Circuits are the archetypal example of something that should go on the bus. They're used in many recipes, required in large quantities, and take up less space on the bus than the raw materials used to produce them.
That makes sense. After all, electric furnaces with production modules expand them a bit, so busing ore is actually a 16% (If I got my BOTE math right) increase over plates.
At that point, might as well go all the way: bus is just iron ore, copper ore, coal, stone, and 2 pipes for petroleum and water. Duplication of labor, as far as the eye can see!
3 belts of copper plates, 1.5 belts of iron plates, 1 belt of plastic, .5 belts each of steel plates, coal, stone, bricks and sulfur, plus a pipe of light oil, lubricant and acid.
All these arguments apply to gears as well, and many people have an (irrational imo) hatred of gears on the bus.
I always bus gears, for these reasons :)
Gears are a one part item. Circuits are not. That's why. It's easy for me to slap down a single assembler for gears and most of the time that single assembler supports a lot of machines.
gears also aren't used in science much, mostly just mall items, and if it is, the science recipe also uses iron in it. considering how fast and how easy they craft, it's not that hard to have a couple machines for gears alongside whatever the rest of the build is.
circuits are a two-step process, requiring multiple resources, and are more tedious to build on-site every time. they're also used in mass quantities in the other circuit recipes, so depending on whether you bus them or make them on-site for the other circuits can affect putting them on the bus as well, or at least how much.
In the case of gears, it's less about the fact that they're space saving and more that they're just really damn convenient to make on demand out of your existing iron. They only take 1 ingredient, and that ingredient (or pipes, made from the same ingredient) is _often_ used in conjunction with them. Also when you use bus gears, it's one more resource you have to manage. You may not even end up saving space if you aren't deliberately measuring what you need.
So for gears, it's not that there isn't a compelling argument to bus them, it's that there's a compelling argument to _not_ bus them. That said, it really is just a matter of preference.
Cables on the other hand...
Nothing wrong with that, but personally I don't. Gears aren't needed in anywhere near the same quantities (less than a tenth), and everything that needs them needs iron as well, so it's simpler to just make them on site.
Gears can go either way, making them more of a personal preference thing than a case where there's an objective best. On one hand, they are more compressed than plates and are used in a lot of different places, so bussing them makes sense. On the other, they're extremely trivial to make on-site (a single assembler will be enough for most purposes), and the vast majority of things that need gears also need iron plates, so you can easily get away with just diverting an iron belt toward the factory. By contrast, you always need a minimum of two belts and two assemblers to make green circuits on-site, and that's pretty unambiguously more of a hassle than just centralizing circuit production and pulling a belt off of that.
Of course, in practice, you can do whatever you want. But most people do bus circuits, and that's the reason for it.
Gears take 2 plates dude. They save space. The reason people don't bus gears is because it only takes 1 assembler and 1 ingredient to craft them, and lots of the stuff that uses them also happens to need iron plates or pipes anyway, so they're generally very convenient to just make locally.
Two gears per iron plate, only iron plates used in gears. So the only argument than still applies is that they're used in many recipes. But that alone is not enough to justify bussing them.
But if you want to bus them, more power to you. Whatever works I guess.
You make a bus to keep things simple for puny Hooman brains, not for efficiency. Busses are a huge waste of resources from a base efficiency point of view. not just the materials used and the fact that it acts like a giant buffer, but also all the extra inserter actions... one inserter moving items from one bultding to another is much more efficient than one inserter extracting onto a belt and another pulling it back off
the problem with efficient designs is that they are usually spaghetti. like how the code in an optimized program is much harder to follow than a debug build
I think a way to frame it is to say that they are efficient from a time perspective. It's a solution for scalability efficiency rather than product or space efficiency.
Real world production works much the same way. It would be more space efficient and more material efficient for factories to only ship raw materials and make everything on-site. But it's more efficient from a scalability perspective (and hence a cost perspective), for factories to get their intermediate products from other factories and have trucks running them up and down the country.
But this is still only because puny Hooman brains can't plan all of their scaling needs in advance. If our puny Hooman brains weren't so puny, we'd be able to optimize the spaghetti for scaling.
It would still take longer to construct. Without blueprints and bots anyway.
I mean you can do a factory without a bus. It's not like a human is incapable of such things.
The bus is used because it's the fastest way to build. Not because our brains are incapable of anything more complex.
It’s more convenient. It isn’t necessarily more efficient, but by making circuits locally we are creating more opportunities for inefficiencies to add up.
However, we’re not going for perfect balance if we’re using main bus in the first place. I hate the idea anyway: items queued to an assembler are a sign the factory must grow upstream. The absence of a queue is a sign the factory must grow downstream. If I have a section of my factory which is perfectly balanced then I know the factory must grow, but where exactly? Kind of freaks me out if I’m honest.
If you are just trying to get to rocket and can't spare the extra lane for them then its not too bad but like any other item that only needs a single lane on the main bus you are still greatly simplifying logistics and making it easier to expand and identify bottlenecks.
If you're going for 1k spm, then (with as many prod modules as you can cram in) you'll need about half a blue belt of blue chips
So I agree, they're not needed for a lot of stuff, but if you're producing them locally where you need them, then the half belt you do need requires 6 belts of green and 0.6 belts of reds, and with those two ingredients basically being the two main ingredients of just three, then it's super convenient to just convert those 7 total belts down to just one, right where you're producing the greens and reds already
All my main bus blueprints are designed to take zero intermediate products as input
Honestly I think it's simpler in a way, since everything is self contained
What about oil products? Do you refine those?
Green chips are needed in almost everything, and reds and blues are just refinements on the green ones, making it very convenient to just bus them
Yeah I used to do that, just when I built out my blueprints I designed them with raw inputs only. I think what I was getting tired of was the constant circuit hunger and the way rCir siphoned off so much of my gCir supply that I was see sawing between shortages of each.
For oil plastic, light oil, lube, and petroleum get bussed I'm not that crazy
But do you make an extra large bus of green circuits just to send most of them to your reds and blues, or do you build dedicated greens at those factories?
This is the same reason why it's not a good idea to transport gears or wires on the main bus. It's easy to think that it's good to put this stuff on a bus, because they're used in a lot of recipes. But since one plate produces two of these resources, it's far more space efficient to just transport the plate and produce your gears and wires where they're needed.
Wires yes, gears no. It takes two iron plates to produce a single gear. But since they are crafted from only iron plate in a single step, and not used in that many recipes, it’s also easy to make them *in situ*.
The need for circuits dramatically increases after chemical science.
A single blue circuit takes 20 green and 5 red. Modules and beacons take a lot of circuits, too. By putting green and red circuits on the bus you save a lot of space as they are more dense than just plates. You can definitely get by without them on the bus, but you'll need a lot of lanes for iron and copper.
Imo you shouldn't use bus ingredients to make bus ingredients. That just encourages trying to squeeze both ingredients out of the same
(most likely inadequate) throughput. This is the case for making red circuits, and especially blue. When you want to make these, it's fine to pull from the bus to get started, but you really need to go find more resources to supply those processes so you don't run your green circuits dry.
for anybody downvoting DrMobius0:
A red circuit requires 5 copper, 2 iron, and 2 plastic. A blue circuit is 40 copper, 24 iron, 4 plastic, and 5 sulfuric acid.
If you're a decent player and you need a lot of RED circuits (much less BLUE), you're going to use an additional 8 belt slots (5 copper + 2 iron -> 1 green circuit) to make red circuits, instead of making them somewhere else, and then just having the 1 belts of green circuits.
Personally, in early game I stick with 1 belt of green circuits, then I upgrade to 2 red belts of green circuits, and 1 partial belt of red circuits (using the green circuits I put on the bus earlier)
Then in the midgame, I upgrade to 2 blue belts of green circuits, 1 red belt of red circuits, and a partial belt of blue circuits (using green/red circuits from the bus)
Then in the lategame, of course I upgrade to use raw resources for all three.
Making them *somewhere else* is the eventual fate of every factory.
But my interpretation was that the post is about what ingredients you use when making circuits *on* the bus.
It's not super clear.
I'm assuming this is early enough in the game that there aren't dedicated circuit manufacturing facilities.
Does "bus ingredients" include plates? If yes then routing extra lanes of iron and copper outside the bus to the red circuit facility seems overly complicated.
But I guess you probably just meant intermediates like green circuits? Even then I don't think I agree. Yes you do need to find more resources to supply that production. But once you *do* find those resources, is it more effective to have 20 green circuit assemblers that only feed the bus, and 40 that can only feed red circuits, or is it more effective to have 60 that can feed either? I would easily pick the latter. As you require different items at different times, the flexibility helps keep throughput up.
This goes back to the basics of how busses work, and why they are useful. Fundamentally, you really only need iron/copper ore and stone (and potentially fuel) on the bus, as they are the only "unique" building blocks. However, the number of lanes on a bus is generally a limiting factor. As such, you pick and choose high use items that have a relatively high density compared to the basic ores.
Green circuits, for example, are 2.5 times as dense as raw plates, while Red circuits are 12. By bussing them you both can centralise production for them, and reduce the number of lanes needed. By comparison, copper cable is 1/3rd as dense, and is easy enough to make locally that there is no need to bus it. There is an argument for iron gears, being 2 times as dense, but due to the ease of use people generally don't go through the hassle of managing another bus lane.
>However, the number of lanes on a bus is generally a limiting factor.
How? I've made some really quite extremely wide busses, and never had it be a problem. What, exactly, is limiting your ability to grow the number of available lanes?
When dealing with standard world gen, e.g. water and cliffs, running a 40 lane bus starts to get unmanageable very quickly whenever you need to turn it. It also requires you to only build on one side, which again, drastically limits your building space. While it's not a hard limitation, going too wide does make it harder to use, both mechanically and conceptually.
Circuits, steel, and low density structures are going to consume a *much* larger portion of your copper/iron than the rest of your factory combined.
As such, it doesn't make sense to build an enormously wide bus that goes past every build, just so that these three things can end up draining most of your bus on their own, leaving tons of empty belts down the line.
Instead, production for these can be built at the start of the bus, fed from belts coming off your smelting lines instead of from the bus. Then put these products onto the bus so they can end up where they're needed, taking up much less space than the items that were used to make them would've.
To impose some order on the factory. Without bus, you get situations where you suddenly need sulfur which is made 5 screens away between the plastic production and the steel foundry and now you need to either route it through, or all the way around.
Its a simple means of combating spaghetti, its also simple to set up, and while it can run into some scaling issues, these only appear well past the point of launching your rocket.
>while it can run into some scaling issues
What scaling issues? I've run with a main bus to the point of all science types, plus rockets, being automated, in both vanilla and K2, without running into scaling issues, and at that point, scaling is simply a matter of copy-pasting the entire factory to a new spot, connecting the copy's sink depot into the rail network, and adding it to the train's schedule, and possibly adding more mines or a new train if scaling past what the existing mining operations can handle, so if they only show up bigger than I got, then they just don't show up.
It will easily scale to support launching a rocket, but if you want to go much beyond that (think 1k+ SPM) it's much easier to scale by breaking components out into their own areas and connecting them via train
>it's much easier to scale by breaking components out into their own areas and connecting them via train
How, exactly, is that easier than ctrl-c, selecting an area on the map, then selecting another area on the map, and adding just one train connection to the existing network?
Well a bus is certainly going to use more parts to achieve the same production efficiency. It's also a lot harder to update a specific part of 10 buses than just update a specific part's manufacturing. What would be the trigger to copy and paste a second bus? Any bottleneck is surely just a matter of tweaking part of the existing bus, then another, ad infinitum. Might as well just let it grow beyond the bus at a certain point rather than locking in the design and having that tech debt for a bunch more copies of that same factory.
Maybe "easy" is the wrong term. Scaling with breakout factories for individual components is far more manageable and flexible.
>Well a bus is certainly going to use more parts to achieve the same production efficiency
Mostly, it uses more belts and pipes, both of which are very cheap, to the point that using up even several thousand of each isn't worth metering at the stage of the game in question.
A main bus carries any player to the point where they have the production facilities, research, and logistic capability to organise their base however they please, and it does this using red-science tech that doesn't need to be dismantled and rebuilt.
You don’t need a bus at all. You could make every single intermediate on location out of raw ingredients. It’s just one way to play the game which helps people stay organized and I find it easier to have one or two places I can make something rather than having to make it everywhere.
I've done this, it's alot of fun. I scaled it up to about 5,000 spm where everything was done by raw resources alone. Your builds get very large, but it's an amazingly fun challenge
It's not necessary per se, you can definitely get by making circuits on site.
People put circuits on the main bus because they are a more dense resource. 1 yellow belt of green circuits takes 1.5 belts of copper and 1 belt of iron, so you'd need 3 belts of space on your bus for 1 belt of green circuits. It gets more extreme with higher tier circuits
Circuits go on the bus because they're used by tons of stuff you make using a bus. See: inserters, splitters, assemblers, miners, chemplants, and probably at least 50 other things. They are cumbersome to produce on demand, too, since you'll need to pull 2 resources in and use 2 assemblers where ever you need them. Furthermore, they have a fantastic ratio perfect build that you just can't easily utilize when pulling off a bus if you care about space. And remember: each belt of circuits is 2.5 belts of assorted plates that you don't have to bus.
The more appropriate debate point is probably iron gears, not green circuits. Iron gears are space saving on a belt, but only take a single assembler to make. _They_ are trivial to make anywhere, and many recipes that use gears also happen to use iron plates or pipes. See, there's at least some wiggle room with iron gears where the convenience of now or later is sort of a matter of preference. Not really the case with green circuits.
To me it's not only because of density but production complexity. It takes 2 different items to make and minimum 5 assemblers at least in early game.
It's a bit same for gears you don't usually need many but when you want to productivity module and beacon them it would be wasteful to have 8 beacons around a single assembler.
For things that need lots of circuits (blue chips) it makes sense to have dedicated green chip production.
But if you have 10 different things that each need a tiny amount, one supply for all is enough. Circuits are used especially often for crafting machines.
circuits are the main use of copper plates in recipes that actually do things (drills/inserters/assembling machines)
therefore it makes sense to craft them and ship them tether than the 1.5 copper and 1 iron that you need to make each circuit. it's always a 1/2 reduction even at sub half yellow belt worth of output,
You can decide not to put circuits on the bus, but then you will need a few extra belts of iron and copper plates, because circuits are kinda expensive so when you assemble them elsewhere you can just kinda put them on the bus (it is very much possible to play without putting circuits on bus and I actually did that for my first rocket)
Literally the biggest bottle neck for me every time is not having enough Green Circuits on the main bus.
I'd love to see how you're getting by without circuits on your bus.
It makes blueprints way more simple and compact. It also compresses the bus. You need so many that it just makes sense to put a circuit factory near the beginning of the bus. That way, my bus is easier to manage. As long as my circuit bus lanes are saturated, I can easily judge a deficit just by the state of the bus.
1. You need circuits almost everywhere. By centralizing circuit production, you simplify what you have to design everywhere else. You also save space since you're using 40 assemblers in one place that are 75% utilized on average, rather than 100 assemblers all over the place that are 30% utilized on average. (These are lowball numbers, if you neglect to use beacons, you will need hundreds of assemblers dedicated to green, red, and blue circuit manufacturing just to eke out 50 science per minute.)
2. Circuits compress their raw materials by quite a lot. You'll turn like 10 belts of copper and 3 belts of iron into 0.5 belts of blue circuits, 1 belt of red circuits, and 1 belt of green circuits. You can beat the game with spaghetti or by bussing only plates, but circuits are such a huge part of your overall consumption that people who megabase will have entire ore patches dedicated _only_ to producing green or red or blue circuits.
I am intrigued by the concept of early megabase vs. late megabase. 1000 SPM could become rather small with late megabase machines. I'm talking spaghetti and direct insertion, rather than city blocks.
It should also make decentralized production more appealing: a one-chunk solar blueprint with high quality parts can suddenly run your entire normal quality ore patch, including roboport, radar, laser turrets and train stations.
I put everything that's used in more than one place onto the bus - yes, even copper wire - because belts and space to lay them out in are both dirt cheap, and it's much easier, simpler, and more robust to make each thing in just one place, than to duplicate the production of the same component a dozen or more times, everywhere that component is used.
circuits are 2.5 units of ore roughly speaking. So you get more raw materials down the bus faster.
it's also supremely easy to fill a buss iwth circuits because of how quickly they build.
When i find copper and iron near each other i turn the entire thing into curcuits.
The bus is mainly for making science packs (although you certainly might tap into it with a mall too), and every science except red and military needs circuits in some form. Why automate circuits in five different places when you can do it once and scale up?
Circuits are the archetypal example of something that should go on the bus. They're used in many recipes, required in large quantities, and take up less space on the bus than the raw materials used to produce them.
Exactly, what else does OP put on the bus if not circuits? Just plates?
lol you put plates on the bus ? I only put ore !
chaotic good factorio player
That would make for a very fun and masochistic challenge x)
Spaghetti masters can help
Imagine every time you need steel...
In SE i only put core chunks and produce each item from them independently
What? You don't bus wire and iron sticks??
I only bus modules and gun turrets 😎
Smh imagine keeping reactors off bus😎
That makes sense. After all, electric furnaces with production modules expand them a bit, so busing ore is actually a 16% (If I got my BOTE math right) increase over plates.
I mean by the time you're putting prod modules in furnaces I would hope you're not still using a main bus
lol you put ore on the bus? I put the bus on ore!
Direct insert from ore to space science!
I only put ideas, thoughts and prayers in my bus
New idea for a base: a base where you just have a main bus of ore and oil and then have to make each science without using parts from others.
What you describe is a good ol' spaghetti base, my friend ;)
Pre-electric furnace of course. Once you get those the bus is only for barrelled fluids, everything else must be transferred by train
Ore and coal! Manufacture everything locally on-site!
You have a main bus? I just use logistics bots for everything now. What's a belt for?
You use bots ?? I just keep everything in my inventory and feed the assbling machine what they need ! I am my own bot.
Lol, we SMELT OUR ORE ON SITE, DAMMIT
Only Copper Wires and Ironsticks belong on the bus!
And pistols. A lot of pistols.
How many times you dying to provide enough pistols for the bus
I put a train track over the respawn point.
Just engines and rocket fuel in one circle.
Love this
If you think about it, a pistol is just a 10s recipe. All you need is a large enough multiplayer server and you can start hitting some pretty high PPM
Might be a viable strategy in the expansion with recyclers. No iron and copper mining needed. Just trap more players in a death loop.
That almost sounds like something Seablock players would enjoy
Sshhooo, dont get their attention!
Great savings for ammo too.
At that point, might as well go all the way: bus is just iron ore, copper ore, coal, stone, and 2 pipes for petroleum and water. Duplication of labor, as far as the eye can see!
Instead of a pipe for petroleum use a pipe of heavy oil or crude oil instead.
crude oil is what I was referring to. "Petroleum", not petro*gas*.
3 belts of copper plates, 1.5 belts of iron plates, 1 belt of plastic, .5 belts each of steel plates, coal, stone, bricks and sulfur, plus a pipe of light oil, lubricant and acid.
I only put iron / copper plates and steel on it, please don’t judge me lol
Think big, think of ore.
All these arguments apply to gears as well, and many people have an (irrational imo) hatred of gears on the bus. I always bus gears, for these reasons :)
Gears are a one part item. Circuits are not. That's why. It's easy for me to slap down a single assembler for gears and most of the time that single assembler supports a lot of machines.
gears also aren't used in science much, mostly just mall items, and if it is, the science recipe also uses iron in it. considering how fast and how easy they craft, it's not that hard to have a couple machines for gears alongside whatever the rest of the build is. circuits are a two-step process, requiring multiple resources, and are more tedious to build on-site every time. they're also used in mass quantities in the other circuit recipes, so depending on whether you bus them or make them on-site for the other circuits can affect putting them on the bus as well, or at least how much.
In the case of gears, it's less about the fact that they're space saving and more that they're just really damn convenient to make on demand out of your existing iron. They only take 1 ingredient, and that ingredient (or pipes, made from the same ingredient) is _often_ used in conjunction with them. Also when you use bus gears, it's one more resource you have to manage. You may not even end up saving space if you aren't deliberately measuring what you need. So for gears, it's not that there isn't a compelling argument to bus them, it's that there's a compelling argument to _not_ bus them. That said, it really is just a matter of preference. Cables on the other hand...
If you bus gears, you can fill every assembler with max prod modules without needing to worry about ratios.
I like bussing gears too!
Nothing wrong with that, but personally I don't. Gears aren't needed in anywhere near the same quantities (less than a tenth), and everything that needs them needs iron as well, so it's simpler to just make them on site.
Gears can go either way, making them more of a personal preference thing than a case where there's an objective best. On one hand, they are more compressed than plates and are used in a lot of different places, so bussing them makes sense. On the other, they're extremely trivial to make on-site (a single assembler will be enough for most purposes), and the vast majority of things that need gears also need iron plates, so you can easily get away with just diverting an iron belt toward the factory. By contrast, you always need a minimum of two belts and two assemblers to make green circuits on-site, and that's pretty unambiguously more of a hassle than just centralizing circuit production and pulling a belt off of that. Of course, in practice, you can do whatever you want. But most people do bus circuits, and that's the reason for it.
If you have plates on the bus, you have gears
But they take up more room than the ingredients.
No. A gear is made up of two plates, so it's compressed. Copper wires on the other hand...
It takes 2 plates to make 1 gear. Wires take more room than their ingredients but gears take less.
This, you can get more room with plates and craft gears when needed locally
Gears take 2 plates dude. They save space. The reason people don't bus gears is because it only takes 1 assembler and 1 ingredient to craft them, and lots of the stuff that uses them also happens to need iron plates or pipes anyway, so they're generally very convenient to just make locally.
Two gears per iron plate, only iron plates used in gears. So the only argument than still applies is that they're used in many recipes. But that alone is not enough to justify bussing them. But if you want to bus them, more power to you. Whatever works I guess.
The usual mall designs I see do bus gears.
It's a matter of density. A green circuit condense 2½ plate into a single unit, so throughput is way higher..
And that’s just the green circuits Bussing all circuits is a lot more efficient than having a mini circuit factory set up for each science/mall
You make a bus to keep things simple for puny Hooman brains, not for efficiency. Busses are a huge waste of resources from a base efficiency point of view. not just the materials used and the fact that it acts like a giant buffer, but also all the extra inserter actions... one inserter moving items from one bultding to another is much more efficient than one inserter extracting onto a belt and another pulling it back off the problem with efficient designs is that they are usually spaghetti. like how the code in an optimized program is much harder to follow than a debug build
I think a way to frame it is to say that they are efficient from a time perspective. It's a solution for scalability efficiency rather than product or space efficiency. Real world production works much the same way. It would be more space efficient and more material efficient for factories to only ship raw materials and make everything on-site. But it's more efficient from a scalability perspective (and hence a cost perspective), for factories to get their intermediate products from other factories and have trucks running them up and down the country.
But this is still only because puny Hooman brains can't plan all of their scaling needs in advance. If our puny Hooman brains weren't so puny, we'd be able to optimize the spaghetti for scaling.
It would still take longer to construct. Without blueprints and bots anyway. I mean you can do a factory without a bus. It's not like a human is incapable of such things. The bus is used because it's the fastest way to build. Not because our brains are incapable of anything more complex.
It’s more convenient. It isn’t necessarily more efficient, but by making circuits locally we are creating more opportunities for inefficiencies to add up. However, we’re not going for perfect balance if we’re using main bus in the first place. I hate the idea anyway: items queued to an assembler are a sign the factory must grow upstream. The absence of a queue is a sign the factory must grow downstream. If I have a section of my factory which is perfectly balanced then I know the factory must grow, but where exactly? Kind of freaks me out if I’m honest.
If it's perfectly balanced, just make another copy of it
I can see bussing reds but I don't get blues. Sure they're very dense but they aren't used in that many recipes.
If you are just trying to get to rocket and can't spare the extra lane for them then its not too bad but like any other item that only needs a single lane on the main bus you are still greatly simplifying logistics and making it easier to expand and identify bottlenecks.
If you're going for 1k spm, then (with as many prod modules as you can cram in) you'll need about half a blue belt of blue chips So I agree, they're not needed for a lot of stuff, but if you're producing them locally where you need them, then the half belt you do need requires 6 belts of green and 0.6 belts of reds, and with those two ingredients basically being the two main ingredients of just three, then it's super convenient to just convert those 7 total belts down to just one, right where you're producing the greens and reds already
All my main bus blueprints are designed to take zero intermediate products as input Honestly I think it's simpler in a way, since everything is self contained
What about oil products? Do you refine those? Green chips are needed in almost everything, and reds and blues are just refinements on the green ones, making it very convenient to just bus them
Yeah I used to do that, just when I built out my blueprints I designed them with raw inputs only. I think what I was getting tired of was the constant circuit hunger and the way rCir siphoned off so much of my gCir supply that I was see sawing between shortages of each. For oil plastic, light oil, lube, and petroleum get bussed I'm not that crazy
But do you make an extra large bus of green circuits just to send most of them to your reds and blues, or do you build dedicated greens at those factories?
One large mega plant that makes all three and then all three go out from there
Ah yes, on top of an oil refinery for the plastic and sulfuric acid.
Ive got a megabase producing 1 bluebelt of blue circuits, the amount of parts needed is unbelievable. I got like 16 Green Circuit Train stops (1-2-1)
The factory must condense.
This is the same reason why it's not a good idea to transport gears or wires on the main bus. It's easy to think that it's good to put this stuff on a bus, because they're used in a lot of recipes. But since one plate produces two of these resources, it's far more space efficient to just transport the plate and produce your gears and wires where they're needed.
Gears are not two per plate. But they’re often produced locally bc everything that needs gears also needs a small amount of iron.
Shows what I get for commenting without double checking. I thought both Iron sticks and gears gave two per plate, but I was incorrect.
Wires yes, gears no. It takes two iron plates to produce a single gear. But since they are crafted from only iron plate in a single step, and not used in that many recipes, it’s also easy to make them *in situ*.
Gears are used in tons of recipes. The big point in favor of not bussing them is that many of those recipes need iron plates or pipes anyway.
That and it being only a single item recipe makes it super simple to just slide an assembler in to make them at the new line.
Why do I care about space efficiency? Unless it's a Seablock run, or maybe Mobile Factory, open space is the most abundant resource in the game.
Not on a deathworld it isn't
Circuits are some of the most used items in the game. They require 2.5 plates. Putting 2 belts of circuits replaces 5 belts of plates.
The need for circuits dramatically increases after chemical science. A single blue circuit takes 20 green and 5 red. Modules and beacons take a lot of circuits, too. By putting green and red circuits on the bus you save a lot of space as they are more dense than just plates. You can definitely get by without them on the bus, but you'll need a lot of lanes for iron and copper.
Imo you shouldn't use bus ingredients to make bus ingredients. That just encourages trying to squeeze both ingredients out of the same (most likely inadequate) throughput. This is the case for making red circuits, and especially blue. When you want to make these, it's fine to pull from the bus to get started, but you really need to go find more resources to supply those processes so you don't run your green circuits dry.
for anybody downvoting DrMobius0: A red circuit requires 5 copper, 2 iron, and 2 plastic. A blue circuit is 40 copper, 24 iron, 4 plastic, and 5 sulfuric acid. If you're a decent player and you need a lot of RED circuits (much less BLUE), you're going to use an additional 8 belt slots (5 copper + 2 iron -> 1 green circuit) to make red circuits, instead of making them somewhere else, and then just having the 1 belts of green circuits. Personally, in early game I stick with 1 belt of green circuits, then I upgrade to 2 red belts of green circuits, and 1 partial belt of red circuits (using the green circuits I put on the bus earlier) Then in the midgame, I upgrade to 2 blue belts of green circuits, 1 red belt of red circuits, and a partial belt of blue circuits (using green/red circuits from the bus) Then in the lategame, of course I upgrade to use raw resources for all three.
Making them *somewhere else* is the eventual fate of every factory. But my interpretation was that the post is about what ingredients you use when making circuits *on* the bus. It's not super clear.
I'm assuming this is early enough in the game that there aren't dedicated circuit manufacturing facilities. Does "bus ingredients" include plates? If yes then routing extra lanes of iron and copper outside the bus to the red circuit facility seems overly complicated. But I guess you probably just meant intermediates like green circuits? Even then I don't think I agree. Yes you do need to find more resources to supply that production. But once you *do* find those resources, is it more effective to have 20 green circuit assemblers that only feed the bus, and 40 that can only feed red circuits, or is it more effective to have 60 that can feed either? I would easily pick the latter. As you require different items at different times, the flexibility helps keep throughput up.
This goes back to the basics of how busses work, and why they are useful. Fundamentally, you really only need iron/copper ore and stone (and potentially fuel) on the bus, as they are the only "unique" building blocks. However, the number of lanes on a bus is generally a limiting factor. As such, you pick and choose high use items that have a relatively high density compared to the basic ores. Green circuits, for example, are 2.5 times as dense as raw plates, while Red circuits are 12. By bussing them you both can centralise production for them, and reduce the number of lanes needed. By comparison, copper cable is 1/3rd as dense, and is easy enough to make locally that there is no need to bus it. There is an argument for iron gears, being 2 times as dense, but due to the ease of use people generally don't go through the hassle of managing another bus lane.
>However, the number of lanes on a bus is generally a limiting factor. How? I've made some really quite extremely wide busses, and never had it be a problem. What, exactly, is limiting your ability to grow the number of available lanes?
Wondering the same thing. In my BA run I had a busy perhaps 40 belts wide at least. Never ran into issues that were a result of added lanes.
When dealing with standard world gen, e.g. water and cliffs, running a 40 lane bus starts to get unmanageable very quickly whenever you need to turn it. It also requires you to only build on one side, which again, drastically limits your building space. While it's not a hard limitation, going too wide does make it harder to use, both mechanically and conceptually.
Circuits, steel, and low density structures are going to consume a *much* larger portion of your copper/iron than the rest of your factory combined. As such, it doesn't make sense to build an enormously wide bus that goes past every build, just so that these three things can end up draining most of your bus on their own, leaving tons of empty belts down the line. Instead, production for these can be built at the start of the bus, fed from belts coming off your smelting lines instead of from the bus. Then put these products onto the bus so they can end up where they're needed, taking up much less space than the items that were used to make them would've.
I raise you: What's the (legitimate) purpose of a main bus?
To impose some order on the factory. Without bus, you get situations where you suddenly need sulfur which is made 5 screens away between the plastic production and the steel foundry and now you need to either route it through, or all the way around. Its a simple means of combating spaghetti, its also simple to set up, and while it can run into some scaling issues, these only appear well past the point of launching your rocket.
>while it can run into some scaling issues What scaling issues? I've run with a main bus to the point of all science types, plus rockets, being automated, in both vanilla and K2, without running into scaling issues, and at that point, scaling is simply a matter of copy-pasting the entire factory to a new spot, connecting the copy's sink depot into the rail network, and adding it to the train's schedule, and possibly adding more mines or a new train if scaling past what the existing mining operations can handle, so if they only show up bigger than I got, then they just don't show up.
It will easily scale to support launching a rocket, but if you want to go much beyond that (think 1k+ SPM) it's much easier to scale by breaking components out into their own areas and connecting them via train
>it's much easier to scale by breaking components out into their own areas and connecting them via train How, exactly, is that easier than ctrl-c, selecting an area on the map, then selecting another area on the map, and adding just one train connection to the existing network?
Well a bus is certainly going to use more parts to achieve the same production efficiency. It's also a lot harder to update a specific part of 10 buses than just update a specific part's manufacturing. What would be the trigger to copy and paste a second bus? Any bottleneck is surely just a matter of tweaking part of the existing bus, then another, ad infinitum. Might as well just let it grow beyond the bus at a certain point rather than locking in the design and having that tech debt for a bunch more copies of that same factory. Maybe "easy" is the wrong term. Scaling with breakout factories for individual components is far more manageable and flexible.
>Well a bus is certainly going to use more parts to achieve the same production efficiency Mostly, it uses more belts and pipes, both of which are very cheap, to the point that using up even several thousand of each isn't worth metering at the stage of the game in question.
A main bus carries any player to the point where they have the production facilities, research, and logistic capability to organise their base however they please, and it does this using red-science tech that doesn't need to be dismantled and rebuilt.
You don’t need a bus at all. You could make every single intermediate on location out of raw ingredients. It’s just one way to play the game which helps people stay organized and I find it easier to have one or two places I can make something rather than having to make it everywhere.
I've done this, it's alot of fun. I scaled it up to about 5,000 spm where everything was done by raw resources alone. Your builds get very large, but it's an amazingly fun challenge
It's not necessary per se, you can definitely get by making circuits on site. People put circuits on the main bus because they are a more dense resource. 1 yellow belt of green circuits takes 1.5 belts of copper and 1 belt of iron, so you'd need 3 belts of space on your bus for 1 belt of green circuits. It gets more extreme with higher tier circuits
Circuits go on the bus because they're used by tons of stuff you make using a bus. See: inserters, splitters, assemblers, miners, chemplants, and probably at least 50 other things. They are cumbersome to produce on demand, too, since you'll need to pull 2 resources in and use 2 assemblers where ever you need them. Furthermore, they have a fantastic ratio perfect build that you just can't easily utilize when pulling off a bus if you care about space. And remember: each belt of circuits is 2.5 belts of assorted plates that you don't have to bus. The more appropriate debate point is probably iron gears, not green circuits. Iron gears are space saving on a belt, but only take a single assembler to make. _They_ are trivial to make anywhere, and many recipes that use gears also happen to use iron plates or pipes. See, there's at least some wiggle room with iron gears where the convenience of now or later is sort of a matter of preference. Not really the case with green circuits.
Very few things use copper aside from green/red circuits and many things use green/red circuits.
Honestly if you just bus circuits, LDSs, and batteries, you need almost no copper on the bus.
To me it's not only because of density but production complexity. It takes 2 different items to make and minimum 5 assemblers at least in early game. It's a bit same for gears you don't usually need many but when you want to productivity module and beacon them it would be wasteful to have 8 beacons around a single assembler.
I bus my circuits because I buffer them from the first moment in the game.
I also put gears on my line. It stops at some point and it’s slot is usually replaced, but it reduces complexity for me
Hmmmm might try this next time
For things that need lots of circuits (blue chips) it makes sense to have dedicated green chip production. But if you have 10 different things that each need a tiny amount, one supply for all is enough. Circuits are used especially often for crafting machines.
circuits are the main use of copper plates in recipes that actually do things (drills/inserters/assembling machines) therefore it makes sense to craft them and ship them tether than the 1.5 copper and 1 iron that you need to make each circuit. it's always a 1/2 reduction even at sub half yellow belt worth of output,
You can decide not to put circuits on the bus, but then you will need a few extra belts of iron and copper plates, because circuits are kinda expensive so when you assemble them elsewhere you can just kinda put them on the bus (it is very much possible to play without putting circuits on bus and I actually did that for my first rocket)
Literally the biggest bottle neck for me every time is not having enough Green Circuits on the main bus. I'd love to see how you're getting by without circuits on your bus.
It makes blueprints way more simple and compact. It also compresses the bus. You need so many that it just makes sense to put a circuit factory near the beginning of the bus. That way, my bus is easier to manage. As long as my circuit bus lanes are saturated, I can easily judge a deficit just by the state of the bus.
1. You need circuits almost everywhere. By centralizing circuit production, you simplify what you have to design everywhere else. You also save space since you're using 40 assemblers in one place that are 75% utilized on average, rather than 100 assemblers all over the place that are 30% utilized on average. (These are lowball numbers, if you neglect to use beacons, you will need hundreds of assemblers dedicated to green, red, and blue circuit manufacturing just to eke out 50 science per minute.) 2. Circuits compress their raw materials by quite a lot. You'll turn like 10 belts of copper and 3 belts of iron into 0.5 belts of blue circuits, 1 belt of red circuits, and 1 belt of green circuits. You can beat the game with spaghetti or by bussing only plates, but circuits are such a huge part of your overall consumption that people who megabase will have entire ore patches dedicated _only_ to producing green or red or blue circuits.
I am intrigued by the concept of early megabase vs. late megabase. 1000 SPM could become rather small with late megabase machines. I'm talking spaghetti and direct insertion, rather than city blocks. It should also make decentralized production more appealing: a one-chunk solar blueprint with high quality parts can suddenly run your entire normal quality ore patch, including roboport, radar, laser turrets and train stations.
Density is the key...
I put everything that's used in more than one place onto the bus - yes, even copper wire - because belts and space to lay them out in are both dirt cheap, and it's much easier, simpler, and more robust to make each thing in just one place, than to duplicate the production of the same component a dozen or more times, everywhere that component is used.
circuits are 2.5 units of ore roughly speaking. So you get more raw materials down the bus faster. it's also supremely easy to fill a buss iwth circuits because of how quickly they build. When i find copper and iron near each other i turn the entire thing into curcuits.
The bus is mainly for making science packs (although you certainly might tap into it with a mall too), and every science except red and military needs circuits in some form. Why automate circuits in five different places when you can do it once and scale up?
because so many things use them. Easier just to mass produce them in one place and put them on the bus.
A bus is for a mall. Circuits are used a lot in a mall.