The Main Bus Concept / Layout & Tips - Factorio 0.18 Tutorial, Guide, Walkthrough: Fundamentals 

In my first playthrough, my factory wasn't just spaghetti, it was a Lovecraftian, non-euclidian, labyrinthine mess of belts and pipes. The bus has helped quite a bit, I must say

Me, 30h in my first gameplay: Well, guess it's time to throw all that out and start again!

Here I am having played factorio several 100 hrs and still enjoy watching something as basic as a main bus tutorial. That's how much I love this game. It all started with awesome videos like this though. Another great video

another thing to consider about taking lots of space, is that if you're playing with biters you need to defend all that space you're taking

As a rule of thumb, if a build has a short crafting time (like Iron Gear Wheels or Copper Cables) it is generally better to craft them locally where needed rather than added to the bus.

You explain things in a way I can understand. I appreciate that! Here's to a more efficient factory.

Bro, you're crazy! Never seen this concept being explained as good as u did. nice

Thank you! Having a hard time trying to figure out logistics in this game and this answered quite a lot.

Easily the best video on main buses I’ve seen! Thank you for the fantastic tutorial!

You have the BEST tutorials. It seems like everyone else just makes these videos to flex their knowledge, but you really take your time to make sense

In my first playthrough I actually started designing with a "main bus" in mind, I had the right core idea but didn't execute probably I didn't know what Matt's I'd need and totally put all my lanes together. =) This helpede clean it up thank you!!!

I could really use a short tutorial on prioritizing what to build in the early game and maybe a blueprint for items needed for expansion in the early game (inserters, assemblers, belts, etc)

This is such a well thought out, quality video. Thank you so much for making this

Another aspect useful to keep in mind is in what order along the bus (starting from your furnaces) you should put your builds, I usually try to put earlier along the bus those items that are used in most advanced recipes, for instance, green circuits are used in a lot of later more complex products, so that is probably the first build I'll set up along the bus, you are also going to need tons of rails, but that is either an end product (destined to be used in base construction) or fed straight into science and nothing else, so my rail build will most likely be towards the end of the bus near that science build. This reminds me I don't see stone ore or brick in that bus, you are going to be building a bunch of rail and wall at some point so I would set up one bus belt for half ore and half brick stone. Gears quite honestly I produce in-situ always so no belt for that, and plastic is used almost exclusively in red circuit so I usually just produce it near to where the red circuit build is. I do bring along oil gas and lube parallel to the main belt bus with underground pipes, this allows me to produce oil derived products like batteries near their respective consumption builds.

Great content as usual Xterminator. I usually plan to have a solid fuel lane in my bus and reserve the space for it.

my lightbulb moment was when you said, in reguards to spacing, "we would need to underground the copper" or something to that effect. I had always been worried to do 4 lanes because I couldn't understand how to get things from the middle lanes. It never occured to me to drop the bus lanes I wasn't pulling off of down and once theyre down you have room a plenty. I only ever thought of underground lanes as a way to go under an obstacle, not a way to reposition an entire section of something. still the same "thing" but i think you get wat i mean

The concepts of the main bus are so well explained in this video. Thanks.

Nice video, really helped me as a beginner! 😄👍🏻

I leave myself 3 spaces between each lane group, mostly because i think the basic power poles fit nicely in the middle free space

I personally like 4 spaces between lanes. Leaves me a bit more wiggle room for On-Off ramping, and merging.

Liked, commented and subscribed for the simple fact that you said in the beginning that everybody should play the game their way instead of talking down inefficient playstyles

I liked the idea for a while but never really thought it worked out well in practice outside about purple science. Building a more distributed, modular factory has always worked better for me. The macro transport level of linking together those small production facilities is really easy with trains.

I don't miss any of your videos! keep it up :)

Thank you for making this video! I watched Nilaus masterclass on main buses but it seemed more like an overview, unlike this video which is more in-depth!

Great video! The structure is a lot better than the previous video, keep up the good work! I usually don't go for a bus but go for spaghetti and I can tell you spaghet bases can be more or equally efficient as main busses. I usually have a dedicated mal and smelter for each science pack which makes it super messy but makes it easier to have perfect ratios and easier to expand. I liked the part where you covered the steel smelting ratios bc newer players might overestimate their steel production. I also learnt why having your items in a specific order is more effecient. I hadn't really thought of that. Last do you have a separate green circuits production for red circuits or do you use the main bus. I think having a separate production is better and healthier for the main bus but I'm not sure. Anyways hope to see more of these videos.

You made me chuckle with your road analogy for the "Main bus" i always assumed it was called Main Bus because of the computing term "Bus" which is the main data/ power route on a component board or in computer hardware, e.g. USB - Universal Serial Bus... I like your Highways analogy more haha

Great video! Thx

As a new player some time ago, I struggled with balancing the draw of materials from a multi-belt bus. It might be good to give people a steer on balancers - for me at least the optimum configuration of splitters to achieve what I wanted was not obvious, and one still sees several different strategies from different players. The simplest is, I believe, always to split off the nearest side (that would be the righthand side in this video) and then use splitters upstream to bring material from the further belts. Also, it's often the case that a production unit will need a mixed belt of e.g. green and red circuits. There are neat ways of mixing the belt mid-bus, without drawing two full lanes off and mixing them at the "roadside".

manufacturing/crafting (whatever anyone calls it) on one side leaves the other side open for more smelting to refill iron/copper/steel lanes. gave me a good idea for a next factory. thanks!

I think I'll enjoy your videos like this because I literally have not played through to finish a vanilla game. A lot of videos about Factorio claiming to be tutorials and guides presume a lot of prior experience and seem to be aimed more at refreshing memories of past victories. Like I've never set up a train station or played with the combinators to detect the state of things and a video about trains that claims to be a tutorial better not start assuming I know how to string the red and green wires to count the quantity in a tank or something unless that was covered in the previous episode. Like that. I've been to train "tutorial" videos that just say "download my blueprint and plop it down and you're done!" That doesn't teach me a thing.

These are great, keep them coming. Something I think you should add to all the tutorial, is to say in the start or in at the end, is to remind them that its okay to restart now and then, and its totally normal to do so, if you f*cked up, or can see a improvement in your setup.

Thank you bro

Great video!! Using time stamps would make them even better

Thanks. I just started Factorio. Never played a game like this before, so my for my first bike I just one big transport that snakes through all of my buildings. It was a mess.

This is still useful information thanks bro!

Perhaps for another tutorial: How to route things off and onto the bus in an optimal way, such as if its in the middle two of four lanes, how would i build that splitter? balancing etc. what's a good way to create a shared belt? how to avoid spaghetti

the 4 wide gap also means you can fit artillery in the middle so it protects a radius aroubd the entire bus, fed by a belt or by robit, whichever youd prefer

1) because blue undergrounds can travel 8 spots, If you INTEND to play past the first rocket launch, or build a megabase, you should triple/quadruple your initial-width needs of the bus: If you plan to start with 4 lines of iron and copper each, give your safe SPACE for 12 or even 16 lanes of each. And when intending to go for mega-base-size saves, I suggest either having single-side production (where the side opposite of factories/utilization is used is for insertion-balancing and rail network), or utilizing a split bus (where you use almost twice the size of a normal/early-mid-game bus, and where you put Iron/Copper/Green Circuits on the outside lanes of each, and rarer materials and liquids are sent through the middle lanes, which can be shared with space for roboports and power distribution. Also, something a lot of people forget is to give themself SPACE for traveling up and down the bus. A dedicated single-lane or double lane rail for a train shuttle can be useful here, but you need to plan for it. Also, leave yourself room for roboports. 2) Leave space between factory areas to limit the times you have to demolish and re-place because you didn't leave yourself room for something you'd like to change. also, getting into the habbit of leaving yourself space helps when you do have spaghetti factories-, especially leaving space between/around large builds to enable insertion-balancing of rail-delivered resources. Also, setting up a clean power distribution line along your bus makes logic-driven control of sections of your factory easier, and can be useful for setting up a dashboard.

For me the smelting is built as the end cap for my bus. The materials come off the smelters in the same direction as the bus and they all merge down into the size as the bus. I also build on both sides of the bus. Though it is usually an oil processing area for the beginning of the other side and eventually science and rocket. After that I start to work on my real base. Anything up to launching the first few rockets is just a starter base for me

Thank god, someone who can explain this in a way my simple monke brain to understand

Last year, something occurred to me: Factorio is to some extent about compressing low-value materials into higher-value materials. 2 Belts of Iron Plates becomes 1 Belt of Gear Wheels. So 2:1. 1.5 Belt of Copper Plates and 1 Belt of Iron Plates, 2.5 Belts in total, becomes 1 Belt of Electronic Circuits. So 2.5:1, 5 Belts of Iron Plates becomes 1 Belt of Steel Plates. Thus 5:1.

I use a 3 bus system, main, science pack backwards bus, and a product bus to bring everything to science pack production areas.

I'm just starting to play and today I started my BUS with only copper and Iron with coal being limited to the smelters and energy production, It's pretty neat and I left plenty of space for several rows of belts. Now I wonder If in the future I could mix BUS and spaguetti, like having a BUS in spiral with the rocket base in the center and factories in the outer border, I bet it would take a lot of space.

17:15 |Holds up hand| Has Hit the limit of the map TWICE!

I always build my facilities on one side of the bus so i can expand my bus on the other side if needed, or I can get end-game resources to the beginning of the bus (for whatever reason).

I do not do gear when I use a bus since when you need iron gears you for the most time also need iron.

how many lanes I probably need then double it. 12 lanes it is!

The thing with starting out with a two lane bus is you can easily upgrade them to a 6 lane bus once you have the blue transport lanes.

* One thing I find very useful is to not run the copper and iron for circuit production over the main bus. That way you don't need necessarily need 8 lanes of iron and 8 lanes of copper or whatever some people have. At the beginning I still do it, but when I scale up they get their own belts. * It's also nice to have a fluid bus with water, crude oil, lubricant and acid

Absolutely fantastic guide! Exactly what I needed!

Putting Gears on the bus is only useful if you're building everything off of a single bus. I tend to separate my bases (starting in the mid-game and beyond) into two areas: research and infrastructure. Each base has its own main bus, eventually fed by trains that will drop off material to whichever one needs materials. If you do that, what you find is that most uses of gears are for infrastructure: belts, inserters, etc. Research materials only need gears for Green and Red packs, which are not what's going to be slowing down your research. You can easily build gears in the places where you use them, rather than funneling them on down the bus.

So, how do you get items onto a belt, how do you distribute them evenly and most importantly how do you get items off the inner lanes?

I stopped using a Main Bus for my starting base when I realized that I cannot transport enough material on it for my science needs (60science/minute). I switched to feed every science production just as needed (the calculator helps a lot for that). It detangled my production/science layout and made it easier to transition to a megabase.

I usually prefer my smelting on the left side too and im left handed as well lol. But i take advantage of unused space

This made so much more sense than Nilaus' video

How do you supply the smelters with enough ore to saturate the belts? Do you build long belts from outposts or use ore trains?

I like to do a mix. I don't like one ridiculous factory to use one bus with 8 belts of copper and such. So what I do is I do modules and connect those modules by train. Inside those modules I use the bus concept. For example for the gray science module I import bricks, iron, copper, coal and steel, put those things on a bus of kinds and then out comes my science packs. This eliminates a large part of the spacing problem. Also it's not efficient at all. You have a lot of useless belts doing nothing when they could be short. What it allows you to do is mainly organization and make sure things stay extendable. You have a common way of doing things that will always work the same. You can always add more to your offshoots if you need to, allowing for infinite extension (so long as the belt capacity is great enough) It also has the benefit of making sure that every factory at least at some point gets some resources, even though something earlier in the bus may gobble things up at a pace that exceeds the inflow of items. It also is a good indicator if you have enough resources to begin with. If the belts are empty you need more. The bus also comes with some fairly substantial drawbacks: The main one is space requirement. You need a lot of belts to run past machines that don't use the resources on them. For example your plastic belt is going to run past red, green, gray, blue and purple science only needed for the yellow one as well as any helper assembly machines that produce logistics items (belts, inserters, machines that don't go into science, etc). This has a lot of plastic sitting on the belt, not being used. Then if you find yourself not having enough throughput and you are already at blue belts (say you found out that 2 blue belts of copper plates aren't enough and you need more) it can become very hard to widen the bus. If you have machines on either side of the bus it can get very messy to split the belts off. If you misplanned and want to add an additional item to the bus (say you decided to ship plastic in after researching oil), it can be again very hard to widen the bus. It bottlenecks throughput for high demand items such as circuit boards through belts. Having your entire factory be fed off one bus will make it (the bus) enormous. to the point where you have more floorspace dedicated to high volume material transportation than actual assembly machines. And belts use a lot of resources to make, especially the higher tier ones. It also creates a lot of delay. An item has to travel down the belt before it can be used. If you have a fresh shipment of ore coming in, the iron plates will need a substantial amount of time, possibly even minutes before any iron is seen at the end of your bus. It also creates a lot of buffer that you might not want, unless you smartly control it with the circuit network. For example if you have a belt full of nuclear fuel you have a massive stockpile of it just sitting on a belt if you run it to your reactor. For this specific instance logistics robots might be useful. I however hate them (they are just cheating, avoiding all throughput and routing problems at the cost of power and initial material cost), so I opted for the circuit network solution for that specific case. Buses have their convenience in organizing things neatly. But now I like to make a little module type base for smelting, mining and every type of science pack. Just name all the supply stations the same and disable them whenever a train can not be fully filled with signals and have one train for every unloading station ferrying in goods. Use small buses inside those mini factories to make things convenient and extendable. It also helps with planning your factory. You can assume the train has infinite throughput and then just build however many buildings you want to get the desired item output per second and have the exact right ratio of machinery for your requirements a lot easier since everything is nice and contained without dozens of machines using the same resource. Trains are cheap and have basically infinite throughput.

Love the video like always! Just a question: the numbers of smelters, are those for the stone furnaces because if i remember correctly (haven't played for a while) you cut the amount of smelters by half with the steel smelters. Then again, if you would like to upgrade your belts to red, you still need the high number of smelters to get that filled.... Ah the numbers, always the numbers......

brand new to the game and 2 questions I had that weren't answered in this: i see you used the splitter to pull from the outer belts on a 4 lane bus, how do you get from the middle 2 lanes? extended robot arms? obviously you dump from smelters/assemblers into the bus and thats how things initially get on the bus, does teh bus loop? like at the start of the bus is there a joining of a belt from the creation of the materials and a loopback from the "end" of the bus? or do you just put all that stuff in boxes at the end? i just got through the tutorial and up to the train station level so i am new to using splitters at all and being able to organize arms dropping/pulling specifically from left/right of a single belt is perplexing

Great Content. Did get some pointers. Having said that, its a bit waffle. Considering that we're talking efficiency as the main goal, maybe that should extend to explanations. On the other hand Nilaus fits in too much content, and I have "wait.....what?" moments. The Goldilocks zone would be somewhere in between...

I feel like im a freak. I put just about everything on the bus. Yes its massive and probably inefficient but its so nice being able to line up assemblers and not worry about making the intermittent parts every time. And to me its just eye candy seeing a massive main bus

Hes we do have 1 or 2 lane roads weaving all trough the city, it is efficient and thats why we (non americans) do indeed have that.

As someone who consistently never leaves enough room for anything, I'd also suggest that you leave a good amount of space between the bus and the various productions lines, just in case you need to route something around that doesn't fit on the bus. At least 10 spaces but probably more in reality.

Eduardo, i'm trying to find the playlist for this so I can watch the mentioned videos, but I can't find it. Could you add it to the description please? also if you'd like, we could talk about a playlist feature that would help you group playlist together.

Still in my first play through and I’ve automated blue science and have started researching stuff with it, but red circuits and oil and stuff and blue circuits just doesn’t work with my factory set up. My setup is too squeezed and there’s automation everywhere instead of long belts leading to an away area where I would make a specific product

I alsways make all needed Gears from ironplates at the production row this way they are never running out

Ninja teaching me Factorio... (this timeline, dude)

Next time, can you make a video going over train bases? I'm having trouble transitioning from a smaller base to a larger base with that being the main transportation.

It was 5pm just a moment ago NOW ITS 5AM AND I HAVE TO BE AT WORK IN A HOUR!

Everytime I watch your videos I think its Ninja

i'm on my first playthrough and i intuitively made a main bus, but my mistake was to put EVERYTHING on there 😆 the thing got like 30 lanes wide and ran out of space to expand

I'm still wondering how to access 2 middle lanes from the 4-wide lanes, like the red and blue circuits, how do I transport it to left or right ? Using robots and put it in colored chest ?

Well I half spaghetti d my bus, top half is nice and neat but the 'start' (smelters) are a tangled web of mashed together splitters and underground looping round 3 separate trainstations and I'm like I want to rip it all down and actually balance the smelting but now I'm stuck between starting a new bus somewhere or continue struggling

pleeeeeaaase set up timelines for these videos!!

Now I see how to pull off something from the side like steel or plastic in the column of (plastic, blue, red, steel) but how do you easily pull off the middle ones? Just go with undergrounding the main bus for a while? Also for the iron and copper ones wondering if you go with some splitter checkpoints along the bus to even out and keep them all filled. I will check out some of your later game videos to try and see the answers myself but this video got me wondering.

Looks like it's time to refactor my factory

Good video, but 1 thing you sould show how to rout from the mid lains, because it not he most intuitive thing for newcomers :D

haw do yoy get to the blue end red circuits when there are steel end plastic at the other side . do i just do 1 laine end so 2 blocks nothing

I expected you to go over at least a few stock builds for branching off/on the bus?

hey this might be a stupid question but how do i get resources from the belts in the middle? not of the whole thing but lets say you have 4 iron belts, how to i get resources off the middle 2? ive tried to figure it out on my own but i either stop the belt i need completely or stop the outside belts. any solutions?

I found doing 3 space between each band of resources on the buss allows me some creativity and fault tolerance when diverging resources to where they need to go along the bus. After trying it, there is no way I am going back to just two empty lanes

After splitting off one material from the belt do you need to re balance out the belts of that material? If so how would you do that?

So Steel furnace needs 12 / side, 24 total since it works double the fast right?

I do not understand, how do i take things of the bus to use in machines and stuff? can someone explain? do i just use splitters or grabbers? how do i get the resources from the middle lanes?

I Wished you showed me how you BRANCH off of the BUS line and such. BEcause, aren`t those copper lanes in the middle unreachable ??? | | | |

I just have a question, how do you get stuff off the middle lane (like red and blue circuits)?

How do you pull out a middle lane from a four lane column though? Sorry I'm new

i dont understand how you tap into the middle 2 lanes of the 4 lane "highway". i see you use a splitter to tap into the outside, but what about the middle?

You can combine both circuit boards onto one belt to use half a lane

You may have already made a video on this, but can you go over the main belt balancers that you use?

Gears can be made by the right ratio in the build it self also why no engines?

I rebuilds first factory twice to fix my inefficiencies. It was hell.

I've never understood the point of doing them more than two belts thick. How do you pull from the middle belts?

Hey! i wonder if you i sent you my save over could you have a look at it please? im not sure where ive gone wrong with the bus :(

If copper and iron are 4 lanes and you're only pulling from the outer most lane, what's the inner 2 lanes for? I'm assuming you just add splitter/balances farther down to recover the 50% split?

Over 500 hours played and I’ve just learned about the main bus concept…

Hey! what i dont understand... Example: Red Circuit or blue comes a little later in the game. how did u ingest a new material to the bus ?

How do you allocate the red and blue chips off the main bus when they're sandwiched between steel and plastic? There's no space to put a splitter or an off lane.

How do you get materials from the inner two belts?

11:00 Starts talking about bussed items.