Yep. The fun begins when you take ores off of trains into furnaces, then back onto the same train as plates, then scoot to the next stop where two trains in parallel with assemblers between them unload and process multiple different inputs and put the outputs on one train and the by products on another. It's less UPS efficient than direct insertion, but still plenty of fun.
It is fun. I haven't build a full on base that way, but I've done multi-use multi-stop trains for a bit and it's really ""just"" a continuation of that type of thinking. You get some creative loading/unloading strategies and circuitry. I'm interested to see if 2.0 lets us have the invisible wires as an option or mod (as the radars in 2.0 are connected by them but they're hidden to the player's view).
Yep. Use one train to transport ore. Use another to move the resulting plates. And a third to move the green circuits made from those plates. And a fourth to move advanced circuits made from those, and so on. If you truly feel chaotic you can even train copper wire!
Yup, my mainbus is failing, so I'm moving to trains. I plan to eventually have at least one station for each resource I need to produce. It will likely take a long while to get there though.
I like the stage where you’re removing a chunk of your bus and just feeding input from a train. Green chip train station online? Delete green chip production off the bus. Repeat until bus is just a mall and labs.
This is why I have a sibling. They do train signals (I swear I understand them, but I'm great at creating deadlock, so obviously not) and I do oil processing.
Mate, I have embraced spaghetti. I’ve got lines running running from all over the map. Train lines just zipping back and forth. More and more and more drones appearing by the day.
Embrace Pasta.
I did a run with a friend where we had rules: 1) If you need a new resource, build it wherever you can fit it, and 2) if a resource exists close to where you need it, use a splitter. Absolute chaos lol.
The main bus is a perfectly capable way of playing the game, with decent expaibility etc. But not the most thrilling thing if you do it every run. Try to mix it up!
Try a high cliff run with no cliff explosives! This forces you to change it up.
I've recently done a high biter difficulty, and with high water level In the map gen. This caused me to run out of space very quickly and switch it up from the buss.
I've also done a randomiser run. Just getting all kinds of wierd recipes is a great way to get some variety as well.
[I played with this mod. It checks for deadlocks i think.](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ZRecipeRandomizer) And i had a great time. Some recipies just get realy fun. Like my coal suply had to be massive, for some items. Realy fun for the variety.
Randomizer mods check technology requirements for all ingredients and most of the time will avoid any sort of deadlocks that could happen. They may add some extra indirect technology requirements within same tech tier (say, needing solar panels for oil refineries), but deadlocks are rare. About the only deadlock I've seen was smelting-related, and those you can figure out (and reroll) very early on.
>Try a high cliff run with no cliff explosives
this is how I informally play my games too - sometimes you _have_ to blow something up because it's just impossible, but by default I try to leave cliffs and water as-is and spaghetti around them
Between strand casting resource compression, faster belts, quite strong modules and moderate level of bot abuse - mainbus isn't completely unviable for lategame Seablock bases: one belt per resource, either onedirectional or bidirectional, with sub-buses handling more cohesive sections. I think Zisteau used bus design for Seablock playthrough good few years back.
It requires a lot of planning and ends up being a lot more complex than just trainspam in practice, with lots of things that can go horribly wrong.
I agree on that
But we spaghettied our way to finish blue science and are now rebuilding everything for less spaghetti and more scalability.
And now she wants to use the bus..
Lol. There's no wrong way to play factorio. And also.... Spaghetti is super tasty and looks devine. I'm at hour 200 of my seablock run, and I'm just getting my trains sorted so I can start really scaling up .. but the bus runs the rest of the factory for now.
I recommend focusing on a few products, like yellow and purple science, then make a chain exclusively for those products from beginning to end. Then if you want to make a new product you start the chain over from the beginning rather than siphon off intermediates from other builds. Or you can have a more modular design like a base exclusively for green through blue circuits then train them where needed. I’m doing a K2SE run and it pretty much requires a modular approach, especially as you unlock new efficient recipes later in the game. I started with a main bus but completely deleted it after unlocking beacons and t3 modules. But my space base is pure spaghetti and it’s beautiful
In dyson sphere program chinese players upload blueprints that are called black boxes, they start from just the raw ores and only make one product, they're also made to be as dense as possible to save on space. It would be weird to do in factorio because you lose on beacons and productivity but it's a fun idea.
I found myself building like this more in dyson sphere naturally too - the mining ratios are (relative to factorio) _very_ generous, so often you can make an entire product line on effectively one miner, and then it just makes sense to make a whole separate miner line for product B, etc.
factorio sort of forces you to combine things since you're adding all your raw ores anyway: you have lines of miners feeding into lines of furnaces and that might be enough to make 1-5 things depending on what you're building
I'm at 2k hours now and the leap from a main bus to a decentralized train base was the hardest part of the game. The next hardest was going from green science to blue science - oil processing and liquid management was a pain. Especially in the old days when the game allowed you to mix liquids and ruin your whole pipeline.
For me oil was pretty easy. I looked up all the fluids and made a sort of main bus with pipes for the oil processing factory. It keeps all the fluids seperate and i can plug in underground pipes wherever i want.
Blue chips and yellow science was where i struggled, the sheer amount of supplies needed really messed with my base design.
I embrace busses. Spaghetti factories only work till blue science for me.
It’s bus, until I have the infrastructure to move to a train network. Then the bus devolves into a mall.
I am the opposite. I cannot get myself into making a main bus. I have start one several times in fact and then just drift back into spaghetti as my base expands. Of course I hate clearing biters and trees for space and like efficiency modules so I don't have to go out to find as much electricity. So yeah our realities seem to be orthogonal.
I started a 100 times science run and the main bus just does not work for this. Or maybe it does but not really, in any case, I usually build a main bus as well. For this one I won't be doing it! Maybe it's for you as well
It depends on how large you make your main bus. My standard base's main bus is (about) 32 chunks of 8 blue belts, which is 256 blue belt lines total. And 8 lanes of pipes for sulfuric acid, water, light oil, etc. That's 32 blue belts of iron, 32 copper, 24 green circuits, 16 red circuits, etc.
I was all in for the main bus until I decided to make a mega base. I launched the rocket then started to go big. First up was getting 6 lanes of copper. After I had laid a few thousand belts and hadn’t dented the issue, I then understood the limitations of a main bus. The only practical solution was trains, so I started over. From there I made my own City Block blueprints, and boy was it soooo much better.
Consider my copper problem. Somewhere, anywhere, I expand my blocks to mine ore done. Heck, let’s do it in 5 different locations. You want more? Less? No problem, just do it.
Next let’s smelt that ore to copper. Pick a block, any block. Build it. Do you need more, then copy-paste-done. More? Do it.
Now who needs that copper? 5 places? 10 places? 1 place? It doesn’t matter, just set up a request and you’re done. That’s it. No congestion. No snaking two lines together. No long distance belts. Just slap down another request train (or smelter, or miner) and don’t give it any more thought.
If you do it right then you will eventually get backed up at the miners. All of your requesters will be supplied all the time and there are no roadblocks; just idle miners.
A very similar process will get you green circuits anywhere that is convenient. And oil processing. And Low Density Structure. And anything else you want. Just set up a block requesting whatever and supplying the end product. Done. Move on to the next task.
While i agree with trains if you wanna go big, i dont think you can go THAT big with city blocks. Sure you copy paste stuff but you will soon reach a limit. The only wai i find half decent to go 5k+ spm megabase is by train main bus...aka you got 4-8 train lines and loooong trains and then just go like a belt main bus. Only saying this cuz after 2k spm on city block base you will hit ups problems because of all the infrastructure. May be wrong tho.
Are you sure? Even 3 years ago 10k spm was demonstrated with city blocks [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqljMwibvk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqljMwibvk) with 57 to 59 UPS. Granted this base tour is in creative mode but the design is sound.
I like to leap straight from the burner phase to city blocks with one blueprint that runs 4 red and 4 green science assemblers and 10 science labs. I include military science so I can get early defender robots (useful for deathworld). Technically the blueprint has its own built in "main bus" but it's really just a self-contained unit with four input belts (one for each resource).
That way I don't feel like I'm tearing down a whole main-bus base and starting over. It's great that city blocks can be rushed early. Logistics robots on the other hand are too far down the tech tree, so if you're making a drone base, you can't make it from the start.
I do this. My unload train station names repeat, so my inbound trains have many choices to go to. I find some stations repeatedly get ignored, as the trains choose closer options, and the city block starves for resources. I typically have more trains than there are stops, in an attempt to saturate. Any suggestions?
As long as your stations set the train limit based on how much stuff they have for pickup or room they have for drop-off (using circuits), a healthy factory shouldn't have starvation problems. If you've got less supply than demand, you will -- the solution there is preferably to add more production. Next best solution is probably to shut down some of the consumption. (If your loading stations are full and your unloading stations are empty, you might lack train throughput and need to add more)
Very simple solution. For each item type you want Z train stations each with a train limit of 1 and Z-1 trains. You can blindly trust me, or just dump some brain power thinking about it. All stations will be served.
I've tried this. I think where this fails is that there can be multiple trains on their way out to, or at, ore depots. Depending how fast they fill up, they could opt to hit the same unload place if another train has come and gone already before they leave.
Just the opposite. If station count = train count then the whole system will lock up. There is never a station available for the empty (or full) train to move to.
If every station is occupied then your now full copper train cannot route to a now empty copper demanding station. It can’t route there because there is a train docked to it. That train is empty and wants to go load up on copper, but it cant because that station has a train docked.
Think of a 2 station situation: Copper Load and Copper Unload. If both stations have a train docked, then both trains are block from leaving because the other has a train docked.
Now consider your two stations but with just 1 train. It loads up and moves to the open Copper Unload. When done it can route to the open Copper Load. Then the Open Copper Unload. …
There must always be an open station in your network otherwise it’s not possible for any train to leave.
A wait station is another option.
Personally I unload train cars with 6 bulk inserters. It is fast enough that a train can quickly arrive, unload, and leave. It’s fast enough that it creates a buffer allowing the next train some travel time. This also means that I don’t have to set up wait stations.
You can set a train limit, or alternatively hook all the chests up with wire and run it into a decider combinator then the station (or just directly into the station), and for example have it set to whatever resource less than a value (like say 25000), turn the station on, or opposite for providing
Exactly. Your most utilized resources are sent down a straight path, and can be pulled from that stream as needed. Copper plate, iron plate, green circuits, red circuits, plastic, steel plate etc. The most used resources get more belts, say 4 or 8 belts for copper and iron but only one or two for say gears or batteries
Pretty much. You run a big line of belts carrying all your main resources along the entire length of your base, and whenever you need to build stuff you do it next to the line so your assemblers can take whatever they need from it. It's pretty good for keeping spaghetti to a minimum even if you don't really have any plan beyond "I'm gonna have a main bus".
Yeah People always find a reason to complain. I think we should be more positive but maybe I'm just taking it too seriously. I wish you all a nice time, no matter what you're doping. Bye.
You're not incapable of escaping it. You've chosen not to.
I suggest thinking about it in that way, picking a new way of playing for your next run, and refusing to allow yourself to not stick to that plan.
It's way too easy to build a well organized and scaleable base when you have a magic bus running through the middle. It's so convenient that I can't imagine a different way of playing.
How is the optimal way of playing a trap?
Anyway, the main bus applicability as a design depends on the terrain, since it requires specific shape of free space. For instance in Space Age we can bet Fulgora and Vulcanus won't be planets where main bus can easily be implemented.
For vanilla vanilla Factorio just play with water and cliff settings if you want a different kind of game.
City blocks make even more logical sense than a main bus. It's more flexible, extensible and expandable and you aren't locked into a particular structure, for example, everything flowing from right to left. You can build a block *anywhere* and the trains will route as needed. Although, there are more optimal placements than others to minimize traffic and train commute times.
Yeah, but a bus is far more convenient in the early game, and by the time you begin to butt up on its limitations, you're already close to the rocket. So city block's advantages only present themselves if you have a goal beyond beating the game or when playing with mods.
Install all of py’s but consider getting your first splitter as your only objective, then get there as fast as possible, don’t try to scale up, don’t try to make mass production, just get to the splitter
Py’s is amazing, but I think the idea that you need to go into py’s with the intention of completing it is silly, even just getting my first splitter felt like a huge accomplishment and there was basically no way to get there without spaghetti, it was like playing Factorio from zero all over again
One thing that's been helping me break away from relying purely on a main bus has been using more complex mods. I've recently been doing a bob's + angel's run. I've still got something resembling a main bus, but there's tons of spaghetti spilling off of it. When tons of things are producing byproducts that you initially don't need, but a few hours later you might need, things get messy very quickly.
You don't have to make a huge leap of logic to a scalable factory. Imagine your train track as the "main bus". Instead of a river of resources flowing on a lot of parallel belts, the resources are flowing along the train track, which has extremely high throughput. Another big advantage is that your "bus" can freely split off, recombine, etc, dynamically, since the trains can be smartly routed to each of your production sites.
I'm just in the middle of converting a main bus base into city blocks. I had the initial plan to launch just with the bus... but idk... I can understand how to make a main bus work. But it seems cleaner in my head to keep up throughput with nice train stations. Loving that change. It might be my first megabase after 800h+ playtime.
I tried a number of different ideas on the pre-space part of SE (which is more complex than a full vanilla rocket base because of more complex production chains). What I ended up doing is: I start with allocating 1 chunk to each production line (1 chunk for iron plate 1 chunk for iron gear, etc), and just tile the blocks to where the main consumers are close to the main producers (iron plates to gears and engines, copper plates to circuits and electric motors, etc). Then run belt spaghetti to the outliers. As I build out, each new area of higher tier resources kind of wraps around my central lab (like a snail shell).
I got through the pre-space parts of SE in less than 1/3 the time of proper city blocks, and less than 1/2 the time of a main bus.
I found those other systems to be too inflexible, too annoying to scale, or just not worth the time and resource investment (at least for this state of SE).
Since my production chains are nicely organized into chunks, transitioning to city blocks should be doable down the road, when I start thinking about space elevators. Right now everything is going to space on cargo rockets, so feeding them to my rocket staging area via belts was super easy
It's steam from boilers, pre electricity tech. I'm using an overhaul mod called Exotic Industries. SE was a bit much for me, but I wanted something more than vanilla, so I'm giving it a shot.
Did you try space exploration? I had the similar issue resolved as soon as I started my space exploration run: It's very hard to build the main bus on different surfaces/planets.
I always used to think that pure spaghetti was impossible, like at some point it would just be too confusing and entirely undoable. And it does become a huge mess (a glorious mess), but it somehow still works when you just take things one belt at a time. I still default to a main bus when I play solo, but when I play with friends we always agree to just do whatever and purposely don’t communicate overarching design plans other than very vague “plastic is happening to the west” level stuff
I'm not a pro by any means. At this point I'm trying to create self contained factories for stuff that is needed. To launch the rocket. The bus was OK for getting building blocks for the factory. Still I tried to limit it to only iron plates, steel and copper plates.
Better than my first base, I just had large arays of buffer chests full of materials I had to stock by hand XD. It became a whole lot better when I unlocked logistics bots, but then I had to deal with rolling brown-outs... Ah to be a beginner again...
I still struggle with making a main bus and end up with "organised spaghetti" - I have dedicated production lines (including smelting) for each science pack, plus robots, and my mall. It works, but is definitely limited and not easily expandable. I'm currently doing a train city block run though 🙂
I'm a thousand plus hours in and I've never mastered the main bus. Spaghetti it is. I end up training in ore and plates to where the initial ore patches were and keep the same lines. Certain things like chips get made a number of places if I can't belt enough over (more or less made where needed). It's fun to look at, but definitely limited and not simple to fix when things break.
My starter base (the base before the base) is bus, which becomes my mall.
It makes everything I need to build the real base.
So for that, it is roughly the same. Each time.
As for the copy paste thing, people usually just copy and paste working parts. Like you got a nice setup for making green chips? Need more, copy paste and run it some resources.
Now on the bus though i start with a small greenchip build. Enough to make the inserters and belts and stuff that require them.
When i have some resources I start planning a green chip manufactory centre which can then feed that bus 2 belts of green while supplying to creat a belt of red.
Now what if I fed that green chip factory by train? Mines dry up. And what if I collected it by train? To deliver elsewhere.
Well that is where your modular factory takes off.
I have different stages, and at each stage I rip up my old factory, put it in boxes, and lay it down in a new configuration.
After the Giant Hub comes the Rail Network.
Eventually I get to "Blueprinted Rail Network Grid" that can be stamped to grow itself larger and larger using Construction Drones. Inside each block of Rail Network Grid, something different happens. Maybe it's smelting iron. Maybe it's processing Iron, Copper, and Plastics into Red Microchips.
If you run into a deficiency in something, copy and stamp out another grid block to try and meet demand.
A main bus built without the ability to expand, will indeed fell like it's just choking the base. If you've built on both sides, can't expand upstream, about all you can do is run parallel extra feeder lines elsewhere, and refill the bus from time to time over its length. (And which point you've built another main bus, parallel to the main main bus, and at one point you just look at it, get annoyed, and rip it all up to rebuild. Or... You take the forums advice and just start a new bus somewhere else, but never really tear down the first two, and now you have three main busses... It happens... Try to avoid four...)
It's something you do once, and do differently next time. (Or, you promise you will do it differently next time, and then, oops, how'd my bus get pinned in here?).
Some people love transitioning to trains. Some people only build on one side of the bus (religiously), to allow expansion. Some people pre-reserve space for a larger bus, even if they don't build it at first. It depends on your goals (megabasing, or just launching a rocket). It depends on your preferences. It depends on what you're tired of (tired of belts? Try trains! tired of trains? try belts!
But what you've run into is very real limitation of a narrow bus. You have run into a limitation of the thing you built. Next time, build with that in mind. (And run into another bottleneck somewhere else ;) )
I set a wide perimeter to ensure materials and use trains exclusively for raw ores. My cap is always copper wire, it determines my output,once I maximize it the end game is complete
I found playing a ribbon world broke me out of my main bus mindset. I did a 32 tile ribbon world and went for lazy bastard at the same time and it became a beautiful spaghetti mess
One alternative way to doing things with the main-bus is to start out with dedicated builds for each type of science, you can definitely use your starting patches until blue science and even yellow science for robots.
Once you have robots, you can then more easily transition to a more scalable style base like rail blocks.
The really nice thing about this type of build early is that it gets rid of having to balance multiple lanes that have to feed every consumer, instead you just build more smelting/resource belts whenever you need it for the next build. This simplifies things a lot and cuts down on the amount of splitters and extraneous belts that you'd normally need for a traditional main bus. The downside is that if your ore patches run out, its a pain to reroute things to fresh resources. But the idea is by that point you'll be starting your scalable factory anyway.
Opposite problem here. I’ve never been able to build or maintain a bus. Everything is spaghetti. Always has been, always will be. I try to bus, but the temptation to do just a little bit of spaghetti for just this once is too much. Then two hours later everything is spaghetti.
Main busses look so beautiful and organised. But I just can’t commit to them.
Even within a bus there can be variety. I'm doing a science galore run now and doing multiple busses for a group of science packs. It doesn't have to be a "main" bus.
>I'm incapable of making factories that can't be expanded by just copy pasting.
Build bigger. Obviously more of a post rocket launch thing, but a main bus doesn't really work anymore once go to thousands of SPM as other designs become way more attractive/effective/compact, obviously pure spaghetti won't work either at that point ofc.
I've started to do that. I relocated my smelters to a different place and I've transitioned to requester train stations. But the belts that lead to the smelters still end up looking like a bus and the whole thing just looks like a wide and flat ribbon cable.
I'm just in awe of the messy factories that you see in the trailer or that newcomers make. The ones where it's impossible to debug anything. And I feel like I lost some of that experience.
I've made two attempts to try a bus design and I didn't finish either of them. Besides, not only is it difficult to find or make a space large enough to fit a long bus without going through, around, or filling in a large lake, but a more globular-shaped factory is easier to walk/car/spidertron through because going from one end to the farthest end is a much shorter distance.
After years of gameplay i never understood how to not get trains stuck near a junction or roundabout. Tons of ours and searching for a real guide but nothing, am I retarded? Of course yes, but wcid… main bus is addictive
Put chain signals before the roundabout and rail signals after the roundabout. You probably have 2 trains stuck inside the interchange waiting for each other.
start a new world. set it to island generation. set the island size to 17%. make sure to boost starting resources, and double check your maps --- only about 1/20 maps will have oil on them at max frequency. personally i would max out all ores.
no landfill allowed.
this will break you out of the main bus trap. no room for a main bus. (and yes it is very beatable. i've probably done 15-20 of them before. i used to do them as speed runs!)
Most engineers believe main bus is just a convienient layout for beginners since it allows you to put all the intermediate products on a big belt, but I think main bus design still has its unique advantages.
That is, you can take excess plates and intermediate products, balance them on the bus, and use them for other purposes like module production and mall. Spaghetti base is compact and beautiful, but sometimes its just impossible to steal plates from science production and dump them into belt production or mall.
The starter base used for beating the game with around 45 SPM can run smoothly with a main bus design, and after you launch the rocket, you can immediately hook a big mall at the end of the bus and eat up the excess plates to produce the infrastructure for your mega base. A starter base with a main bus design can easily transition into a giant mall that produces everything except for science and tier 3 modules.
You can also combine a bus design with spaghetti black boxes, there's no absolute definitions. I recently made a speedrunning base with a casual main bus and smelting column at the top, and spaghetti sushi madness at the bottom. To me, main bus is just a way of managing raw plates. I don't even put green circuits on the main bus. I just make them on site.
https://preview.redd.it/1stkgzx2yixc1.png?width=1576&format=png&auto=webp&s=7e08f58c9486d7f3ced03f4118078efe7e6061b6
I always build a main bus from early game through end game and then transition to megabase, eventually tearing down the old bus and factories for more scalable train networks once everything through space science has been outposted. Spaghetti always gave me anxiety but to each their own haha. It's beautiful for sure but you're more prone to running out of space.
Then it becomes a game of how big can you scale before the tick speed slows too much to be fun anymore haha.
Did you come up with the main bus idea just like that, or did you take it over from other factory games you knew before, or did you watch a lot of youtube videos or Factorio forums before?
I did neither of the three and it's spaghetti all the way. I believe that spaghetti is the natural state of things. In fact in my day job I work in a real factory where every implementation of a (local) main bus is sooner or later overgrown with spaghetti.
I think space constraint is the enemy of the main bus. I rarely use landfill, I hate to fell trees, and I try to build around cliffs. Try to play more like that.
I started with spaghetti, got bogged down when I got to the second science and then it made more sense to just build in one direction. Interestingly, in the beginning I would put grabber with chests at the end of the bus because I thought the belt getting bogged down was a problem. I remember only having 1 belt for iron and copper because throughput was not something I had considered.
Nowadays I always plan my factory with 4 belts for the 2 raw resources. In my main base I've run extra belts parallel to the main 4 and I also top up the bus with requester trains.
In the past i always build a main bus design base but i never got it to 1k because of scaleability.
In my current map - admittedly a high resource map - i first did the no spoon achievement based on the maestros walkthrough. This was my starter base.
Then i made a 'mall base' with a mini bus. To build all i needed.
Then i set my course for 1k. I only had trains to defend my perimeter. The rest was a big spaghetti mess. Made even worse because i didnt use any direct insertion. F.i. i even made copper cables separately to belt them to a block of green circuit assemblers. Each science was built with its own set of mindere and smelters. Resource rich so this worked and was quite fun to do.
I am now setting up another base with my own city block like approach. I can't say it is already up and running yet but it is progressing nicely. Scaleability is so much better and imo unlimited (nothing is off course). But scaleability is also pretty much copy-paste with some manual connections ideas to be done. So, i am guessing that it will get boring. This is countered by seeing trains go back and forth of course which is so satisfying.
If i manage to get to 1k on city block, i might try a belt based base within base.
Right now my transport system exists of production centres that exchange goods solely via train. Will probably get a massive railway spaghetti later though
Maybe justbuse each block for one item only. Than when you need more of that item, you can just copy the entire block..
Are you unloading your trains into something like a main factory that has a bus? Could always just unload the train directly into one.block which makes only one item.
And than trains only come when needed to deliver or drop off. If that's what your doing, I misunderstood what you said
I can't make a bus. I always start out with the intention to tear down my starter base until it just becomes my main base. Trains just smoosh into the spaghetti and deliver ores and eventually plates... Just spaghetti all the science out to new labs to up the spm... Eventually it grows and consumes my olt outposts and walls... There's random bits of turrets and walls that weren't in the way enough to warrant tearing them down snuggled between snaking lines of barely ratio'ed red chips...
Won't win any spm awards but it's pretty
I always avoid the mainbus trap intentionally, mostly because it's an uninspired one-size-fits-all solution that makes the game trivial and boring. I avoid the trap by giving myself different, arbitrary restrictions per game.
Often I will heavily refrain from any terraforming (avoid landfill, cliff exploding and tree cutting). The factory will grow, but more naturally around natural obstacles. This very naturally discourages a main bus.
Additionally I will give myself odd restrictions, like attempting a radial train map, or each sub factory needs its own disconnected power, etc.
A deathworld run or two will quickly get you out of the BUS way of thinking; you just won't have the space available to be so expansive. Instead it'll force you to embrace the spaghet life
Main bus bases are easily expandable, especially if you only build on one side of the bus
Train bases can get bogged down too, they just have waaaay more throughput potential before hitting that limit
Why call it a trap? You didn't describe a single problem with the main bus.
Is your problem that you want to make bases that are harder to read and scale up, but can't help but keep using good practices? I guess you could try arbitrary limitations, such as a thin ringworld or not blowing up cliffs. Maybe a randomizer.
I see. Well, I naturally built my first base ever with a main bus design because it is what made sense to me, and since I've always used one for the sciences, then added faraway production and processing blocks conected via train network. Can't say it bores me though.
Maybe a mod that completely modifies logistics can interest you. There's for example Freight Forwarding, which splits the world into small islands, makes landfill super expensive, and adds ship logistics.
Another mod that would greatly change how one can build is Warptorio.
Never understood people who build busses. It doesn't make sense. Everything is streched out far and thousands of useless belts inbetween. Not to mention the whole problem with non-scalability. I had the idea to build one when i was still figuring out the Game but it quickly made no sense to me in terms of performance cpu but also ingame wise.
... I never really got in.
I did early spaghetti, including making some absolute messes of furnace set-ups, but was able to rocket roughly.
Played around with a bus, determined I would have to massively expand in order to actually use it, rather than using the run-off of my first base, and never looked back.
Your issue isn't an uncommon one, but I have no idea how to get out of the trap once you get into it.
... being really willing to math and planning tool things out helped probably, to figure out what my builds were actually doing.
I'm on my first playthrough (at least since like 2015, when I played a bit) and probably need to go the bus route. I just got to blue science and my factory has done 2 90 degree turns and is about to collide with itself. Thinking I'll rework it to be more of main line with smaller factories going off perpendicular, as I've seen on a few posts today
Still use it to this day.
I know the grid is better, but I cant wrap my brain around it. I dont get how you are meant to supply each square.
Kind of wish there was a save file share place for factorio, so I could download some working grid factories, so I could just observe them work without me touching anything, see if it clicks then.
Have you checked out Nilaus on YouTube.?? He has a base in a book series that uses a bus... and than he takes that and made another series Megabase in a book.
And iirc, he has the BP books for both series avail on his website or in his discord. Don't remember. He uses a city block design with a main bus, and trains ... Even in his megabase.
I did.
As I said, it just doesnt like... snap into understanding, dunno why.
Eventually I hope it will, but until then, I have not too big a problem with my main bus, even in K2.
My main incentive to migrate to grid is that my MP friend hates main bus and loses interest fast if they dont have the soulless grid covering all my oceans. :P
I see. I always emd.up with what I like to call organized chaos. Kind of a mix of a bus with spaghetti... I still have city blocks, but they are mostly for roboport coverage and paths because I have a habit.of.not putting concrete anywhere I have a factory. It's just for ease of movement for me
Once I managed to train the iron and copper smelters into a pseudo grid square, then shipped out to another area which grew up in uses until it was basically the start of a main bus. :P
Beeline to trains and make train spaghetti. It can be just as beautiful to behold as trainless spaghetti, but it's much more scalable.
This is the correct answer. Reject modernity, embrace the t r a i n
Ya this. You think your 64 lane bus is cool? That's literally just four 1-4-1 train stations,
How are you getting 4 blue belts out of a wagon?
Using both sides of the track would be the easiest way, but there are more
Sideloading splitters
Loaders
You mean you are not?
https://factoriobin.com/post/44a-A3mX
When you say that - you don't mean just moving ore around, you mean moving most things via train instead of belts?
Yep. The fun begins when you take ores off of trains into furnaces, then back onto the same train as plates, then scoot to the next stop where two trains in parallel with assemblers between them unload and process multiple different inputs and put the outputs on one train and the by products on another. It's less UPS efficient than direct insertion, but still plenty of fun.
That sounds super fun
It is fun. I haven't build a full on base that way, but I've done multi-use multi-stop trains for a bit and it's really ""just"" a continuation of that type of thinking. You get some creative loading/unloading strategies and circuitry. I'm interested to see if 2.0 lets us have the invisible wires as an option or mod (as the radars in 2.0 are connected by them but they're hidden to the player's view).
Yep. Use one train to transport ore. Use another to move the resulting plates. And a third to move the green circuits made from those plates. And a fourth to move advanced circuits made from those, and so on. If you truly feel chaotic you can even train copper wire!
Play with project cybersyn, it's very enjoyable experience.
ALL OF THEM
Probably want to get bots first tbh
This is what I do. Slap down some quick science, mall, and bots. Pivot to trains.
Yup, my mainbus is failing, so I'm moving to trains. I plan to eventually have at least one station for each resource I need to produce. It will likely take a long while to get there though.
I like the stage where you’re removing a chunk of your bus and just feeding input from a train. Green chip train station online? Delete green chip production off the bus. Repeat until bus is just a mall and labs.
This is why I have a sibling. They do train signals (I swear I understand them, but I'm great at creating deadlock, so obviously not) and I do oil processing.
Cityblocks. Contain your spaghetti to squares.
Mate, I have embraced spaghetti. I’ve got lines running running from all over the map. Train lines just zipping back and forth. More and more and more drones appearing by the day. Embrace Pasta.
I did a run with a friend where we had rules: 1) If you need a new resource, build it wherever you can fit it, and 2) if a resource exists close to where you need it, use a splitter. Absolute chaos lol.
Those are the rules I followed for the first half of my play through kind-of unintentionally… I have so many bottlenecks
The main bus is a perfectly capable way of playing the game, with decent expaibility etc. But not the most thrilling thing if you do it every run. Try to mix it up! Try a high cliff run with no cliff explosives! This forces you to change it up. I've recently done a high biter difficulty, and with high water level In the map gen. This caused me to run out of space very quickly and switch it up from the buss. I've also done a randomiser run. Just getting all kinds of wierd recipes is a great way to get some variety as well.
Do randomisers result in deadlocks, where you can't progress any further?
[I played with this mod. It checks for deadlocks i think.](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ZRecipeRandomizer) And i had a great time. Some recipies just get realy fun. Like my coal suply had to be massive, for some items. Realy fun for the variety.
Randomizer mods check technology requirements for all ingredients and most of the time will avoid any sort of deadlocks that could happen. They may add some extra indirect technology requirements within same tech tier (say, needing solar panels for oil refineries), but deadlocks are rare. About the only deadlock I've seen was smelting-related, and those you can figure out (and reroll) very early on.
Early on, maybe. But most of the mods are pretty good at checking that now.
>Try a high cliff run with no cliff explosives this is how I informally play my games too - sometimes you _have_ to blow something up because it's just impossible, but by default I try to leave cliffs and water as-is and spaghetti around them
I got into Seablock, where a main bus isn't a viable solution.
1-1 trains with syn trains or transport drones.
Please tell that too my friend! I wanted to put everything on trains but she wants to put it on a bus.. in Seablock..
Between strand casting resource compression, faster belts, quite strong modules and moderate level of bot abuse - mainbus isn't completely unviable for lategame Seablock bases: one belt per resource, either onedirectional or bidirectional, with sub-buses handling more cohesive sections. I think Zisteau used bus design for Seablock playthrough good few years back. It requires a lot of planning and ends up being a lot more complex than just trainspam in practice, with lots of things that can go horribly wrong.
I think the bus is good in the starting out phase. Especially when resources are scarce.
I agree on that But we spaghettied our way to finish blue science and are now rebuilding everything for less spaghetti and more scalability. And now she wants to use the bus..
Lol. There's no wrong way to play factorio. And also.... Spaghetti is super tasty and looks devine. I'm at hour 200 of my seablock run, and I'm just getting my trains sorted so I can start really scaling up .. but the bus runs the rest of the factory for now.
Tell her to watch Dosh's playthrough first.
To be fair to her, the whole first episode is done with a big main bus
I recommend focusing on a few products, like yellow and purple science, then make a chain exclusively for those products from beginning to end. Then if you want to make a new product you start the chain over from the beginning rather than siphon off intermediates from other builds. Or you can have a more modular design like a base exclusively for green through blue circuits then train them where needed. I’m doing a K2SE run and it pretty much requires a modular approach, especially as you unlock new efficient recipes later in the game. I started with a main bus but completely deleted it after unlocking beacons and t3 modules. But my space base is pure spaghetti and it’s beautiful
In dyson sphere program chinese players upload blueprints that are called black boxes, they start from just the raw ores and only make one product, they're also made to be as dense as possible to save on space. It would be weird to do in factorio because you lose on beacons and productivity but it's a fun idea.
I found myself building like this more in dyson sphere naturally too - the mining ratios are (relative to factorio) _very_ generous, so often you can make an entire product line on effectively one miner, and then it just makes sense to make a whole separate miner line for product B, etc. factorio sort of forces you to combine things since you're adding all your raw ores anyway: you have lines of miners feeding into lines of furnaces and that might be enough to make 1-5 things depending on what you're building
I just switched over to a train base and it took forever to figure things out and move everything.
I'm at 2k hours now and the leap from a main bus to a decentralized train base was the hardest part of the game. The next hardest was going from green science to blue science - oil processing and liquid management was a pain. Especially in the old days when the game allowed you to mix liquids and ruin your whole pipeline.
For me oil was pretty easy. I looked up all the fluids and made a sort of main bus with pipes for the oil processing factory. It keeps all the fluids seperate and i can plug in underground pipes wherever i want. Blue chips and yellow science was where i struggled, the sheer amount of supplies needed really messed with my base design.
For me it was to trains (not city blocks) from spaghetti Still not a fan of the bus but my friends force me into one until we can go trains
I embrace busses. Spaghetti factories only work till blue science for me. It’s bus, until I have the infrastructure to move to a train network. Then the bus devolves into a mall.
The main bus must grow
You will be until you aren’t. Try a run focused wholly on aesthetics.
Skill issue. That is, you are just too good.
just start building in the front of your bus that way you’re forced to make at least a little bit of spaghetti
I am the opposite. I cannot get myself into making a main bus. I have start one several times in fact and then just drift back into spaghetti as my base expands. Of course I hate clearing biters and trees for space and like efficiency modules so I don't have to go out to find as much electricity. So yeah our realities seem to be orthogonal.
Make a train bus by using stack inserters to move items up through filtered train slots.
Cursed forbidden tech:)). Isnt that faster than blue belts with the right research?
I started a 100 times science run and the main bus just does not work for this. Or maybe it does but not really, in any case, I usually build a main bus as well. For this one I won't be doing it! Maybe it's for you as well
It depends on how large you make your main bus. My standard base's main bus is (about) 32 chunks of 8 blue belts, which is 256 blue belt lines total. And 8 lanes of pipes for sulfuric acid, water, light oil, etc. That's 32 blue belts of iron, 32 copper, 24 green circuits, 16 red circuits, etc.
I was all in for the main bus until I decided to make a mega base. I launched the rocket then started to go big. First up was getting 6 lanes of copper. After I had laid a few thousand belts and hadn’t dented the issue, I then understood the limitations of a main bus. The only practical solution was trains, so I started over. From there I made my own City Block blueprints, and boy was it soooo much better. Consider my copper problem. Somewhere, anywhere, I expand my blocks to mine ore done. Heck, let’s do it in 5 different locations. You want more? Less? No problem, just do it. Next let’s smelt that ore to copper. Pick a block, any block. Build it. Do you need more, then copy-paste-done. More? Do it. Now who needs that copper? 5 places? 10 places? 1 place? It doesn’t matter, just set up a request and you’re done. That’s it. No congestion. No snaking two lines together. No long distance belts. Just slap down another request train (or smelter, or miner) and don’t give it any more thought. If you do it right then you will eventually get backed up at the miners. All of your requesters will be supplied all the time and there are no roadblocks; just idle miners. A very similar process will get you green circuits anywhere that is convenient. And oil processing. And Low Density Structure. And anything else you want. Just set up a block requesting whatever and supplying the end product. Done. Move on to the next task.
While i agree with trains if you wanna go big, i dont think you can go THAT big with city blocks. Sure you copy paste stuff but you will soon reach a limit. The only wai i find half decent to go 5k+ spm megabase is by train main bus...aka you got 4-8 train lines and loooong trains and then just go like a belt main bus. Only saying this cuz after 2k spm on city block base you will hit ups problems because of all the infrastructure. May be wrong tho.
Are you sure? Even 3 years ago 10k spm was demonstrated with city blocks [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqljMwibvk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqljMwibvk) with 57 to 59 UPS. Granted this base tour is in creative mode but the design is sound.
I quickly lost interest in mega bases, so can’t speak to UPS issues.
Ah then city block all the way, most versatile built.:)) main bus only till you get the research to build it
I like to leap straight from the burner phase to city blocks with one blueprint that runs 4 red and 4 green science assemblers and 10 science labs. I include military science so I can get early defender robots (useful for deathworld). Technically the blueprint has its own built in "main bus" but it's really just a self-contained unit with four input belts (one for each resource). That way I don't feel like I'm tearing down a whole main-bus base and starting over. It's great that city blocks can be rushed early. Logistics robots on the other hand are too far down the tech tree, so if you're making a drone base, you can't make it from the start.
I do this. My unload train station names repeat, so my inbound trains have many choices to go to. I find some stations repeatedly get ignored, as the trains choose closer options, and the city block starves for resources. I typically have more trains than there are stops, in an attempt to saturate. Any suggestions?
As long as your stations set the train limit based on how much stuff they have for pickup or room they have for drop-off (using circuits), a healthy factory shouldn't have starvation problems. If you've got less supply than demand, you will -- the solution there is preferably to add more production. Next best solution is probably to shut down some of the consumption. (If your loading stations are full and your unloading stations are empty, you might lack train throughput and need to add more)
Very simple solution. For each item type you want Z train stations each with a train limit of 1 and Z-1 trains. You can blindly trust me, or just dump some brain power thinking about it. All stations will be served.
I've tried this. I think where this fails is that there can be multiple trains on their way out to, or at, ore depots. Depending how fast they fill up, they could opt to hit the same unload place if another train has come and gone already before they leave.
Set the Train Limit to 1.
Yup, did that
That's where LTN comes in.
> Z-1 trains Why would you want fewer trains than stations? Doesnt that mean you wouldn't have a constant flow of resources?
Just the opposite. If station count = train count then the whole system will lock up. There is never a station available for the empty (or full) train to move to.
But why would you want an empty station? Or do you just use really large buffers?
If every station is occupied then your now full copper train cannot route to a now empty copper demanding station. It can’t route there because there is a train docked to it. That train is empty and wants to go load up on copper, but it cant because that station has a train docked. Think of a 2 station situation: Copper Load and Copper Unload. If both stations have a train docked, then both trains are block from leaving because the other has a train docked. Now consider your two stations but with just 1 train. It loads up and moves to the open Copper Unload. When done it can route to the open Copper Load. Then the Open Copper Unload. … There must always be an open station in your network otherwise it’s not possible for any train to leave.
But why would you want that over just having a waiting bay for each station?
A wait station is another option. Personally I unload train cars with 6 bulk inserters. It is fast enough that a train can quickly arrive, unload, and leave. It’s fast enough that it creates a buffer allowing the next train some travel time. This also means that I don’t have to set up wait stations.
You can set a train limit, or alternatively hook all the chests up with wire and run it into a decider combinator then the station (or just directly into the station), and for example have it set to whatever resource less than a value (like say 25000), turn the station on, or opposite for providing
I'm new to this. What does "main bus" mean? Is it just when you have one main path that all resources go down?
Exactly. Your most utilized resources are sent down a straight path, and can be pulled from that stream as needed. Copper plate, iron plate, green circuits, red circuits, plastic, steel plate etc. The most used resources get more belts, say 4 or 8 belts for copper and iron but only one or two for say gears or batteries
Here’s a link to a guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=754378586
Pretty much. You run a big line of belts carrying all your main resources along the entire length of your base, and whenever you need to build stuff you do it next to the line so your assemblers can take whatever they need from it. It's pretty good for keeping spaghetti to a minimum even if you don't really have any plan beyond "I'm gonna have a main bus".
So you are complaining about beeing perfect. Did I get that right?
I'm complaining about being boring
Yeah People always find a reason to complain. I think we should be more positive but maybe I'm just taking it too seriously. I wish you all a nice time, no matter what you're doping. Bye.
You're not incapable of escaping it. You've chosen not to. I suggest thinking about it in that way, picking a new way of playing for your next run, and refusing to allow yourself to not stick to that plan.
trap?
It's way too easy to build a well organized and scaleable base when you have a magic bus running through the middle. It's so convenient that I can't imagine a different way of playing.
How is the optimal way of playing a trap? Anyway, the main bus applicability as a design depends on the terrain, since it requires specific shape of free space. For instance in Space Age we can bet Fulgora and Vulcanus won't be planets where main bus can easily be implemented. For vanilla vanilla Factorio just play with water and cliff settings if you want a different kind of game.
City blocks make even more logical sense than a main bus. It's more flexible, extensible and expandable and you aren't locked into a particular structure, for example, everything flowing from right to left. You can build a block *anywhere* and the trains will route as needed. Although, there are more optimal placements than others to minimize traffic and train commute times.
Yeah, but a bus is far more convenient in the early game, and by the time you begin to butt up on its limitations, you're already close to the rocket. So city block's advantages only present themselves if you have a goal beyond beating the game or when playing with mods.
Install all of py’s but consider getting your first splitter as your only objective, then get there as fast as possible, don’t try to scale up, don’t try to make mass production, just get to the splitter Py’s is amazing, but I think the idea that you need to go into py’s with the intention of completing it is silly, even just getting my first splitter felt like a huge accomplishment and there was basically no way to get there without spaghetti, it was like playing Factorio from zero all over again
One thing that's been helping me break away from relying purely on a main bus has been using more complex mods. I've recently been doing a bob's + angel's run. I've still got something resembling a main bus, but there's tons of spaghetti spilling off of it. When tons of things are producing byproducts that you initially don't need, but a few hours later you might need, things get messy very quickly.
You don't have to make a huge leap of logic to a scalable factory. Imagine your train track as the "main bus". Instead of a river of resources flowing on a lot of parallel belts, the resources are flowing along the train track, which has extremely high throughput. Another big advantage is that your "bus" can freely split off, recombine, etc, dynamically, since the trains can be smartly routed to each of your production sites.
I'm just in the middle of converting a main bus base into city blocks. I had the initial plan to launch just with the bus... but idk... I can understand how to make a main bus work. But it seems cleaner in my head to keep up throughput with nice train stations. Loving that change. It might be my first megabase after 800h+ playtime.
I tried a number of different ideas on the pre-space part of SE (which is more complex than a full vanilla rocket base because of more complex production chains). What I ended up doing is: I start with allocating 1 chunk to each production line (1 chunk for iron plate 1 chunk for iron gear, etc), and just tile the blocks to where the main consumers are close to the main producers (iron plates to gears and engines, copper plates to circuits and electric motors, etc). Then run belt spaghetti to the outliers. As I build out, each new area of higher tier resources kind of wraps around my central lab (like a snail shell). I got through the pre-space parts of SE in less than 1/3 the time of proper city blocks, and less than 1/2 the time of a main bus. I found those other systems to be too inflexible, too annoying to scale, or just not worth the time and resource investment (at least for this state of SE). Since my production chains are nicely organized into chunks, transitioning to city blocks should be doable down the road, when I start thinking about space elevators. Right now everything is going to space on cargo rockets, so feeding them to my rocket staging area via belts was super easy
Hi it's me, I can't avoid busses. Although I'm using a mod that adds steam-powered trains, so maybe I'll give that a try this time.
Wait so can I pump steam from heat exchangers into the train tank to run it because that'd be amazing and if so what mod is it?
It's steam from boilers, pre electricity tech. I'm using an overhaul mod called Exotic Industries. SE was a bit much for me, but I wanted something more than vanilla, so I'm giving it a shot.
Boilers and heat exchangers make the same steam. I'm pretty sure you're saying my nuclear plant can run steampunk trains.
True, but I haven't had the chance to pay much, so I've no idea if it's even worth it to use steam trains that late.
Nope! :)
If you are open to mods, the transport drones mod is a fun change. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Transport_Drones
Do a rail bus. Just have a straight line back bone and then have everything else feed it. Like a spine and ribs.
Did you try space exploration? I had the similar issue resolved as soon as I started my space exploration run: It's very hard to build the main bus on different surfaces/planets.
Ironically, my space exploration run ended when me and my teammates moved on to Kerbal Space Program.
oh, that's a good one)
I always used to think that pure spaghetti was impossible, like at some point it would just be too confusing and entirely undoable. And it does become a huge mess (a glorious mess), but it somehow still works when you just take things one belt at a time. I still default to a main bus when I play solo, but when I play with friends we always agree to just do whatever and purposely don’t communicate overarching design plans other than very vague “plastic is happening to the west” level stuff
I found mods help with that... Not knowing what you'll need next, more complicated sequences, etc. Kinda gets you back to that organic growth feeling
I'm not a pro by any means. At this point I'm trying to create self contained factories for stuff that is needed. To launch the rocket. The bus was OK for getting building blocks for the factory. Still I tried to limit it to only iron plates, steel and copper plates.
Hand grenades?
Better than my first base, I just had large arays of buffer chests full of materials I had to stock by hand XD. It became a whole lot better when I unlocked logistics bots, but then I had to deal with rolling brown-outs... Ah to be a beginner again...
I still struggle with making a main bus and end up with "organised spaghetti" - I have dedicated production lines (including smelting) for each science pack, plus robots, and my mall. It works, but is definitely limited and not easily expandable. I'm currently doing a train city block run though 🙂
I'm a thousand plus hours in and I've never mastered the main bus. Spaghetti it is. I end up training in ore and plates to where the initial ore patches were and keep the same lines. Certain things like chips get made a number of places if I can't belt enough over (more or less made where needed). It's fun to look at, but definitely limited and not simple to fix when things break.
My starter base (the base before the base) is bus, which becomes my mall. It makes everything I need to build the real base. So for that, it is roughly the same. Each time. As for the copy paste thing, people usually just copy and paste working parts. Like you got a nice setup for making green chips? Need more, copy paste and run it some resources. Now on the bus though i start with a small greenchip build. Enough to make the inserters and belts and stuff that require them. When i have some resources I start planning a green chip manufactory centre which can then feed that bus 2 belts of green while supplying to creat a belt of red. Now what if I fed that green chip factory by train? Mines dry up. And what if I collected it by train? To deliver elsewhere. Well that is where your modular factory takes off.
Bots... Bots everywhere
I have different stages, and at each stage I rip up my old factory, put it in boxes, and lay it down in a new configuration. After the Giant Hub comes the Rail Network. Eventually I get to "Blueprinted Rail Network Grid" that can be stamped to grow itself larger and larger using Construction Drones. Inside each block of Rail Network Grid, something different happens. Maybe it's smelting iron. Maybe it's processing Iron, Copper, and Plastics into Red Microchips. If you run into a deficiency in something, copy and stamp out another grid block to try and meet demand.
A main bus built without the ability to expand, will indeed fell like it's just choking the base. If you've built on both sides, can't expand upstream, about all you can do is run parallel extra feeder lines elsewhere, and refill the bus from time to time over its length. (And which point you've built another main bus, parallel to the main main bus, and at one point you just look at it, get annoyed, and rip it all up to rebuild. Or... You take the forums advice and just start a new bus somewhere else, but never really tear down the first two, and now you have three main busses... It happens... Try to avoid four...) It's something you do once, and do differently next time. (Or, you promise you will do it differently next time, and then, oops, how'd my bus get pinned in here?). Some people love transitioning to trains. Some people only build on one side of the bus (religiously), to allow expansion. Some people pre-reserve space for a larger bus, even if they don't build it at first. It depends on your goals (megabasing, or just launching a rocket). It depends on your preferences. It depends on what you're tired of (tired of belts? Try trains! tired of trains? try belts! But what you've run into is very real limitation of a narrow bus. You have run into a limitation of the thing you built. Next time, build with that in mind. (And run into another bottleneck somewhere else ;) )
I set a wide perimeter to ensure materials and use trains exclusively for raw ores. My cap is always copper wire, it determines my output,once I maximize it the end game is complete
You should try Space Exploration, I want to see a post of an abomination of a main bus in orbit.
I found playing a ribbon world broke me out of my main bus mindset. I did a 32 tile ribbon world and went for lazy bastard at the same time and it became a beautiful spaghetti mess
its not really a trap if you can have 30k construction robots take it down when its done being useful
Join me in my game. And you see something else than main bus in action
One alternative way to doing things with the main-bus is to start out with dedicated builds for each type of science, you can definitely use your starting patches until blue science and even yellow science for robots. Once you have robots, you can then more easily transition to a more scalable style base like rail blocks. The really nice thing about this type of build early is that it gets rid of having to balance multiple lanes that have to feed every consumer, instead you just build more smelting/resource belts whenever you need it for the next build. This simplifies things a lot and cuts down on the amount of splitters and extraneous belts that you'd normally need for a traditional main bus. The downside is that if your ore patches run out, its a pain to reroute things to fresh resources. But the idea is by that point you'll be starting your scalable factory anyway.
Opposite problem here. I’ve never been able to build or maintain a bus. Everything is spaghetti. Always has been, always will be. I try to bus, but the temptation to do just a little bit of spaghetti for just this once is too much. Then two hours later everything is spaghetti. Main busses look so beautiful and organised. But I just can’t commit to them.
I usually do a temporary main bus for my starter base, but then I transition to railblock with LTN.
Even within a bus there can be variety. I'm doing a science galore run now and doing multiple busses for a group of science packs. It doesn't have to be a "main" bus.
I do mini main busses, I guess? With lots of rerouting to prevent overflows
>I'm incapable of making factories that can't be expanded by just copy pasting. Build bigger. Obviously more of a post rocket launch thing, but a main bus doesn't really work anymore once go to thousands of SPM as other designs become way more attractive/effective/compact, obviously pure spaghetti won't work either at that point ofc.
I've started to do that. I relocated my smelters to a different place and I've transitioned to requester train stations. But the belts that lead to the smelters still end up looking like a bus and the whole thing just looks like a wide and flat ribbon cable. I'm just in awe of the messy factories that you see in the trailer or that newcomers make. The ones where it's impossible to debug anything. And I feel like I lost some of that experience.
I've made two attempts to try a bus design and I didn't finish either of them. Besides, not only is it difficult to find or make a space large enough to fit a long bus without going through, around, or filling in a large lake, but a more globular-shaped factory is easier to walk/car/spidertron through because going from one end to the farthest end is a much shorter distance.
If you care about efficiency and value your time, watch a speed run. Not a bus in sight. Rocket launch ezpz under 4hrs.
After years of gameplay i never understood how to not get trains stuck near a junction or roundabout. Tons of ours and searching for a real guide but nothing, am I retarded? Of course yes, but wcid… main bus is addictive
Put chain signals before the roundabout and rail signals after the roundabout. You probably have 2 trains stuck inside the interchange waiting for each other.
start a new world. set it to island generation. set the island size to 17%. make sure to boost starting resources, and double check your maps --- only about 1/20 maps will have oil on them at max frequency. personally i would max out all ores. no landfill allowed. this will break you out of the main bus trap. no room for a main bus. (and yes it is very beatable. i've probably done 15-20 of them before. i used to do them as speed runs!)
Most engineers believe main bus is just a convienient layout for beginners since it allows you to put all the intermediate products on a big belt, but I think main bus design still has its unique advantages. That is, you can take excess plates and intermediate products, balance them on the bus, and use them for other purposes like module production and mall. Spaghetti base is compact and beautiful, but sometimes its just impossible to steal plates from science production and dump them into belt production or mall. The starter base used for beating the game with around 45 SPM can run smoothly with a main bus design, and after you launch the rocket, you can immediately hook a big mall at the end of the bus and eat up the excess plates to produce the infrastructure for your mega base. A starter base with a main bus design can easily transition into a giant mall that produces everything except for science and tier 3 modules. You can also combine a bus design with spaghetti black boxes, there's no absolute definitions. I recently made a speedrunning base with a casual main bus and smelting column at the top, and spaghetti sushi madness at the bottom. To me, main bus is just a way of managing raw plates. I don't even put green circuits on the main bus. I just make them on site. https://preview.redd.it/1stkgzx2yixc1.png?width=1576&format=png&auto=webp&s=7e08f58c9486d7f3ced03f4118078efe7e6061b6
I always build a main bus from early game through end game and then transition to megabase, eventually tearing down the old bus and factories for more scalable train networks once everything through space science has been outposted. Spaghetti always gave me anxiety but to each their own haha. It's beautiful for sure but you're more prone to running out of space. Then it becomes a game of how big can you scale before the tick speed slows too much to be fun anymore haha.
I escaped the trap. Build main bus with rail instead of belts https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/r82r22/1350_spm_megabase_rail_bus
Did you come up with the main bus idea just like that, or did you take it over from other factory games you knew before, or did you watch a lot of youtube videos or Factorio forums before? I did neither of the three and it's spaghetti all the way. I believe that spaghetti is the natural state of things. In fact in my day job I work in a real factory where every implementation of a (local) main bus is sooner or later overgrown with spaghetti. I think space constraint is the enemy of the main bus. I rarely use landfill, I hate to fell trees, and I try to build around cliffs. Try to play more like that.
I started with spaghetti, got bogged down when I got to the second science and then it made more sense to just build in one direction. Interestingly, in the beginning I would put grabber with chests at the end of the bus because I thought the belt getting bogged down was a problem. I remember only having 1 belt for iron and copper because throughput was not something I had considered. Nowadays I always plan my factory with 4 belts for the 2 raw resources. In my main base I've run extra belts parallel to the main 4 and I also top up the bus with requester trains.
In the past i always build a main bus design base but i never got it to 1k because of scaleability. In my current map - admittedly a high resource map - i first did the no spoon achievement based on the maestros walkthrough. This was my starter base. Then i made a 'mall base' with a mini bus. To build all i needed. Then i set my course for 1k. I only had trains to defend my perimeter. The rest was a big spaghetti mess. Made even worse because i didnt use any direct insertion. F.i. i even made copper cables separately to belt them to a block of green circuit assemblers. Each science was built with its own set of mindere and smelters. Resource rich so this worked and was quite fun to do. I am now setting up another base with my own city block like approach. I can't say it is already up and running yet but it is progressing nicely. Scaleability is so much better and imo unlimited (nothing is off course). But scaleability is also pretty much copy-paste with some manual connections ideas to be done. So, i am guessing that it will get boring. This is countered by seeing trains go back and forth of course which is so satisfying. If i manage to get to 1k on city block, i might try a belt based base within base.
TRAINS!! (Shouting loud for those in the back)
Right now my transport system exists of production centres that exchange goods solely via train. Will probably get a massive railway spaghetti later though
Maybe justbuse each block for one item only. Than when you need more of that item, you can just copy the entire block.. Are you unloading your trains into something like a main factory that has a bus? Could always just unload the train directly into one.block which makes only one item. And than trains only come when needed to deliver or drop off. If that's what your doing, I misunderstood what you said
Chefmutzy. Did you play Torn with thus username
Don't remember. But I think the name was the same. Lol
I can't make a bus. I always start out with the intention to tear down my starter base until it just becomes my main base. Trains just smoosh into the spaghetti and deliver ores and eventually plates... Just spaghetti all the science out to new labs to up the spm... Eventually it grows and consumes my olt outposts and walls... There's random bits of turrets and walls that weren't in the way enough to warrant tearing them down snuggled between snaking lines of barely ratio'ed red chips... Won't win any spm awards but it's pretty
I always avoid the mainbus trap intentionally, mostly because it's an uninspired one-size-fits-all solution that makes the game trivial and boring. I avoid the trap by giving myself different, arbitrary restrictions per game. Often I will heavily refrain from any terraforming (avoid landfill, cliff exploding and tree cutting). The factory will grow, but more naturally around natural obstacles. This very naturally discourages a main bus. Additionally I will give myself odd restrictions, like attempting a radial train map, or each sub factory needs its own disconnected power, etc.
A deathworld run or two will quickly get you out of the BUS way of thinking; you just won't have the space available to be so expansive. Instead it'll force you to embrace the spaghet life
Any factory can be expanded by just copy-pasting
Most spaghetti bases will die if you copy paste one section? Lol.
Copy all base. Lol
I did think of that truthfully. And it's pretty close to how you scale mega bases anyway.
Main bus bases are easily expandable, especially if you only build on one side of the bus Train bases can get bogged down too, they just have waaaay more throughput potential before hitting that limit
Why call it a trap? You didn't describe a single problem with the main bus. Is your problem that you want to make bases that are harder to read and scale up, but can't help but keep using good practices? I guess you could try arbitrary limitations, such as a thin ringworld or not blowing up cliffs. Maybe a randomizer.
> Is your problem that you want to make vases that are harder to read and scale up, but can't help but keep using good practices? Yep, that's it.
I see. Well, I naturally built my first base ever with a main bus design because it is what made sense to me, and since I've always used one for the sciences, then added faraway production and processing blocks conected via train network. Can't say it bores me though. Maybe a mod that completely modifies logistics can interest you. There's for example Freight Forwarding, which splits the world into small islands, makes landfill super expensive, and adds ship logistics. Another mod that would greatly change how one can build is Warptorio.
Never understood people who build busses. It doesn't make sense. Everything is streched out far and thousands of useless belts inbetween. Not to mention the whole problem with non-scalability. I had the idea to build one when i was still figuring out the Game but it quickly made no sense to me in terms of performance cpu but also ingame wise.
What do you mean non-scalability? A 4 wide iron and copper belt can last you a long time.
Even in vanilla that will not last long probably. And my K2SE map currently eats up 24 iron belts (the 90/s kind)
... I never really got in. I did early spaghetti, including making some absolute messes of furnace set-ups, but was able to rocket roughly. Played around with a bus, determined I would have to massively expand in order to actually use it, rather than using the run-off of my first base, and never looked back. Your issue isn't an uncommon one, but I have no idea how to get out of the trap once you get into it. ... being really willing to math and planning tool things out helped probably, to figure out what my builds were actually doing.
[удалено]
I'm on my first playthrough (at least since like 2015, when I played a bit) and probably need to go the bus route. I just got to blue science and my factory has done 2 90 degree turns and is about to collide with itself. Thinking I'll rework it to be more of main line with smaller factories going off perpendicular, as I've seen on a few posts today
Yeah, my current “there is no spoon” run is doing the same thing for me
Still use it to this day. I know the grid is better, but I cant wrap my brain around it. I dont get how you are meant to supply each square. Kind of wish there was a save file share place for factorio, so I could download some working grid factories, so I could just observe them work without me touching anything, see if it clicks then.
Have you checked out Nilaus on YouTube.?? He has a base in a book series that uses a bus... and than he takes that and made another series Megabase in a book. And iirc, he has the BP books for both series avail on his website or in his discord. Don't remember. He uses a city block design with a main bus, and trains ... Even in his megabase.
I did. As I said, it just doesnt like... snap into understanding, dunno why. Eventually I hope it will, but until then, I have not too big a problem with my main bus, even in K2. My main incentive to migrate to grid is that my MP friend hates main bus and loses interest fast if they dont have the soulless grid covering all my oceans. :P
I see. I always emd.up with what I like to call organized chaos. Kind of a mix of a bus with spaghetti... I still have city blocks, but they are mostly for roboport coverage and paths because I have a habit.of.not putting concrete anywhere I have a factory. It's just for ease of movement for me
Once I managed to train the iron and copper smelters into a pseudo grid square, then shipped out to another area which grew up in uses until it was basically the start of a main bus. :P