10 TIPS To Improve Your MAIN BUS 2024 - Factorio Space Age

[@JudasBrennan]

Don't use balancers on your bus. All that does is spread your resources out so nothing after the first product gets a full lane of resources. Instead, use splitters to push resources to one side of the bud. If you always extract from the same side of the bus (and you should), then you only need that lane to be fully saturated. Use a diagonal row of splitters with their outputs prioritised towards the lane you want saturated. In this way you'll keep your production arrays fully fed for as long as possibly, and you can see at a glance how much is left on the bus by the number of empty lanes on the opposite side from your saturated lane.

[@rhueoflandorin]

no, you lose compression/throughput doing it this way. And once you transition from localized smelting to train-delivery, failure to properly balance will WRECK your throughput, as consumption from the different cargo wagons will not be properly balanced. The correct way to utilize a multi-belt bus is to properly balance the input, then have each new production center pull from a different belt, then rebalance and compress if needed. Your train unloader will be able to properly unload trains this way.....do it any other way and you'll have problems.

[@JudasBrennan]

@rhueoflandorin the instant you balance you have lost all compression. 🤣

[@rhueoflandorin]

@@JudasBrennan ....not if you're doing it right.

[@JudasBrennan]

@@rhueoflandorin then you don't know what a balancer does.

[@Datscrazi231]

@@rhueoflandorindoesn’t balancing distributes the resources evenly and… reduce compression?

[@-nefeskar-]

well i agree with "mega bus" you saying. But not 4 lane iron etc. Just double it 8 Lane iron, 8 lane copper, 4 lane green circuit, 2 lane red circuit etc. Cuz Factory MUST GROW.. If we need more metarial just add more train!! :)

[@rhueoflandorin]

i wouldn't call 4 lanes of copper or iron a "mega-bus" i'd call that a standard bus. a double-wide would make that 8 lanes of iron and copper. I'd say anything more than 8 belts for a single resource is a megabus. This would be something like "16 iron, 16 copper, 4 steel, 2 stone 2 brick, 2 coal, 4 plastic, 8or16 green circuits, 4 red circuits, 2 blue circuit, etc.

[@Ic0nGaming]

It really depends on your point of view on the game. For just finishing vanilla you hardly need 4 lanes of iron and copper. Not nearly that much. If you are a veteran you look at 4 lanes and start worrying how that should be enough for your chip factory and your science factory.

[@ikjman1]

​@@Ic0nGaming I mean, I finished the game before space age with 2 blue belts of iron and 2 blue belts of copper

[@GhostStyle007]

It is useless to get that many lanes in space age. You would rather go for a fast 2 blue belt lanes, rush vulcanus, get turbo belts , rush gleba, get stack inserters and there you got the equivalents of that painful to manage 99 lanes main bus with just 2 lanes

[@rhueoflandorin]

@@GhostStyle007 my argument wasn't that 4+ lanes was worthwhile, it was that having 4 lanes of iron or copper isn't something i'd consider "MEGA". If you want a good idea of what would be considered MEGA, watch the "factorio 2 simulation playthrough" videos where they have 8:64:8 trains unloading into 32-lane balancers. THAT is MEGA. a 4-belt balancer for iron or copper isn't really MEGA.

[@MoonLiteNite]

@7:53 I played the game around 2k hours with that thought. But my last 2 play throughs, i have changed my mind. Throwing one built of gears on will make it so you don't need 4 lanes of iron for huge base stages Rather than 4 iron, you can do 2 iron, gears and have room for something else!

[@Ic0nGaming]

Well the Gear Wheels at least do compactify iron. In some cases you bloat the material (iron sticks/copper wire). And there's no wrong as long as the machine is running afterwards. Have fun and thanks for your thoughts o/

[@RubberDuck5]

In Space Age stone becomes far more important and needs a full lane to support millatery science and rocket building/nuclear power for concrete. Just my experience after playing 800+ hours. As mentioned in the video, don't go too wide with the initial main bus. It's a trap. Plan before building to know what you need on the bus or go Italian with spaggehti and hate yourself later.

[@crafty1818]

Hey man, this really helped me out, thanks!

[@MarkusGehlhaar]

I only disagree with one thing. You can't calculate how much you need, because you will always need more. Make your calculations and then double it ;-) Nice video. Thanks.

[@Ic0nGaming]

I disagree with this stance. I've been working like this and it led me to burnout and putting the game away out of exhaustion. Cause always building doubly as much as tiresome to me. Building it to0 small with lots of room of expansion was for me personally the game-breaker. But we are all wired differently, so every approach which works out for you is a good one. Overpreparing killed the game for me personally though.

[@gro967]

This is not proper bus extraction. You need a balanced bus extractor if you are extracting from more than 1 belt. Just splitters definitely won’t do the job, throwing in a balancer before or after also doesn’t. Also don’t plan an end for your bus, the reason for having a main bus is having it flowing through the base. The mega bus concept is what I start with after around 1-2 hours into the game. I start the third science with at least 30 belts blocked and planned. It’s also not a mega bus, it’s a normal main bus. There are mega buses, but they are at least 8-16 belts per resource to even start calling it a mega bus. We had bases that had 48 belts for copper alone…

[@Ic0nGaming]

Well there's no upper limit and when you call it a megabase is up to you. Sorry if that offended you in any way. So what to do then if not extracting and balancing afterwards? Critics is easy, but you also don't present the solution. If I'm so wrong here, please correct instead of only belittling. How we build our factories and plan it is also not a standard thing. You start your way, next people works different. As long as we reach our goals and have fun with it it's fine.

[@gro967]

@ not offended in any way, I still liked and enjoyed your video. I just don’t think that the word mega should be used here. In vanilla mega started maybe around the 1k spm mark, but now it’s around 10-20 at least. I just wanted to make other players aware of some game meta.

[@gatekeeper258]

that belt balancer blueprint book is horribly incorrect in many places, do you have a better option?

[@ngavr]

Raynquist's Belt Balancers. Google it!

[@kozwiz2385]

I think the owner straight up downgrade the blueprint from higher tier belt to yellow that why some of them incorrect

[@Ic0nGaming]

Hey there, I added the Link to the Raynquist Belt Balancers into the Description as well! Thanks for spotting out o/

[@Toxodos]

you can also use splitter priorities and use a splitter each lane every time you split something off, that way your lanes fill up one after the other

[@heyhoe168]

@@Toxodos unfortunately it does not compress one side of the belt to another. But it is good enough for a sane-sized bases.

[@rainerzufall1337]

11:40 - I disagree!! THE FACTORY MUST GROW!! 😀 because you can play the complete oposite -> overthink everything but make all goods on-demand. Then you don't have that issue at all. You can also design your mainbus around an on demand good system, just with some storage containers and green circuit 🙂 But great video! ;-)

[@stiliangeorgiev3869]

so how would a new player would ever be able to plan anything ... im new player and gosh tip 1 makes no sense so far lets see next ones

[@Ic0nGaming]

You plan as far as you can currently look ahead. And then you do a new plan. I killed most of my early game fun by trying too hard to make "everything right" just from the get-go. Resulted primarily in pressure and frustration cause I wasn't able to keep up with the fancy stuff the content creators made. That's mostly what I was trying to get down to.

[@wurst1284]

Here's one, don't use yellow belts for anything ever and don't do halfsies on a bus, especially not green circuits. You need those a lot. Also there's no point in making 2 busses for the mall and for science and if it devolves into spaghetti down the line where one factory feeds directly into the next, that's not a bus.