you build with sounds like it certainly can be quite efficient. What I had in mind when mentioning spaghetti not being as efficient, was the style where you have all your smelting in one place and then just run like 1 or 2 belts from it throughout the whole base without splitting off or evening distributing the resources.
But that's what I love about Factorio, there are so many different ways to play and methods to build even within the same "category".
There will definitely be more videos in this series in the near future!
This made so much more sense than Nilaus' video
i was hoping to learn more about how to actually branch off for production....you went way too in depth about the possible order of belts, i get it!
Great content as usual Xterminator. I usually plan to have a solid fuel lane in my bus and reserve the space for it.
I feel like im a freak. I put just about everything on the bus. Yes its massive and probably inefficient but its so nice being able to line up assemblers and not worry about making the intermittent parts every time. And to me its just eye candy seeing a massive main bus
hey this might be a stupid question but how do i get resources from the belts in the middle? not of the whole thing but lets say you have 4 iron belts, how to i get resources off the middle 2? ive tried to figure it out on my own but i either stop the belt i need completely or stop the outside belts. any solutions?
i have found a way👍
Everytime I watch your videos I think its Ninja
It was 5pm just a moment ago NOW ITS 5AM AND I HAVE TO BE AT WORK IN A HOUR!
Oh boieh
In good cities there are no 10 lane highways. That is terrible city design. Run a train or tram down that road instead and you have a room for a row of houses now.
Trains op man.
I usually prefer my smelting on the left side too and im left handed as well lol. But i take advantage of unused space
How do you get materials from the inner two belts?
You probably figured it out by now - but for anyone else reading this, you use three splitters. Splitter one swaps the two lanes, so that the one you need is on the outside, and accessible. Then you do the standard splitter + underground belt thing to take it. Then, the third splitter puts it back to normal. I made an image so you can see: imgur.com/a/I1XLsBB
The thing with starting out with a two lane bus is you can easily upgrade them to a 6 lane bus once you have the blue transport lanes.
i'm on my first playthrough and i intuitively made a main bus, but my mistake was to put EVERYTHING on there 😆 the thing got like 30 lanes wide and ran out of space to expand
Good video, but 1 thing you sould show how to rout from the mid lains, because it not he most intuitive thing for newcomers :D
Ah good call! I'll try and show that over the next couple episodes.
How do you route it from the midlane?
This is still useful information thanks bro!
Glad it's still helpful!
brand new to the game and 2 questions I had that weren't answered in this: i see you used the splitter to pull from the outer belts on a 4 lane bus, how do you get from the middle 2 lanes? extended robot arms?
obviously you dump from smelters/assemblers into the bus and thats how things initially get on the bus, does teh bus loop? like at the start of the bus is there a joining of a belt from the creation of the materials and a loopback from the "end" of the bus? or do you just put all that stuff in boxes at the end?
i just got through the tutorial and up to the train station level so i am new to using splitters at all and being able to organize arms dropping/pulling specifically from left/right of a single belt is perplexing
Ninja teaching me Factorio... (this timeline, dude)
pleeeeeaaase set up timelines for these videos!!
If you make your bus 4 lanes wide, how are you supposed to use splitters to get resources from the middle two lanes? That makes no sense to me and you didnt explain it
You use splitters from one of the middle lanes to the outside lane you want balanced.
You should be using splitters across all 4 lanes to keep the belt balanced out.
I'm just starting to play and today I started my BUS with only copper and Iron with coal being limited to the smelters and energy production, It's pretty neat and I left plenty of space for several rows of belts.
Now I wonder If in the future I could mix BUS and spaguetti, like having a BUS in spiral with the rocket base in the center and factories in the outer border, I bet it would take a lot of space.
200 hours on factorio but i love watching these videos on basic mechanics xd
Older video but should I watch this first or your watch it played playlist first as a newbie?
I think probably my let's play series first. This video isn't really complex and is can be applied to all parts of the game, but I think the concepts will make a bit more sense if you go through the let's play tutorial series first. :)
How do you allocate the red and blue chips off the main bus when they're sandwiched between steel and plastic? There's no space to put a splitter or an off lane.
I'd guess using the long-handed inserters. :)
I found doing 3 space between each band of resources on the buss allows me some creativity and fault tolerance when diverging resources to where they need to go along the bus. After trying it, there is no way I am going back to just two empty lanes
Still in my first play through and I’ve automated blue science and have started researching stuff with it, but red circuits and oil and stuff and blue circuits just doesn’t work with my factory set up. My setup is too squeezed and there’s automation everywhere instead of long belts leading to an away area where I would make a specific product
Absolutely fantastic guide! Exactly what I needed!
I Wished you showed me how you BRANCH off of the BUS line and such. BEcause, aren`t those copper lanes in the middle unreachable ??? | | | |
Thank you bro
Great Content. Did get some pointers. Having said that, its a bit waffle. Considering that we're talking efficiency as the main goal, maybe that should extend to explanations. On the other hand Nilaus fits in too much content, and I have "wait.....what?" moments. The Goldilocks zone would be somewhere in between...
I expected you to go over at least a few stock builds for branching off/on the bus?
Hey, I'm a new player as of just 2 weeks ago and I'm running into a numbers issue. As you say you will eventually need 48 furnaces for iron on a yellow belt. 48 furnaces puts out 48 iron BUT if a yellow belt only carries 15/s, don't you need a faster belt to handle the load?? Only other way would be to separate the belts inside your smelter array and that looks funky splitting or just breaking furnaces up inside an array to make room for 3 belts to exit. This isn't like satisfactory where you can go vertical when you exceed a belt capacity.
That would be a massive bottleneck of iron that just cant get thru to where it needs to go because the belt capacity is 300% overloaded. Just from the start...
So what's the gist here? The numbers just don't match from where I'm looking at it.
Hey, welcome to the game! So it's 48 stone furnaces total to fill a yellow belt with iron, so 24 per side of the belt.
Remember to factor in the craft time of the item (in this case iron), a long with the machine/smelter speed. So a stone smelter has a speed of 1, but iron takes 3.2 seconds to smelt. So 48x3.2x1 is 15. :)
Hope that helps clear things up! If/when you upgrade to red belt, since it's conveniently twice the speed of yellow , that means you can just do double the amount of stone furnaces to fill it, or better yet, just upgrade the 48 you had for yellow belt, into steel furnaces since they are twice the speed of stone ones.
my main question is I never see how the bus is fed and where they end. I also find it complicated to try to build one due to where the resources are and the terrain. Once you start a base, its hard to get a bus going. and until you get your base started and have resources, its hard to think about where or how you will build the bus. For me, the difficulty is more about the planning part and getting it started in a way to support what I am trying to build and where I put things. I also like trains so I have been trying to figure out how to create a proper train depot to drop off all the materials to try to start a bus.
the bus doesn't "end" anywhere everything is done on the side and the beginning is just a train depo or smelting setup. terrain isn't an issue because you can deconstruct or land fill as needed.
you should also just plan things around science ratios and how many labs you want.
Hey! what i dont understand... Example: Red Circuit or blue comes a little later in the game. how did u ingest a new material to the bus ?
The bus won't contain all the materials you plan for it at the beginning. Most things beyond plates get created from materials on the bus and then routed back onto the bus. Usually they only need to go further down the bus, but occasionally you need to use a splitter and run them the opposite direction up the bus to get to something you built earlier, like a mall.
You can combine both circuit boards onto one belt to use half a lane
You may need more input than half a belt tho
Okay my question is. What’s the point of the middle two lanes. For example. Your copper. How do you even utilize them?
I rebuilds first factory twice to fix my inefficiencies. It was hell.
But how do you get the blue wires
Blue wires?
Looks like it's time to refactor my factory
Something missing from this that I would consider important: How much is a lane of X worth? Okay yeah you need 4 lanes of iron/copper, but is that factoring in the shitload you're going to be consuming building green circuits? Does that factor in constant production of intermediate items like gears as well? What about stuff getting built at a mall? How do you quantify this stuff without getting lost in a calculator? This is what I tend to struggle with the most when I play, even after 650 hours, and it eventually just grinds my desire to keep playing to a halt. :(
Stuff built at a mall should not be a big concern, it is used more sporadically than what goes into science which can be consistently consumed, I usually leave the mall at the end of the bus for this reason, so it consumes only what other builds didn't, and a full 4 red belt bus worth of iron and 4 of copper should be quite enough for any main science /starter base, if you need more than that this will only come up in late mid game and by then you can start plotting a whole second base elsewhere if you need to go big.
That is playing mostly vanilla, this does not apply to complex mods like bobs or angels.
I give dedicated iron and copper lines to green and red circuits. That cuts down a lot on what needs to be on the main bus. The mall also eventually gets dedicated iron lines for part of the gear production (for belts).
What's this 117/234 thing? I'm pretty sure it's 120/240... exactly 5x what it is for iron. I think that's probably residual from old ratios, before they changed smelting to match the new (yellow) belt speed of 15 items per second instead of 13.333... ratios changed then, so I could easily imagine 117/234 being correct before, but I'm pretty sure it's just 120/240 now. Open to being corrected, though!
Hmm I was under the impression that with the belt changes, they also changed the smelting time of stuff so the ratios wouldn't change. I'll have to check up on that though! I could definitely be wrong!
Xterminator I think that's mostly true, but it used to be that the 24/48 number was an approximation. It was closer to 23.5/47 or something? But people didn't want to do asymmetric builds, so they rounded up. And then your steel numbers are just without (or with less) rounding. But I think when they made these changes, they evened it out. I could be wrong, though... do the math. :D
Should you really have gears on your main bus? You can just build them on the spot from iron, where needed.
Great video! Thx
If copper and iron are 4 lanes and you're only pulling from the outer most lane, what's the inner 2 lanes for? I'm assuming you just add splitter/balances farther down to recover the 50% split?
Rebalance and use the other ores
Ok but with the line with the steel, red circuit & blue circuit, how would I get the blue circuit out of that bus you made? If I put a spliter it'll encroach on the other belt.
@@TrueXiarno good question! You would use an underground belt on the line where the splitter would encroach on, that way you could place the splitter on the blue circuit line without it encroaching on the other belt.
Hope that makes sense written out lol
i dont understand how you tap into the middle 2 lanes of the 4 lane "highway". i see you use a splitter to tap into the outside, but what about the middle?
Why have multiple lanes at all? Is it a case of using the outermost lanes until you have shortages and then you just use the next lane in?
Basically yes. Or using certain split off designs that pull from all lanes equal each time you pull off for a build.
The more you add to your factory the harder it will be to supply it with just 1 lane worth of resources.
How do you pull out a middle lane from a four lane column though? Sorry I'm new
How do you get items off the middle belts in a row of 4?
It just takes time. I’ve built around 10 factory’s. I’m telling you. By the time you build that many that launch rockets, you will get it. It takes a lot of planing.
Next time, can you make a video going over train bases? I'm having trouble transitioning from a smaller base to a larger base with that being the main transportation.
I'm not sure I can promise for next video, but I can certainly cover that in the near future.
Now I see how to pull off something from the side like steel or plastic in the column of (plastic, blue, red, steel) but how do you easily pull off the middle ones? Just go with undergrounding the main bus for a while?
Also for the iron and copper ones wondering if you go with some splitter checkpoints along the bus to even out and keep them all filled. I will check out some of your later game videos to try and see the answers myself but this video got me wondering.
Good questions! For pulling from the middle, you may need to underground a little bit of the main bus, but then should be able to just underground your pull off line across the bus using the two spaces left between each set of 4 lanes. I'll try to show it in my tutorial let's play on EP10.
As for splitter check points, I usually don't bother. Once I get 4 lanes of a material, everytime I do a split off, I make sure it's balanced, so I don't need to do it again until next time I split off. Hope that makes sense. :)
haw do yoy get to the blue end red circuits when there are steel end plastic at the other side . do i just do 1 laine end so 2 blocks nothing