Need help with polar mall

[Ikit Claw]

I'm trying to build a polar mall (no sushi belt) that has every building. I keep looking at youtube videos and reading guides but idk where to even start.

I don't want to use someone else's blueprint.
Do I need a logistic station for each building? There's a lot of buildings in the game so I feel like I might be over doing it with the stations.
And how do I even get all of the resources for these buildings to the right place?

I'm just not understanding how the whole mall thing works.

[cswiger]

You don't need a PLS / ILS for each building, but you do need to make a storage with a logistics hat on it if you want to refill your inventory automatically. (Which is mostly the point of making a mall.)

Yes, you need to be exporting all of the raw resources needed from other PLS / ILSes placed somewhere else.

[Ikit Claw]

cswiger lähetti viestin:

You don't need a PLS / ILS for each building, but you do need to make a storage with a logistics hat on it if you want to refill your inventory automatically. (Which is mostly the point of making a mall.)

Yes, you need to be exporting all of the raw resources needed from other PLS / ILSes placed somewhere else.

Is it even possible to have all the buildings being made in one area? Or should I just spread them out across the planet?

[Andy]

My main polar mall makes everything you invent with blue and red science, except belts and sorters. It has two logistics stations and a bus. My second polar mall makes logistics stations and drones, it has three logistic stations. My third polar mall makes blue belts and sorters. I have a few smaller blueprints that make things like blue assemblers, ejectors, mini particle accelerators, and other things you can't build until purple and green science.

Typically I make an equatorial bus first, and I have mall blueprints that attach to it. Eventually, I build the polar malls and tear that first stuff down to make room for my module blueprints.

[josmith7]

Ikit Claw lähetti viestin:

Is it even possible to have all the buildings being made in one area? Or should I just spread them out across the planet?

Not really, not if you're including advanced buildings as well. They start taking too many one-off specialized items.

A mall taking in just iron ingots, magnets, copper ingots, glass, and stone brick (with a little in-place sub-assembly making) can make all your basic buildings:
1. Arc Smelter
2. Assembling Machine Mk.I
3. Chemical Plant (requires steel)
4. Conveyor Belt Mk.I
5. Depot Mk.I
6. Depot Mk.II (requires steel)
7. Gauss Turret
8. Matrix Lab
9. Mining Machine
10. Missile Turret (requires electric motor & engine)
11. Oil Extractor (requires plasma exciter, which requires prism)
12. Oil Refinery (requires plasma exciter, which requires prism)
13. Sorter Mk.I
14. Sorter Mk.II (requires electric motor)
15. Splitter
16. Storage Tank
17. Tesla Tower
18. Thermal Power Plant
19. Traffic Monitor
20. Water Pump (requires electric motor)
21. Wind Turbine
22. Wireless Power Tower (requires plasma exciter, which requires prism)

But that still leaves 38 more buildings that require more complicated inputs, from other raw materials, and thus aren't really amenable to being build into a classic mall.

You just need too many belts to avoid mixed item 'sushi belts' to fit into a proper mall. Plus you can't easily make those subcomponents in-place (especially not at the required scale) so you now need more PLS or logistics distributors to fly in sub-assemblies. At that point it's not a mall it's just a collection of nearby factories.

[Ikit Claw]

josmith7 lähetti viestin:

Ikit Claw lähetti viestin:

Is it even possible to have all the buildings being made in one area? Or should I just spread them out across the planet?

Not really, not if you're including advanced buildings as well. They start taking too many one-off specialized items.

A mall taking in just iron ingots, magnets, copper ingots, glass, and stone brick (with a little in-place sub-assembly making) can make all your basic buildings:
1. Arc Smelter
2. Assembling Machine Mk.I
3. Chemical Plant (requires steel)
4. Conveyor Belt Mk.I
5. Depot Mk.I
6. Depot Mk.II (requires steel)
7. Gauss Turret
8. Matrix Lab
9. Mining Machine
10. Missile Turret (requires electric motor & engine)
11. Oil Extractor (requires plasma exciter, which requires prism)
12. Oil Refinery (requires plasma exciter, which requires prism)
13. Sorter Mk.I
14. Sorter Mk.II (requires electric motor)
15. Splitter
16. Storage Tank
17. Tesla Tower
18. Thermal Power Plant
19. Traffic Monitor
20. Water Pump (requires electric motor)
21. Wind Turbine
22. Wireless Power Tower (requires plasma exciter, which requires prism)

But that still leaves 38 more buildings that require more complicated inputs, from other raw materials, and thus aren't really amenable to being build into a classic mall.

You just need too many belts to avoid mixed item 'sushi belts' to fit into a proper mall. Plus you can't easily make those subcomponents in-place (especially not at the required scale) so you now need more PLS or logistics distributors to fly in sub-assemblies. At that point it's not a mall it's just a collection of nearby factories.

I feel like the easiest thing for me would be to just designate a planet for building production. So I have all the resources being sent to a planet to be turned into buildings.
Would that work? Or is that too much?

[Shiroe]

Ikit Claw lähetti viestin:

I feel like the easiest thing for me would be to just designate a planet for building production. So I have all the resources being sent to a planet to be turned into buildings.
Would that work? Or is that too much?

My factory planet in my home system is a bit like that: I think about 1/8th of it is just producing buildings, drones etc. You don't need super fast production for those, for most 1-2 assemblers is fine, so the planet looks a bit like a hedgehog of PLS-es, 1 or 2 per building/drone/etc. type depending on the inputs needed. (1 output + 3 inputs fits 1 PLS, any more inputs needed gets a 2nd PLS) . Add to the output PLS a short belt for the output product to a 1-slot-restricted depot with a distribution hat and you have both distribution to Icarus and to ILSes for export (or the PLSes of higher tier buildings as inputs) of the buildings/drones/ships/etc.
(Youthcat, please hurry with the beacons, so I can easier find that 1/8th of the planet inbetween all the other factories, since fidget spinners are so slow when you come in to restock hundreds of buildings and end up half a planet away instead of in the buildings section. :-| )

edit: I did have 5+5 polar belts producing _items_ on each of my 3 starter system planets until I could mass produce PLSes/ILSes, but recycled them from then on since I could never balance them well input/output-wise; worse than drone/ship RNG to PLSes for me... (a supply of recycled belts enough to have the belt factory idle for a loooong time)
I don't think I've placed a belt section longer than about 100 units since then.

[gorgofdoom]

I think it might help to come at this from a different direction; considering the dark fog. Since the DF have been introduced we do not need to make every item from scratch anymore.

Start by building a dark fog sorter. This begins at the BFAB, right behind a defensive line. Most importantly, here, know that the bottom right of the inventory is emptied first. This combined with filters allows unloading items with priority, and by extension also ensures valuable items will be collected.

Next we need to sort items into cargo boxes such that drones can handle them. To do this i build a single endless green belt around the 20 degree latitude to ensure drones can deliver to anything within the polar region with only the first range upgrade. Every chance you get: put a sorter, with the shortest possible link of belts between them. Each sorter is used to sort one item off to one side or the other, into a box.

for combustible items it helps to draw excess off from higher cargo boxes. In this way we can keep a stock of all drops for crafting but not waste any excess combustibles.

Now that we have all the things the DF will drop flowing into the polar region, sorted and accessible by drone, we can set up drone fed factories to build every building. Initially it will be a matter of collecting resources from the boxes manually, but you can easily grab a stack of processors, iron, and thrusters and make a lot of them in a few moments with higher difficulty DF settings.

[JuryCyber]

Shiroe lähetti viestin:

Ikit Claw lähetti viestin:

I feel like the easiest thing for me would be to just designate a planet for building production. So I have all the resources being sent to a planet to be turned into buildings.
Would that work? Or is that too much?

My factory planet in my home system is a bit like that: I think about 1/8th of it is just producing buildings, drones etc. You don't need super fast production for those, for most 1-2 assemblers is fine, so the planet looks a bit like a hedgehog of PLS-es, 1 or 2 per building/drone/etc. type depending on the inputs needed. (1 output + 3 inputs fits 1 PLS, any more inputs needed gets a 2nd PLS) . Add to the output PLS a short belt for the output product to a 1-slot-restricted depot with a distribution hat and you have both distribution to Icarus and to ILSes for export (or the PLSes of higher tier buildings as inputs) of the buildings/drones/ships/etc.
(Youthcat, please hurry with the beacons, so I can easier find that 1/8th of the planet inbetween all the other factories, since fidget spinners are so slow when you come in to restock hundreds of buildings and end up half a planet away instead of in the buildings section. :-| )

edit: I did have 5+5 polar belts producing _items_ on each of my 3 starter system planets until I could mass produce PLSes/ILSes, but recycled them from then on since I could never balance them well input/output-wise; worse than drone/ship RNG to PLSes for me... (a supply of recycled belts enough to have the belt factory idle for a loooong time)
I don't think I've placed a belt section longer than about 100 units since then.

Same with my home planet and now im going to a empty planet in the middle of the map to build every building with hats on top and sent to a carrier vessel so i dont have to come back to it every time.

Also building a process to where you want to empty out your inventory is much needed too. The little drones can some what do it for you but i like to fully empty myself(inventory) and let the drones give me a fresh inventory.