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This makes the main bus style very hard to maintain to the point where you are better off just not using it.
The seablock pack makes it even harder to use the main bus because land is a premium and a main bus uses a ton of space.
But if you want something more reasonable, there are ways to discourage main bus.
For example, cutting your factory into portions that each do their own thing (for example making green circuits).
If you "mastered" trains it's a great way to use them by making trains deliver the items where they are needed.
If trains are still a bit too much for you that's fine, you can go for a city block approach where you make a grid and build the portions in a part of the grid each.
Yet another way would be to never use splitters to split your plates into several belts.
That means more smelter lines, possibly not fully used.
This also lets you expand your factory in all directions instead of only going into one direction with the bus.
You can also "force" yourself off the bus style by putting your labs right where your bus would usually go and make the science packs all around them (each in a direction).
For me, it was mostly the trains that got me out of the main bus since they allow you to decentralize your factory, mods also came soon afterward to deal a death blow to the style for me.
This just ends with city blocks along a line, connected to a bus. I mean; you're going to need to connect those blocks logistically somehow. And if they're already all organized in neat lines. What better way than a backbone that's also a neat line?
I'm reminded of Nilaus and the Krastorio 2 playthrough he streamed, where he set out to use Klonan's Transport Drones mod and proclaimed: this time we're going to do something different, and we're not doing city blocks.
And then 4 episodes later: Ok, we did city blocks. But at least they're not square.
Habits like that are very, very hard to kick.
Especially when functionally speaking, they're actually not bad habits.
Once I have my defenses set up to the tech I have I'll lay out a main bus and use my initial smelters to feed into that. As I lay out the machines that are all ready in the start base organized into groups by function, tech level, and product use. I pull up and recycle the machines from the start base and the spaghetti is gone. I consider this the main assembly area. I make sure that I leave 4 rows of empty tiles between each bank of machines so that I can add roboports in to the main assembly area when I have the tech for logistic bots. I build all the circuits on one side of the bus and every thing else on the other.
Then I set up more smelters away from the main bus (usually my first set of electric furnaces are set up near an ore patch that they use) and I smelt plates and steel on site and haul it to the main bus area (this way I don't have to have trains hauling coal to the smelters) and fill in my other bus belts with the new product using trains. After that I set out all the other banks of machines I'll need to launch a rocket and expand into a megabase.
Next I set up more smelting off assembly area These are stand alones that haul ore in and plate out and set up a train hub on each side of the banks of machines. On the circuit side I bring in copper plate. iron plate, plastic, and sulfuric acid and reverse the direction that the raw materials flow in so that they aren't coming off the main bus. Then I set up a train hub on the other side of the bus and bring in product from off the main assembly area and those trains unload onto belts that feed into the banks of machines and reverse the belt directions on those. Then I rip out all the main bus belts that aren't carrying circuits and set up a logistic mall in some of that space. (That's after I have construction bots with max basic speed researches).
Then I move green circuit production off main assembly area (these are laid out with beacons modules) and bring in green circuits with trains on the main assembly side and tear out the green circuit machines, then I do the same with red and blue circuits and then I use the space where the circuit machines were set up to hold all my labs for a 1,000-2,000 SPM base and repurpose the train hub on that side of the base to deliver science packs from off mall and all the belts from the center of what was the main bus are gone and its a rail hubs base with a logisitc mall in the area that the main bus used to be.
I then just use spodertrons equipped with robots and remotes to build outside the logistic area I have crews that are set up with logistic set up to construct the various things that I need (smelting array group, nuclear plant group, refinery group, railway system group) and a deconstruction group that starts out with auto trash set up and trunk empty, goes out and picks up every thing in the deconstruction area (rocks, trees, old machines and belts) and brings them back to the logistic hub for recycling.
After that I have things set up so that spidertrons can go out, build artillery bunkers by remote and just automate military supply trains, that clear terrain without further input on my part and once the area is clear I can ring the newly claimed territory with defense, set up military supply trains for defense, clear out the artillery bunkers, and build what ever I wanted in the newly claimed space and hook it up to the rail system. I can keep doing that until the UPS for that game tanks and then I start a new base on a new map.
TL:DR - I start with spagehtti, graudate to main bus, graduate to train hub, and graduate to logistic mall supplied by train. I get to reuse/recycle every thing except for any surplus stone furnaces, steel furnaces, and burner gear I made so very little goes to waste. (I even get to reuse some basic power poles).
Well, Buses does have up's and down's. Transport belts can be useful going places like trains but slower, so you will need the fastest belt you researched to get to places faster.
I not only read it, but saved it. Great summary. How many hours have you played this game?
Oh, yes! I started on Nullius and my initial starting spaghetti made it very clear that a bus approach would not work. I went for modular train stations instead. It makes for a very sprawling factory to the point of car dependency, but at least it works.
You've got me dreading the amount of work it would take to add enough personal stations to get around without clogging up things for the other trains while stopped.
Given how I've got things set up, I think I might need multiple construction trains if I were to take that approach, as the stations are relatively short. I've never actually used one before because I just don't normally need to build much outside my starting area other than a couple of mining outposts. Though this might actually be a case where it could be a good idea.
I guess I could have one for rails, belts, pipes and other stuff associated with loading and unloading trains, and another for combinators, assemblers, chemical plants and other production stuff. Still kind of daunting, though.
I completed it with a mostly bus-like base. It wasn't 100% a strict bus design. The lowest level metallurgy and low level, high volume chemicals were produced in separate regions, then belted or piped in to start 2 buses. One bus for fluids and advanced materials made with high end fluids, starting from my air separation/electrolysis zones, and one bus for solid intermediates, starting from my metallurgy zones, and a few cross links between those buses. These 2 buses ran roughly perpendicular to one another and intersected into a bot mall area, where the high volume intermediates from the buses were used to create expensive, low volume buildings. I only had around 1000 bots, and only had logistic coverage in one small corner of the base, since the intermediates were made with belts/pipes, and the buildings in the mall mostly only need 1 assembler each and are produced in smaller numbers than the more basic materials.
I think the key with a mod like Nullius is to know where to draw the line between what does and does not belong on a bus. If you try to put every item in Nullius with 2 or more uses on the bus, then it will end up with an overwhelming number of lanes, and some of the buildings will be very expensive to waste the resources necessary to fill up a whole belt with them. It's not always the easiest thing to figure out, especially when you're just getting started and having to make these kinds of decisions fairly blind. But you can use Recipe Book to get a sense of high how on the food chain each item is. Or you can insert the research packs into Factory Planner and see what kinds of resources they break down into to let you know which intermediates you'll be needing in what volumes. This is not a perfect system, since in Nullius the construction materials for your factory can also be very costly and may not use the same balance of materials as science, but it's a rough starting point.
Basically anything that's a pure intermediate, not a placeable entity, there is a good chance it will go on your bus (but not always if it has limited uses). Most of the ores and ingots you don't need on your bus, since ingots are only used to make rods/plates, which are a reasonable thing to put on the bus instead. You can cut down on some belts by making wires and sheets in place, since it's pretty fast and simple to do so. Any low level electronics stuff like arithmetic circuits, antennas, capacitors, green wire, etc, you're going to want a ton of that that on your bus. They will take a lot of assemblers to make them in the volumes you need, and a lot of logistics to move them around, so it would really bloat your mall and overwhelm your bots to try to cram all of that into a mall rather than a bus. Any basic building material with a bunch of uses should likely go on your bus. The majority of buildings should go in your mall, even if they have several uses in other buildings, it won't add up to a ton of volume, and they're expensive.
Another trick to cut your bus down to a more reasonable number of lanes is to figure out which intermediates are more niche and used in only moderate volumes, and put them on only half a lane, with the other half for some other item. You can separate off the lane you need with a filter splitter. Bonus points if these two items are sometimes used in the same recipes, so you can belt them both straight to an assembler.