Using the main bus idea but not getting enough resources down the line

[kevinshow]

Now there are a lot of guides and suggestions to use a main bus. I'm just now using that idea in my latest game play world.

However, one thing that isn't explained often ( or I've missed it) is how to get enough resources down to everything that is needing items items off from that main bus. Every branch that we redirect off to the side, leaves only half and half again on the main bus for the next assembly products down the main bus. There is re-balancing, but that can only achieve a balance on the 1/2 of the 1/2 of the 1/2 etc that is going down that line(s). Way down the line, this becomes a trickle for me, which is where I experience slow production lines.


The reason I'm having trouble with this would be an example as follows:
I don't have enough blue chips, which need green chips. Green chips need copper plates or iron gears. I didn't get enough copper plates or iron gear to those assembly lines to make green chips fast enough to saturate the requirements to make blue chips, so only one or two of the plants that make blue chips are actually producing anything, which means my overall production of blue chips, and Item X down the line that needs blue chips, is much lower than I anticipated.

Of course, this changes with time, too. If green chips up the line weren't needed, so that they then filled up more down the line, it reveals that now I'm actually slow on producing red chips or something like that. Investigating that shows that red chips were slow because of plastic being used up in other places and not enough plastic was getting to the red chips fast enough. Make more plastic, more petrol, more oil, etc. However, I believe this is still fundamental to my problem of how to keep resources feeding to the lines down along the main bus, so that's why I brought it up together, because fundamentally, I'm still going to have trouble as I branch off more and more plastic lines from the main branch unless I understand what I'm doing wrong.


So I've tried the following, which have all helped me understand more about the need for raw resources when there is a large demand:
1. Increasing the belts from yellow to red to blue to get more ore down to the smelters down the line
2. Putting in more mining drills to saturate the raw ore belt, even from two or more different patches of ore where needed
3. Instead of adding more smelters in a series, since some can't release their plates if the outgoing belt is full from earlier smelters , I added a parallel set of smelters and redirect the output back to the original line output, which feeds the rest of the base via the main bus. In total, I have about 32 smelters for each of iron and copper, with 16 per set line of smelting output.

Of course, this makes the output line saturated with plates so that in the end, not all 32 are running either, but the output is full of plates at least.

4. Multiple branches that make green circuits, trying to feed back into the green circuit main bus to have more there


What am I missing or not doing right, so that I can get more basic plates off to the proper assembly lines that will help feed the other lines down the road with their products in a decent rate?


Note: I've also seen that some people make outposts to make chips and bring them back to be used in the main factory area. I can do this, of course, but that didn't help me understand what I've done wrong with the main bus in a one-base setup.

Thanks!!

[Varenvel The Festive Dinosaur]

As a word of thumb and medium experience with large scale production , if you really want to make big belt bus , you need to produce atleast 75% as maximum speed of belt , idealy you want to keep belt full even if all iron was used as it goes

Also all depends how recources are diverted , if your bus its less susitable to "being half diverted" unless your masivly overproducing something

As person who stocked a lot game , when comes to pure raw recoruce , overproduce alweys , make storage between smeltry and make sure it also stocks overproduced ore(i never seen reason to store plates as ore storage before smeltry is just as good)

i alweys have nice big storage ore before my smeltries , and mine ore quite fast , that way you will almost never run out and if you do , you got depending on storage even hour+ or more till shortage actualy hits you

[Nethogen]

If I understand your problem, you are taking things off the main bus to feed other branches of the factory and the belts are becoming more and more un balanced, you need to lay in some belt balancing rigs to spread the load across all the lines, KOS has a guide that i read way to much for me to happily admit, the title of it is Factorio: How to Build a Main Bus

Edit: Im not sure how to link the guide, sorry for that mate

[Varenvel The Festive Dinosaur]

Originally posted by Nethogen:

If I understand your problem, you are taking things off the main bus to feed other branches of the factory and the belts are becoming more and more un balanced, you need to lay in some belt balancing rigs to spread the load across all the lines, KOS has a guide that i read way to much for me to happily admit, the title of it is Factorio: How to Build a Main Bus

solution to your problem is very simple , make more raw materials , make bus transport more plates

also you may want and i alweys did that , place factory with most important production at start of the bus and less essencial in very far line

That way important stuff will have these recoruces first , and stuff who is not very important wont mind shortages

[Samus Aran]

take all those videos and screeen shots with a hand full of salt. alot of them are not playing vanilla.

[Morphic]

Originally posted by navorskatie:

So I've tried the following, which have all helped me understand more about the need for raw resources when there is a large demand:
1. Increasing the belts from yellow to red to blue to get more ore down to the smelters down the line

Yes this is a good idea. However if your primary problem is keeping the Main Bus Fed all the while your Smelting output is saturated ... chances are you need to replace your Yellow Belts that have your Plate Output to Blue/Red Belts. Furthermore, in some situations you may even want to replace your Main Bus Belts with Blue/Red.

Originally posted by navorskatie:

2. Putting in more mining drills to saturate the raw ore belt, even from two or more different patches of ore where needed

That's not bad but, IMO, I wouldn't do this. At least using multiple patches going to the same Smelting area. Instead you should try to saturate using a single patch; preferably locally. Then later on use Trains to ferry in Ore from other Patches. Again, just IMO.

Originally posted by navorskatie:

3. Instead of adding more smelters in a series, since some can't release their plates if the outgoing belt is full from earlier smelters , I added a parallel set of smelters and redirect the output back to the original line output, which feeds the rest of the base via the main bus. In total, I have about 32 smelters for each of iron and copper, with 16 per set line of smelting output.

IMO, you should always run a "double row" of Furnaces smelting Plates onto a single line. Usually this should immediately show you if you are Overproducing or Underproducing.

If you are Overproducing then you should have Plates backed up on the line and your Furnaces idling since there's no room to place their output. This, IMO, is a great problem to have. If you are Underproducing; your Furnace Output isn't fast enough because they aren't getting enough Ore ...(heh) or you are consuming faster than you are producing. [IMO, in some situations you may want to have 2 Smelting areas to produce Plates and then feed it into the Main Bus.]

EDIT:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=873275297

In the above picture you can tell that I have enough Ore input but I'm not producing enough output to keep up with my consumption. Ergo I need to add more Furnaces to my line or otherwise speed up production to increase my Iron Plate output.

[kevinshow]

Thanks everyone! Yes at the beginning with 16 smelters (8 in each row, using a double-row setup) it seems like I'm having enough raw resources and smelted resources, but as the assembly lines branch off with more and more branches, that's where I need to learn more about how to keep that belt properly supplying all the necessary materials.

I have since decided that I'll leave space for another double row of 16. Even if it doesn't get full of smelters, it can be used for a central storage since that smelting area certainly seems quite busy and I'm always running around it anyway.

[KatherineOfSky]

Check out my guide on how to set up a main bus here:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=754378586

This willl help you have decent throughput of materials even to the ends of the lines.

You probably will need MANY more furnaces... I use 4 each of iron & copper of 2x12 furnaces to get a decent start up, then improve them to steel furnaces.

[Nethogen]

KOs i must ask how did you link that guide i was trying for the life of me to link that exact guide!

[KatherineOfSky]

Originally posted by Nethogen:

KOs i must ask how did you link that guide i was trying for the life of me to link that exact guide!

When you are looking at the guides... just copy the link & paste it here. Steam auto-converts it into that pretty box.

[Nethogen]

Thank you ma'am!

[Plazmic Flame]

I didn't know KoS was a MOD here.

I almost gave up on this game and then I came across her "Belt Diva" series. I highly recommend that series. Most new maps I start, I build that same bus to get my main factory going.

[Nethogen]

Yea KOS is and always will be one of the few gamers i watch on youtube

[GMC]

In all probability, your problem is simply not enough raw materials. It's only an issue with the bus IF your consumers are starved of a product AND the product is backing up on the bus at the producers. So if your circuit assemblers are starved of copper but the copper furnaces are idle because the copper bus is full, it's a problem with the bus.

Otherwise, so long as you only have a single end product (typically either research or a rocket), everything will balance out eventually. Suppose that you're building a rocket and all of the iron seems to be going to make steel plate for low-density structures, leaving none for the circuits for the rocket control units.

After a while, the low-density structures will start backing up at the silo. When the backlog reaches the structure assemblers, the assemblers will stop producing and stop consuming steel plate. Steel plate will back up from the assemblers to the furnaces, and the furnaces will stop consuming iron ... eventually (unlike assemblers, furnaces won't stop until there's 100 items in their output slot).

For a large factory, the "time constant" can be rather large. At 24x final product (24 assemblers for each of low-density structures, rocket control units, and rocket fuel, and everything needed to supply those), if I let everything back up until the only things still running are the coal mines, after launching one rocket, the second one will reach 80% purely on backlogged resources, and it won't be until half-way throught the third rocket that assemblers start getting staved on first-level products (iron/copper plate, plastics) and probably onto the fourth rocket before one of the raw materials (iron/copper ore, crude oil, or coal) starts to dry up and the process reaches an equilibrium state.

Current game: 108 iron furnaces, 72 copper furnaces, 60 steel furnaces, 30 low-density structure assemblers, 24 rocket control unit assemblers, 30 rocket fuel assemblers, 13 refineries, 10 heavy-to-light-oil plants, 15 light-oil-to-gas plants, 5 coal mines, 6 copper mines, 8 iron mines, 10 oil depots (~100 pumpjacks total), 8 trains (2 on each resource), 180 steam engines. 52 satellites launched in 90 hours.

The main bus (4 iron, 4 copper, 2 steel, 2 plastic) starts off red then goes to yelllow after feeding steel plate and green circuits. Blue belts are only used in the network which merges 6 belts of iron from the furnaces down to 4 for the bus.

The bottlneck is the raw materials. Whichever one runs dry, I add more mines/wells, then launch more rockets until it's clear which one is the new bottleneck. Wash, rinse, repeat.

[Lothos]

fwiw, I found in the end it was always easier for red/blue chip production to locally produce their own green/red chips in their branches rather than pull green chips off the main bus. Everytime I did it that way the production was much more steady.

The second thing I've been leaning more towards is buffers in more spots for things.The issue I ran into constantly was being starved for ore whenever I depleted a deposit and not being able to run new train lines and setup a new deposit fast enough to maintain production.

[KatherineOfSky]

@Plazmic and Nethogen -- Aww, thanks!

@Iothos -- it depends on your green circuit production. (In a regular factory), I produce 4 fully-compressed blue belts of green circuits, and I have 1.5 belts completely diverted to Blue circuits, and another full belt going into Reds... I always have planety of production ;-)