Build Anything WIth MAIN BUS; Simple, Scalable & Aesthetic | | Dyson Sphere Program | Master Class 

If anyone is interested here is how many times you use each product to build every building. Steel: 18 Times Circuit Board: 17 Times Iron: 14 Times Super Magnetic Rings: 12 Times Titanium Alloy: 10 Times Plasma Exciters: 8 Times Stone: 8 Times Gears: 8 Times Electromagnetic Rings: 7 Times Frame Materials: 7 Times Particle Containers: 6 Times Glass: 5 Times Processors: 4 Times Photon Combiners: 4 Times Engine: 4 Times Quantum Chips: 4 times Electric Motor: 3 Times Silicon: 3 Times Electro-Magnetic Turbines: 3 Times Copper: 2 Times Graphene: 1 Time Carbon Nanotubes: 1 Time Titanium: 1 Time

Another really big advantage with this design is that centralizing all of your production makes it much easier to identify and resolve bottlenecks and throughput issues (as opposed to flying all over your planet trying to locate a specific production facility). It may not be efficient use of planet real estate, but does make for efficient use of engineer time, ease of use, and quality of life. Bravo Nilaus! 👏

We really appreciate all the hard work you put in for these blueprints and videos. I've been using a handful of your early game blueprints on my recent restart to play against the Fog and it has SAVED ME SOOO MUCH TIME! Thanks!!

The only reason I dislike bot/ILS bases over this is: if you're not a fairly organized person, it quickly becomes very hard to remember where you put things. I have a 100% ILS "mall planet" that makes everything and it was extremely quick & easy to build, but now I spend most of my time flying around the planet looking for the one ILS that makes a certain thing. Main buses force you to arrange things logically and in a straight line -- so they're harder to set up, but potentially easier to use once they're done!

This design is brilliant! I've been using it since your first video of it, 3-4 weeks ago. Works perfectly. Easy to set up, easy to expand, easy to customize. 🤘

i bought this game cause of you, but i haven't been playing it since i struggle with designs, and mechanics (im used to fatorio). but this was a very clever way of making a main bus. i didn't know that you can have different configurations of the splitters🤔 this will get me started playing again, THANK YOU!!

this video changed everything. i now have a factory for orbital collectors, because why not!!! thanks for sharing your awesome blueprints!

Thank you so much for these blueprints! I'm going to start a new game JUST because of this. You're the best!

Awesome main bus, neat and orderly. Easy to find and order any items you may need.

I set up 2 extra lanes between iron and the builders. Both are mostly empty, but I put a box and hat over the splitter of one to request intermediate buildings and the other for a little bit of blue spray for those components (but it could just be made perminant on the lowest belt) On the north side of hub I also have a buffer building extra processors for the mid game but on the lowest priority to feed the belt.

excellent! I have been watching your death world streams but I am glad that you took the time to show us your setup. I've seen some others streamers on twitch do horrible things. Thanks for insisting on non-chaos builds.

I use this HUB in my game. After I saw u do it a few episodes in. And I love it. OMG.

Just started DSP, and just started using this setup. Its incredibly simple and efficient to use once its up and running. You were right, its a bit of a pain to get it going, but once its up, setting up segments for automation is amazing.

Truly a work of art :) I've been tempted to try something this, but just haven't yet. It just takes so much space. For that much space (I know it's not as visually interesting) I'd just as much rather use logistics stations... Thanks for all the awesome content Nilaus!

oO, saw your first steps with new bus on twitch some weeks ago. really interesting how you developed it!

This is so cool! Thank you

I've been using this design since I first saw you creating it on stream. The convenience and simple ease of it trumps the spaghetti mess I used to create before.

i love this design, it's plain and simply good.

Thx for the video!

You can make this design 2x more compact by having the belts right next to each other instead of spaced out. The splitters have to zig zag instead of being right on top of each other, but honestly that looks very good.

@Nilaus The last smelter for your Magnets isn't hooked up! Love all your vids, it really helped me learn how to think more efficiently when planning logistical routes - Yeah, I used your vids to get better at my day job. You rock.

I like the modularity of this design

Have you considered designing Farm/Mall Planet? Like half of the planet is for dark fog bases and the other - sorter of loot and mall. I think dark fog drops pretty much all of the resources needed for mall (even thrusters and such) and if you have ~10 max level bases on the planet you get loooots of loot (more than full 30/s belt for a base). One probably could make a mall that completely independent and doesn't consume any mined resources. Also - transforming 10-20 lines of unsorted loot into an orderly main bus would look amazing)

Definitely using this on my next playthrough, may even start a 2nd "main" base on the current one to test it out

Coming from Factorio I still like having a traditional mall, love the design. I took inspiration from an earlier video of yours and messed around with a version of this with belts on the ground level and splitters pulling off items on level 2 as you mentioned. It works fine but is definitely messier to setup :)

Amazing video again!

Thank you!

Thats actually very good, and i create my own bus, thanks for the guide!!

This is beautiful.❤

It would be good to get blueprints for the "upgrades" as well -- one for the full late-game bus, one for the proliferation and monitors, and one or two for the ILSes (input and output). While most of these are fairly simple, placement can be fiddly and it's nice to have something preconfigured.

At one point I had decided to box-craft all my buildings with logistics bots supplying all the materials, but to no surprise, it takes way too much room and way too much power to maintain all the bots constantly flying around. In addition, the range of the bots was frustratingly short early game, so I was forced to constantly ferry over items like electromagnetic turbines. After switching to a main bus design (which of course I overbuilt, putting titanium, crystalline silicon, and every other single-use item on), I was much happier with the end result. YOU MUST PROLIFERATE! Amazing how much a little coal can create so many extra products.

Thank you. This is super helpful. I don't want to learn all the ratio of different crafts and use calculator. I have started playing this game for experience and had fun but then i watched some youtube videos with tipis because i was starting to had some problems with not enough automation, and i was busy all the time crafting with 30m que.. After watching those videos with tips and blueprints I was discuraged to play this game becaue there was no sense for me just to use other people designs and solution and they where extra efficient and complicated. I remember thinking that there has to be some easy standarized way to craft basic things. And here comes you like a knight in shining armour. I want to have my own experaince and learn a thing or two and not just copy what others did. But this thing is just perfect for me. I can use the bus for some essential crafting and have my own experiance with designing different things. And your way of explaining things work for me perfectly. I have started new game and i have fun again. THANK YOU :)

im very new to factory games, and my biggest problem is trying to manage what i have producing and what i need more of a bus makes things so much simpler and easier to understand whats going on, incredible design idea thank you

a better counter-argument for the item in the belt would be to contrast with item waiting in planetary, much less in the belt than any planetary based build

Great for beginners but I def prefer a far more compact mall with a combination of pls/belts for most early stuff and logistics boxes for the more unique end game buildings. It also makes it much easier to to grab what you need all in one place, all buildings are in reach with minimal movement.

When dragging a BP, no need to tab multiple times, just hit the "-" button once, and you're good to drag out several BPs.

I noticed that the sorters pulling stuff out of assemblers to go into other assemblers to be a little slow when starting up the bus. I put the storage behind the assemblers on splitters, then continued the belts to the adjacent assemblers. It still looks aesthetic imo and it prioritizes evenly distributing to the dependent assemblers before storing excess.

I have to say, I made a bus on mine, though it circles the entire planet >.>. Made it that way just because I think it looks cool. Even have my research circling along lol

loved it

You'e the hardest working man in gaming.

Oh boy, as a new player I didn't know you could change the style of the splitters. That changes things...

Something I remember hearing a lot growing up is that the best engineers tend to favor analog design over digital designs, and I feel that relying over a bus over fidget spinners really exemplifies this. Sure you can make everything by drones, but i’ve found that on my first save (where i used modular, only drones designs), ive spent a lot of time backtracking and debugging my system that would have been solidly managed by a bus foundation. The drones are good for patching up holes in the system but are far too unreliable once your entire mall is built upon them. Maybe if the devs take a look at improving the AI of drones past the “last tower built gets priority until full” I would use them more, but hubs are far more trustworthy. Thank you for sharing this!

Very good idea for initial research and staying organized when starting off. Plus belts dont use energy and fidget spinners do

I did this but I made it half as wide and stacked it two sorters high. Harder to design but super nice.

The only real improvement I can suggest is adding a monitor to certain high-importance buildings. Your old make-everything polar hub had this, and it was useful to reach to "Oh shi-" situations.

Personally I've found a bus system to be super handy in the early/midgame, belts are super cheap and can be quickly automated with like, 2 smelters and a fabricator.

I create a giant smelter/subproduct array to feed my mall and use PLS's around a giant square so that everything I might want is within grabbing range. The main advantage is that your eyes don't go cross-eyed looking at the same pattern over and over again. There are two disadvantages though. 1. belting all the product neatly is time-consuming. 2. it makes it hard to put all mall products into an ISL later. I have to prioritize just the products I want.

I'd be interested, once you've played with it for a bit, to here if you have a recommended order of item that takes advantage of the synergies of similar items. I picked up on the obvious ones like PLS -> ILS -> Gas Collect, but I picked up a few more watching this. Some times it's not obvious until way down the road when you unlock something that you should have inserted something else earlier. A simple "recommended order" list would be awesome.

My one suggestion would be to add to the blueprint stub belts with input sorters next to the assemblers. That way you just have to drag belts and you're done, instead of also needing to configure sorters for each one.

The probably nicest thing about a bus system like this is with planning you can set up early and thus you only have to make your production hub once and just keep upgrading it, and not need to slap down an upgraded one later. The belt and sorter you can leave spaces for to avoid the clustering. I like the elegance and look of this. If concerned about how much space the belt lanes take up, you can stack another lane on top if you move the first 2 rows back a bit and the ramps slide down without clipping and look pretty nice. I suppose if someone was super pressed about the materials on the belts, you could put a return lane in, or like PLS units at the end of the bus to pick up the excess and then ship it back to the start. Power free you could loop the belt back around like maybe returning up top, or looping the planet if you were silly about it. People don't mind a buffer storage box but belt buffer gets them pressed need to relax more.

Bus it super helpful

If you alternate the position of the splitters (so they're not right next to each other), you can fit twice as many belt lanes in the same space. It's a little harder to work with because there's less space to see below the bus and place belts under there, but it's literally twice as compact! It's personal preference, really. You can always make a design smaller if you're willing to make it more convoluted :)

I have to say, great work and thank you. Indeed this is a great way to make a bus, those blueprints to expand it (draggable and spacable too - although you worked out the ideal spacing along the bus I imagine) is appreciated. This would be my go-to if I ever try a bus. One thing that I wonder and I imagine you tried, is that if you want to expand production of things that are made by getting things off the bus, this would expand vertically? as opposed to horizontally but then again how many do we need (with the improved buildings and all). Also it would have been nice if you showed how to get new things on the bus i.e. as the bus gets thicker with new stuff e.g. processors, quantum processors etc. The other contender for building stuff in this game, the other method, is plots with ILS's. Dedicated ILS that only produce one thing, import stuff and export the product. The thing is, especially after the introduction of dark fog, I was imagining that the challenge would be introduced, regarding redundancy and survival and that is the disadvantage of the bus i guess. If the bus gets hit then everything halts. But if you have gone the way of plots, if you lose a plot on one planet, then you have others spread out in the universe, so that means you get a production hit, but can survive (Battlefield Analysis Bases do mitigate that as they do do repair - but sometimes when you get hit, you do get hit). On the other hand, the advantage of a bus in this case, is that if you go the plots way, then you have to remember where the plots are and end up travelling all over the place to get production rate back up. This way, with the bus, if you have one or two (identical) buses, you know exactly where to go to fix it. Having said that, the dark fog seems disappointing to start with. (Emphasis on *seems* cause there is potential if they chose to go that way) Before getting lazy and looking at other peoples hard work, such as yours and thank you, I started by putting turrets everywhere spread around my base, so hadn't realized that the fog only comes from one direction (if you set it up right - almost). Also I did not expect that interplanetary and intra-planetary transportations vehicles would not get hit. You can end up transporting between ILSs and see the "trucks" go right through the fog swarm in space, without getting a scratch. Not knowing that, delayed my getting it up and running, which is a pity since I would have hoped to make more use and incorporate more the whole planetary movement of the game, i.e. how planets move in the solar system, in relation to each other but now more importantly in relation to the fog, as to avoid it. Not sure how they would add that to the game (maybe some vehicles get hit, but how, and do then what? a way for us to organize it so that, time it so that "we don't cross the beams" and make it part of the challenge. It would be nice, coz otherwise it just for show and an idler (the space movement/billiards thing). But how? Don't get me wrong we do get to appreciate things, as the horses-for-courses suitability of inner planets for building dyson spheres (in this case) perhaps, but, and that's the point, generally speaking I like games for such, i.e. promoting learning. So having such modeled star systems with movements etc, is good as long as its part of the game so we bother to think about it towards whatever goal, and how it affects it. Still as I said, its early days. Imagine multiplayer, or a better fog, i.e. trying to hit you where it hurts, i.e. bottlenecks etc and what we can do to mitigate that, i,e, with redundancy and what type of redundancy, bus or plot? Anyway great work, thank you!

Thanks

Looks nice. Last time I tried the factorio bots approach and had stroages with hats all over the place and bots to carry the resources, it was quite the mess.

The great thing about this design is the customizable and modular design. Don’t like where an item is built, you can change that, Don’t like what’s on the bus, you can change that. Could use “funny” vertical belts for the 1 to 2 buildings (Warning: Devs said it could crash the game and they have no intention on fixing the bug.) I prefer, order based on the crafting grid.

I've been playing alongside this play through since you started doing dark fogs. I've really enjoyed using this main bus style. A question for you: can you create a "complete" end game bus blueprint that could be dropped down in a new planet? Likely it would go in the "planet scale" blueprints book you have in your bookmarks. What you have already made IS the superior product, a simple and expandable way to increase your main bus as needed... But i'd love it if i could stamp down the end game one that included all the ILS.... maybe for patreon supporters? (I'll sign up!)

Looks like I'll be rebuilding my bus tonight.

Was there any implementation of the bus through blocks with storage and spinners? It would be interesting to see. It's just that this bus is quite large for a mall.

my construstors have a little bid of belt and sorters for the intakes allready in the blueprint (for easy connecting) but the rest looks very much like my own version

So I'm guessing Nilaus is planning to make one of the planets into a "Deathstar" to take out the Dark Storm satellite bases LOL!

@Nilaus, If you want to use Drones with BABs, you can set the BABs to grab the drones, then drop the drones on the ground to let the BABs pick them up themselves. Would that be worth trying for you?

You can make the main bus a lot tighter if you offset the splitters ever other two intersections instead of right next to each other. Left right left right left right, etc.

I've been there, too, but I've settled on a sushi belt design. I've come to the conclusion that a main bus quickly becomes way too wide the more buildings you add. Before the Dark Fog update, you needed 34 different types of components (not counting other buildings) to build every single building in the game in vastly different quantities ranging from 0.45/s (strange matter) to a whopping 47.75/s (iron ingot) to satisfy the demand of a single Mk.III assembler per building. Your idea for a hybrid design with bots for lesser-used components is great though. Using Sushi Belts, you only need 4 quad stacked belts in instead of 34 and every single assembler taps the same 4 belts and builds whatever recipe you assign to it (you have to cross-feed buildings to the neighboring assembly machine when you need buildings as components). And yes, I do have a working non-blocking sushi belt mall that builds every building plus drones, vessels and bots. I still have to upgrade it to the dark fog update which should be doable relatively quickly.

been following you since your early stream days and I was waiting for this video going more in depth on the main bus. :) perfect!

Perfect, you made me trash my newest run. I’m not angry, I hated my setup anyway, I just needed a reason to do it, so I’m quite happy.

For me, this has completely replaced a compact 'all buildings' mall design I found on Steam two years ago (obsoleted by the combat update too, of course). The bus is great for wide varieties of low-volume items such as buildings. Not so good for bulk production, naturally, but it's important to use the right tool for the job.

why not layer the charger pole + missle tower thing behind the power pole similar to how you stack belts/sorters/assemblers?

Can you make a blueprint for Titanium Crystals? I know it’s a super easy recipe and setup but I enjoy your designs and optimizations. Would love to see your take on it with blue proliferation.

I still prefer your old 'temple of build anything' blueprint. Was easy enough to put the plasma cannon on it, and then modify the belt/sorter/assembler build to have an extension for implosion cannons, missile launchers, shields, babs, and laser turrets. I changed the alert sensor on the intermediate building hub to do turrets instead.

I like your bus a lot, I even use it in my game. But I don't lay that flat. I have 2 layers. it makes footprint to be smaller :)

Look super organized, exactly what I always try and never get 😅 Just for clarification: you "only" use the main bus for constructing buildings? Not for ammo, sphere components, matrix or anything else? And do you seperate the ressource between these types strictly? I'm not sure if I have discipline to not use the main bus for everything 😂

As a quick note, I tried using this design a bit more heavily in a run I was doing- it is not capable of sustaining large-scale production at all. You very rapidly hit belt capacity, even at T3 belts. Keep it only to building structures, and nothing else- stick to PLS or traditional logistics for the fabrication of all components.

Long lines of colourfull items look cool, but you need a huge amount of space to build this mall, and there are lots of materials just laying on belts. I recently learned how easily you can create sushi belts with new splitters, and also u can use sushi in early game using boxes. With sushi belts u need only 3belts for a mall.

Can you please show how you support all those belts with each items? All we see is the nice bit but they all have to be made somewhere first right?

I'm curious if there is a matrix for the material requirements for each assembler recipe?

i always have issues with the terrain not lining up when building a buss i can never get it totally straight like yours

I was never a fan of main bus on DSP. It takes so much space that probably means burying ores, and eventually I still need to upgrade everything into ILS and some buildings may occasionally need more production speed than one assembler. So I just have been putting everything directly into PLS and ILS. BUT, been playing on a near max difficulty which means I need to build more stuff locally for longer before setting out to other systems, a bus seems more useful. I also have to admit that I have been a bit lazy to draw the blueprint for the bus which previously only useful for a couple of hours, so something just in time for me to watch 😊

Hi, Thank you so much for your great videos. I do have a question between belt focused bus and drone focused bus. so my mid game bus is heavily focused on drones. if I can post my video, I have thousands flying around. it makes things easier for me, my personal opinion. The only benefit that I can think the belt focused bus has, is that you can access it very early, and it does not use nearly as much power as drone based. However, in mid to late game power will not be an issue since I usually have 5 equatorial belts of solar and 4 belts of ray receivers. The question I have, can belt focused bus deliver as fast as drone focused bus for the end game? because I remember in factorio, LOVE that game, there was a limit on how much you could do with belt focused bus and then the best bus for mega factory was using trains.

How do you get the item icon to appear over the conveyor belts like that?

oh, i actually want to make a bus like this so that everything is built in one place and you don't sort of have to hack it away. ;)

How many sorters can you stack up? I was thinking that I haven’t seen anyone build a vertical stacked bus.

The only thing I don't like with this is it doesn't leave much room for resource input as you scale up prior to logistics. You don't need more than 3-4 factories for belts, sorters etc but many of them take 3-4 ingredients and with only 3 spaces between fabricators it can lead to spaghetti or production limitations. Leaving one more space between fabricators gives more room to scale up without having to change the layout later.

I think this is a great design, but a warning / caveat to go along with it. If you want 100% shield coverage of a planet, you need to put shield generators 45 degrees away from each other in all directions. This bus is, of course, larger than a 45 degree span of your planet. So if shield coverage is important to you, then plan pre-plan your shield placements along the 45 degree longitude and equator to accommodate the necessary latitudinal lines.

🔥🔥🔥🤝

I noticed a flaw in the "New Early Hub" "#01 Circuits + Coils" blueprint. The sorters between the last magnet smelter and the coil assembler are incorrect. It is attempting to insert iron ore into the assembler making the coils then another sorter attempting to move coils into the magnet smelter. You can see the smelter has a yellow dot indicating it is not operating.

15:16 How do i get that technology? i killed nearly every enemy and getting nothing....

I’m trying this right now, but the number one thing I find annoying is all the ressource nodes and oil seeps in the way of my bus! As far as I know the starter planet always has one side with ressources and the opposite side is pretty much bare, so that would be great for the bus, except in the beginning before you have planetary logistics, you need your ressources to be close by. And there’s a dark fog base in the middle of the bare half now.

I hacked my way through building a main bus, but I had no space and was forced to run it north/south. While it is working, it is turning into a soppy sloppy spaghetti nightmare!

i've got an older computer and i've noticed the bus affects my fps. i think they might be a megabase game killer like a bus in factorio

While I like the idea of this main bus approach, it just takes up SO much room on the planet when you've got all the different materials on it. I think the bus is useful in the beginning to make all the different buildings up to like Oil processing, but after that I prefer smaller separate production areas. Maybe it's just because I rarely/never use busses in factory games, but it just feels wasteful to have that much area taken up by a sea of belts.

Its sure does look good and its also fairly easy to build. The only issue I had with it is that certain buildings are just to slow to build with just 1 assembler.

It'd be interesting to compare performance between bus & logistics. If it's anything like Factorio's belt optimizations a bus should provide somewhat better framerates.

Thank you so much! This is what I've been trying to figure out for hours now!

Developers should add a dark fog unit that steals from belt storage. A stealth unit perhaps?

Huh. What I've been doing lately is just plopping all of my mall along the blue belt I have dragged from the dark fog farm to my sorting and storage. The planetary base units drop everything I need to craft basically anything.

I can't find the main bus blueprint in your google drive folder.

you already did what i wrote in previous video 5 min ago!

There are sooo many Blueprints in his dropbox. Anyone know what the blue print for this one is?

But what is the speed of producing all of those items?