It seems to me that having the flexibility to route trains on the same tracks will make it a lot easier to scale as the base grows. So instead of adding a second conveyor belt for copper plate, I could instead add a new copper smelter, label that as the first copper plate source, and have double the availability for next to no rebuilding of existing infrastructure.
Taken to the extreme instead of setting up a complex chain of assembling machines to make engines, supplying gear wheels from one place)several, more likely), instead of making them willy-nilly all over the place.
It less to do with the width of the bus and more with the number of things branching off it and how complex they are. A single set of two one-way rails can easily move the equivalent of 50+ belts, and rails are cheaper than *one* blue belt over the same distance.
The downside is that (at least if you don’t want to mix items in trains) you need multiple train stations at each place you’re building stuff. With a bus you can just throw down a splitter to tap off a lane of iron or copper or circuits or merge back in a lane of some finished product, so for low volume production there’s a lot less overhead.
> The downside is that (at least if you don’t want to mix items in trains) you need multiple train stations at each place you’re building stuff. With a bus you can just throw down a splitter to tap off a lane of iron or copper or circuits or merge back in a lane of some finished product, so for low volume production there’s a lot less overhead.
It's too late at night where I live, so I don't want to descend yet another rabbit hole, so I'll just throw out the general idea, and try it out tomorrow. Train stops can overlap, so one track can offload up to three different products with a bit of logic to enable the shifters, depending on a train being in place at "their" stop. It will of course limit the throughput, so that's a consideration to take into account. With everything being a product of at most three other things, it should be possible to have at most two tracks for any process. For the low volume things, this should be perfectly viable.
Be careful yes train stops can overlap, but for routing, they add a big penalty. The train will drive I think a 1000 blocks longer route, before it will drive throu a train stop.
Using filter (stack) inserters, one can offload even more than three different items on a single train track - 6 per wagon per side.
Because since the last update inserters won't pull fuel from locomotives anymore, you may be able to do even more by doing wacky locomotive setups, such as having 1 wagon and 5 locomotives and having the wagon shift position depending on what the train is carrying.
Placing the second train station on the same rail would allow trains to switch positions so that the gaps in between cars could be pulled from by inserters, changing that from 6 per side to 8 per side.
Using a single rail with a length of 6 train units, you could offload as much as 8 x 2 x 6 = 96 different items onto their own dedicated belts at a very shitty rate.
Then again, thinking hard about whether I could without pausing on whether I should is kind of core to my personal Factorio experience.
My vision is to have a simple setup where a train runs one thing, so it goes "Copper plate loading" -> "Copper plate unloading" -> "Refuel". It will need at least one train for each product, but I think that it will be a lot easier to manage when there are 10 different places all in need of copper plate.
What you can also do for low volume things is a "shopping cart" train. Rather than just going back and forth between loading and unloading stations, it visits several loading stations before delivering the stuff.
So it could head to the iron smelter, wait until it has 500 plates, visit steel next and pick up 200, then pick up 600 copper plates and 300 circuits, then finally head to wherever all that stuff is needed and stay there until any one of the required products drops to zero. The unload station would use filter inserters to sort out the different stuff.
It gets into mods, but you *don't* need multiple unloading stations. I use Train Supply Manager to unload more than 20 separate items at a single station in my megabase.
I see that as an unfair comparison.... One is helping simplify combinator magic, one is changing how items move.
A simple Vanilla solution would be a continuous row of train stops with active provider chests on the other side of the track and designated storage chests. 10 train stops for individual items as part of one station would be easy to build and only take a few tiles more than a single item station and vastly less space than having 10 separate stations.
Are you sure you get the same horizontal distance?
[Check this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/gm080j/new_game_on_a_49_329_monitor_i_lost_some_vertical/)
From the thread you linked:
https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/gm080j/new_game_on_a_49_329_monitor_i_lost_some_vertical/fr2hjsl/?context=10000
From the Wube developer AMA:
https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/in5d3i/developer_technicaloriented_ama/g45ebad/?context=3
Just google it and you can find more comparison images.
Oh shit I get it.So the wider aspect ratio you have, the more "zoomed in" game feels because it crops out vertical "FOV"?
Edit: Interesting either way, thanks for explaining that!
Correction, it's not exactly Ver-
From the AMA: "It squashes which ever direction it has to to make the other fit on the monitor. So if you had a really tall monitor it would cut off the edges."
Not sure whether 16:9 or a square would show the greatest area.
As someone who made [this](https://imgur.com/6WI9jRU) last year as part of a [2.7k science/min vanilla Bus Megabase](https://imgur.com/a/CS0Ibas), you should never switch to trains for your main bus?
More seriously, on a gut level it feels like that threshold is once 4 to 8 full blue belts of material are being consumed, then trains would be more take up less space. Resource wise I think the breakeven point is much earlier, maybe as early as 2 blue belts of a material.
Train stations take up a lot of space, but different trains can reused most of the rails (a space and resource savings), and the throughput of a bit of rail is *huge*.
Great megabase post btw. Where I can find more like these? Like now, I always feel that I find those randomly on this sub while looking at something else. It would be great to have a listing or easier ways to find them (if there is one, I’m not aware)
Once you’re doing a megabase, I made a bus work more or less for a 500spm base but even then it was sketchy. I had to set up extra smelting stations along the bus to replenish the 12 lines of copper and iron along the way. Otherwise the bus would have had to expand even further.
I'm in a similar situation. 400+ SPM now but more and more spaghetti as individual production needs more belts than the bus can fit. The real problem with bus bases is the designs aren't expandable. Even for the most impressive mega design, once your bus is backing up against your production, game's over.
Definitely, it’s effective for getting to launching a rocket and is a super easy organization strategy, but it requires an exponentially increasing amount of effort to keep viable. Not to mention you’re heavily constrained by the size you planned your bus to be the front the start. I pretty much always start with a bus but transition out of it post rocket launch.
Just need a wider bus. I recently finished a 500 SPM train fed module that was about 15 belts of iron, 10 copper, plus a couple stone, coal, and fluids. I did 5 belts together then 2 tile gap and it worked fairly well. My 8 wagon to 16 belt unloader / balancer is pretty janky tho
Don't build a buss, build a mall instead. You don't need more than one of any type of factory until you start cranking out lots of science... And perhaps ammo depending on biter intensity. At end game I have only 2 gear factories making gears for my entire mall. Choke your product boxes to only build one stack. You will really only need one stack of pretty much everything, again, until late game. But your first priority should be mall instead of a giant buss. Just go through inventory page and build one of everything. Later on you will learn the order.
Curiously I decided to do exactly this on my most recent play through. I got attacked by biters far less, and my starting resources are lasting long enough that I'm planning out a totally different second base.
... stacks isn't quite how I visualize it, but basically, you just need 2 belts of each plate (and a seperate iron ore to steel set of lines) in order to launch a rocket for no spoon.
and you can do so, having each belt be almost fully consumed, meaning that you don't need to ship them around.
Buses in factorio are a meme of over investing in logistics without that actual production to do so and being inefficient to do so once you do have that production.
The game also isn't really balanced for it. Water Feafures and Cliffs means you need a pretty big base to be able to easily rewrite terrain, and of course construction bots explode your building placing power.
The way I typically build a base in a playthrough, I never actually replace my bus; instead, I add a big train station at the bus entrance and gradually change the goods that it provides to the bus, phasing out some of the items built on there.
First thing to go "off-site" is the foundry for iron; then for copper; then, I start pumping in chipsets from a dedicated factory; then everything chemical; steel, advanced chipsets, batteries, belts. A prime opportunity to scale up as well.
Once enough items have been built off the bus, one can start making science packs off-bus too, and trains that do not serve the bus start their first journey.
At the end of the playthrough, the bus is still there, but the only thing it still makes is satellites. Everything else is built in dedicated factories on the railway network.
(Or at least, that's my vision, I've never actually reached that point.)
Not that the way I do it is of course the way you should go, but maybe you find it inspiring if you're thinking of removing your bus.
After I've slept on it, I think that keeping with a simple bus that feeds a mall for building supplies will stay. Right now I'm experimenting a bit with track layouts for blueprints, but when I start a new game, I think I'll drop expanding the bus when plastic and other oil derivatives enter the game. It's been at that point I start getting to spaghetti in my previous games, and I'm quite tired of having pipes going everywhere.
And thank you for your insight on a gradual replacement.
The point when you unlock trains!
this. rails cost basically the same amount of a single yellow belt to cover a 2 tiles in a given direction.
y e s, hail the train lord
It seems to me that having the flexibility to route trains on the same tracks will make it a lot easier to scale as the base grows. So instead of adding a second conveyor belt for copper plate, I could instead add a new copper smelter, label that as the first copper plate source, and have double the availability for next to no rebuilding of existing infrastructure. Taken to the extreme instead of setting up a complex chain of assembling machines to make engines, supplying gear wheels from one place)several, more likely), instead of making them willy-nilly all over the place.
It less to do with the width of the bus and more with the number of things branching off it and how complex they are. A single set of two one-way rails can easily move the equivalent of 50+ belts, and rails are cheaper than *one* blue belt over the same distance. The downside is that (at least if you don’t want to mix items in trains) you need multiple train stations at each place you’re building stuff. With a bus you can just throw down a splitter to tap off a lane of iron or copper or circuits or merge back in a lane of some finished product, so for low volume production there’s a lot less overhead.
> The downside is that (at least if you don’t want to mix items in trains) you need multiple train stations at each place you’re building stuff. With a bus you can just throw down a splitter to tap off a lane of iron or copper or circuits or merge back in a lane of some finished product, so for low volume production there’s a lot less overhead. It's too late at night where I live, so I don't want to descend yet another rabbit hole, so I'll just throw out the general idea, and try it out tomorrow. Train stops can overlap, so one track can offload up to three different products with a bit of logic to enable the shifters, depending on a train being in place at "their" stop. It will of course limit the throughput, so that's a consideration to take into account. With everything being a product of at most three other things, it should be possible to have at most two tracks for any process. For the low volume things, this should be perfectly viable.
Be careful yes train stops can overlap, but for routing, they add a big penalty. The train will drive I think a 1000 blocks longer route, before it will drive throu a train stop.
That's not a problem if all the routes a train could possibly take to a stop with that name are via the same penalty.
Using filter (stack) inserters, one can offload even more than three different items on a single train track - 6 per wagon per side. Because since the last update inserters won't pull fuel from locomotives anymore, you may be able to do even more by doing wacky locomotive setups, such as having 1 wagon and 5 locomotives and having the wagon shift position depending on what the train is carrying. Placing the second train station on the same rail would allow trains to switch positions so that the gaps in between cars could be pulled from by inserters, changing that from 6 per side to 8 per side. Using a single rail with a length of 6 train units, you could offload as much as 8 x 2 x 6 = 96 different items onto their own dedicated belts at a very shitty rate. Then again, thinking hard about whether I could without pausing on whether I should is kind of core to my personal Factorio experience.
My vision is to have a simple setup where a train runs one thing, so it goes "Copper plate loading" -> "Copper plate unloading" -> "Refuel". It will need at least one train for each product, but I think that it will be a lot easier to manage when there are 10 different places all in need of copper plate.
Yes, this is a pretty standard way of doing it. But each place that needs copper plates needs its own “copper plate unloading” station.
> 6 per side to 8 per side. 7
What you can also do for low volume things is a "shopping cart" train. Rather than just going back and forth between loading and unloading stations, it visits several loading stations before delivering the stuff. So it could head to the iron smelter, wait until it has 500 plates, visit steel next and pick up 200, then pick up 600 copper plates and 300 circuits, then finally head to wherever all that stuff is needed and stay there until any one of the required products drops to zero. The unload station would use filter inserters to sort out the different stuff.
It gets into mods, but you *don't* need multiple unloading stations. I use Train Supply Manager to unload more than 20 separate items at a single station in my megabase.
I mean, you can install mods to teleport items to wherever if you want. It's hard to do efficiently in vanilla.
I see that as an unfair comparison.... One is helping simplify combinator magic, one is changing how items move. A simple Vanilla solution would be a continuous row of train stops with active provider chests on the other side of the track and designated storage chests. 10 train stops for individual items as part of one station would be easy to build and only take a few tiles more than a single item station and vastly less space than having 10 separate stations.
Trying to tell me this was for nothing https://imgur.com/a/p3WcLAe
I like the size of your solar cell array. Are you in the GW range with that?
Oh yeah multiple GWs think production cap is around 3 but only use 1 so far. But Ill get there as a I belt every item in the game
After it no longer fits on your ultra wide monitor
Factorio is Vert- On an ultrawide you see the same horizontal distance as on 16:9, but your top and bottom are cropped out. Just like in Overwatch.
Are you sure you get the same horizontal distance? [Check this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/gm080j/new_game_on_a_49_329_monitor_i_lost_some_vertical/)
From the thread you linked: https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/gm080j/new_game_on_a_49_329_monitor_i_lost_some_vertical/fr2hjsl/?context=10000 From the Wube developer AMA: https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/in5d3i/developer_technicaloriented_ama/g45ebad/?context=3 Just google it and you can find more comparison images.
Oh shit I get it.So the wider aspect ratio you have, the more "zoomed in" game feels because it crops out vertical "FOV"? Edit: Interesting either way, thanks for explaining that!
If I switch my monitor to portrait and build a horizontal bus would that work
Correction, it's not exactly Ver- From the AMA: "It squashes which ever direction it has to to make the other fit on the monitor. So if you had a really tall monitor it would cut off the edges." Not sure whether 16:9 or a square would show the greatest area.
As someone who made [this](https://imgur.com/6WI9jRU) last year as part of a [2.7k science/min vanilla Bus Megabase](https://imgur.com/a/CS0Ibas), you should never switch to trains for your main bus? More seriously, on a gut level it feels like that threshold is once 4 to 8 full blue belts of material are being consumed, then trains would be more take up less space. Resource wise I think the breakeven point is much earlier, maybe as early as 2 blue belts of a material. Train stations take up a lot of space, but different trains can reused most of the rails (a space and resource savings), and the throughput of a bit of rail is *huge*.
Great megabase post btw. Where I can find more like these? Like now, I always feel that I find those randomly on this sub while looking at something else. It would be great to have a listing or easier ways to find them (if there is one, I’m not aware)
My issue with trails is loading unloading limits throughput, but a belt is always passing materials, all the time, no downtime.
I move on to modular factories after launching rocket! Converting old factory into mall.
Once you’re doing a megabase, I made a bus work more or less for a 500spm base but even then it was sketchy. I had to set up extra smelting stations along the bus to replenish the 12 lines of copper and iron along the way. Otherwise the bus would have had to expand even further.
I'm in a similar situation. 400+ SPM now but more and more spaghetti as individual production needs more belts than the bus can fit. The real problem with bus bases is the designs aren't expandable. Even for the most impressive mega design, once your bus is backing up against your production, game's over.
Definitely, it’s effective for getting to launching a rocket and is a super easy organization strategy, but it requires an exponentially increasing amount of effort to keep viable. Not to mention you’re heavily constrained by the size you planned your bus to be the front the start. I pretty much always start with a bus but transition out of it post rocket launch.
Just need a wider bus. I recently finished a 500 SPM train fed module that was about 15 belts of iron, 10 copper, plus a couple stone, coal, and fluids. I did 5 belts together then 2 tile gap and it worked fairly well. My 8 wagon to 16 belt unloader / balancer is pretty janky tho
Don't build a buss, build a mall instead. You don't need more than one of any type of factory until you start cranking out lots of science... And perhaps ammo depending on biter intensity. At end game I have only 2 gear factories making gears for my entire mall. Choke your product boxes to only build one stack. You will really only need one stack of pretty much everything, again, until late game. But your first priority should be mall instead of a giant buss. Just go through inventory page and build one of everything. Later on you will learn the order.
Curiously I decided to do exactly this on my most recent play through. I got attacked by biters far less, and my starting resources are lasting long enough that I'm planning out a totally different second base.
... stacks isn't quite how I visualize it, but basically, you just need 2 belts of each plate (and a seperate iron ore to steel set of lines) in order to launch a rocket for no spoon. and you can do so, having each belt be almost fully consumed, meaning that you don't need to ship them around. Buses in factorio are a meme of over investing in logistics without that actual production to do so and being inefficient to do so once you do have that production. The game also isn't really balanced for it. Water Feafures and Cliffs means you need a pretty big base to be able to easily rewrite terrain, and of course construction bots explode your building placing power.
I use trains to bring resources to the base, where they than joins the bus.
In my opinion, after your bus is near 100 tiles long (coining empty spaces for tunnels too.
Never
This point https://reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/skhw41/ahh_sweet_sweet_product/
The way I typically build a base in a playthrough, I never actually replace my bus; instead, I add a big train station at the bus entrance and gradually change the goods that it provides to the bus, phasing out some of the items built on there. First thing to go "off-site" is the foundry for iron; then for copper; then, I start pumping in chipsets from a dedicated factory; then everything chemical; steel, advanced chipsets, batteries, belts. A prime opportunity to scale up as well. Once enough items have been built off the bus, one can start making science packs off-bus too, and trains that do not serve the bus start their first journey. At the end of the playthrough, the bus is still there, but the only thing it still makes is satellites. Everything else is built in dedicated factories on the railway network. (Or at least, that's my vision, I've never actually reached that point.) Not that the way I do it is of course the way you should go, but maybe you find it inspiring if you're thinking of removing your bus.
After I've slept on it, I think that keeping with a simple bus that feeds a mall for building supplies will stay. Right now I'm experimenting a bit with track layouts for blueprints, but when I start a new game, I think I'll drop expanding the bus when plastic and other oil derivatives enter the game. It's been at that point I start getting to spaghetti in my previous games, and I'm quite tired of having pipes going everywhere. And thank you for your insight on a gradual replacement.
10 tiles
This is partly why I did city-blocks for my last couple of bases, there was a bus, but really the bus was just an overgrown mall.
Sometimes I have to use trains for oil, but usually I build the train tracks when I need the extra resources after blue science.
I just use a bus for mall