A lovable sushi hub

NOTE: this guide is now more than two years old; it was written for an earlier version of the game when it had many fewer buildings and no pile sorters. I've refined this design and expanded upon it over the last two years;
click here for an updated tutorial.

A small polar hub that manufactures all buildings as well as logistics drones and vessels, and provides them to the logistics network using a robust and uniform design, with technology that is available at yellow science. It requires component materials to be available on the network.

Attractive features include:

• The hub fits in a small polar region and uses only 18 ILSs.
  
• A single ring of 50 assemblers builds all buildings.
  
• The design is simple, so you can easily tweak and adapt it to your own taste.
  
• It doesn't need any high tech components beyond interstellar logistics stations.
  
• It's robust and doesn't rely on subtle finicky mechanics. It doesn't stall if power fails or an input material becomes unavailable, it only stops making buildings that require it. It also starts right back up when the material becomes available again.
  
• It has sushi belts!

Introduction

Reminder: this version of the sushi mall is deprecated; please use the link at the top of this post to find the modern version.

This manufacturing hub was designed as an alternative to the hub described by Nilaus, which used to be my go-to manufacturing setup. His complete infrastructure consists of three parts:

1. A bus-based hub for about 20 of the most basic buildings. This part uses about 6 interstellar logistics stations (ILSs) to bring in the source materials and export all products.
   
2. A separate design to make assemblers, sorters and belts, using 3 ILSs.
   
3. A polar hub with 20 ILSs that makes all the advanced buildings, using one ILS per building.

His design is clean, robust and convenient, but I found that using sushi belts (belts that carry items of several distinct types) it's possible to make a hub that is smaller, cheaper, more uniformly structured, and arguably simpler, while still maintaining very high reliability and effectiveness, especially now that materials can be piled on the belt. Several alternative sushi hubs have been described, but most seem complex and I haven't found any that closely resemble mine.

If you don't feel like building, you can find the blueprint here[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com].

A redesign that uses the new logistics system, supports 60 rather than 50 assemblers and is more easily extensible, can be found here[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com].

If you are happy to supply materials using logistics bots, you can use this version[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com].

Alternatively, come along and have some fun building this hub yourself by following the 10 simple steps in this guide, and use what you learn in your own designs!

Step 1: clear the required area.

Near the poles the build grid has many tropic lines ("fault lines") where the grid shifts. The bands between tropic lines form concentric rings around the pole. You can see those rings clearly in the image below.


We will use these rings as follows:

• Pole. Unused by this design.
  
• Ring 1-1: 5 grid cells wide and 40 long. Unused by this design.
  
• Ring 1-2: 5 wide and 80 long. Unused by this design.
  
• Ring 1-3: 5 wide and 100 long. Unused by this design.
  
• Ring 2-1: 10 wide and 160 long. 6 ILSs that import materials will be spread out in this ring.
  
• Ring 2-2: 10 wide and 200 long. This ring will contain the three sushi belts, as well as 50 assemblers making all the buildings.
  
• Ring 3-1: 15 wide and 300 long. This ring will contain 50 Mk 1 storage chests that are used as buffers for the produced buildings, and 12 ILSs that will export the buildings (and sometimes import additional materials that are not available on the sushi belts).

That's the plan! So put foundation everywhere from the pole through to ring 3-1, that's all the space you'll need. After completing the build, another ILS can be placed in the center if so desired, or the space can be used for a small amount of power generation.

Step 2: put down the 6 central ILSs.

The central ILSs are placed in a hexagon shape in the exact center of the 2-1 ring. The previous image shows where the first ILS is placed.

Unfortunately, the 160 grid cells in this ring do not divide evenly by 6, so it is not possible to make a perfect hexagon: consecutive ILSs will be 27 cells apart in four cases, and 26 cells apart in two cases. Depending on your level of OCD, this can be really frustrating thing, but in my experience it isn't so bad once the build is done.

The ILSs will be used in three adjacent pairs, each pair managing one of the three sushi belts, so it is convenient to make sure that the two members of each pair are all the same distance apart. I therefore recommend placing the ILSs like so:


It is a good idea to temporarily place boxes in between the ILSs that are spaced 26 apart, to make sure that you leave the space between them empty for the time being and don't accidentally try to use them as a pair.

You can power the ILSs by placing a tesla tower directly behind each (blocking the middle in/output slot on the side facing the pole), and then placing a wireless power tower at the pole itself.

Step 3: set up the ILS pair for the first (outermost) sushi belt

The following table shows what materials should be carried by what sushi belt. (I actually wrote a program to work out the optimal belt assignment for fast production.) Select the materials for belt 1 in both ILSs of the pair. Set the materials for the ILS on the right to "storage"; leave the left ILS be for now.

belt 1 (outermost)	belt 2	belt 3 (innermost)
iron ingot	stone brick	magnetic coil
circuit board	gear	glass
steel	copper ingot	electromagnetic turbine
super-magnetic ring	processor	plasma exciter
titanium alloy	frame material	quantum chip

Feed the five materials out of the right ILS towards the left, immediately spreading the belts out so they are spaced one apart. Similarly feed the five materials out of the left ILS towards the right, making sure each pair of belts opposite each other carries the same material.

Make sure that the center belt contains the material at the top of the table, in this case, iron ingots: the material on the center belt will appear on the sushi belt with higher frequency than the other materials. (More about this below.)

Step 4: demultiplex, top up, pile, and remultiplex the first belt.

This is the core part of the design.

In the following I assume that the sushi belts will be running clockwise around the pole. Moreover, the right ILS of each pair is used as the demultiplexer of an incoming sushi belt; the left ILS of each pair imports new materials when needed. If you want the belts to run counterclockwise, you should also invert the roles of the left and right ILSs in the description below.

4a

Take each belt coming from the left ILS and continue it, raising it up TWO levels.

4b

Under the middle three belts now build three splitters, as far to the left as they will go. These splitters will multiplex the materials from all belts into an alternating stream. The bottom and top splitter should be connected to the middle splitter; the belts in between them are invisible, so do this right away so you can't forget.

Note that these splitters will alternate between their five inputs, but the center belt will be selected more often than the other four. Namely, the sequence of output materials will be selected from belts 1,3,5,2,3,4,1,3,5,2,3,4,... in turn. It is therefore good practice to put a material on belt 3 that is not too expensive and/or used a lot; in this case, iron ingots fit that bill.

Just to the right of the splitters, build five pilers inputting from the right; one for each belt that will be coming in from that direction.

After the pilers we finally get to merge the material coming off the sushi belt coming from the right, and the new supplies coming in from the left. Build five splitters to the right of the pilers. Use the TAB key to get the splitter shape where two inputs are above one another.


Note: you need to build these splitters far enough to the right that the raised belt coming in from the left can be attached to its top slot as in the image below. Try this out with the splitter closest to the pole before you continue.

4c

Now connect up all the belts: belts from the right into the splitters, from the splitters into the pilers, from the pilers into the left splitters (where the top and bottom belts take the side entrance), and the top and bottom splitter on the left feeding into the center splitter (if you didn't do this when I told you to earlier). The raised belts should be connected to the top inputs of the splitters on the right as well. IMPORTANT: set the input priorities of the splitters on the right to the right hand input, so that we only add new material to the sushi belt when necessary, and the system doesn't clog up. (In the image below, the input priority hasn't been set up correctly yet.)

4d

Take the output of the leftmost, central splitter and bring it to the outside, two grid cells into ring 2-2, then counterclockwise a little ways. We will connect it later.

I recommend putting traffic monitors on each of the raised supply belts so that you immediately know when there is trouble; it is really annoying to request a building and not receive it. Set the pass/fail criterion to ">=0" so that it basically just always passes, and set it to issue a warning on "no cargo", obviously with the appropriate icons.

Step 5: complete the first sushi belt.

Make the first, outermost sushi belt, which should be located one grid cell outward from the center of ring 2-2, that runs clockwise all around the pole (see the image below). We will populate this belt using the pair of ILSs we just set up.

Interrupt the sushi belt when it's nearest the middle of the right ILS, and make an "exit" belt that runs straight into the ILS's central input. Since this belt will cross a tropic line, it may be a bit wobbly depending on where you placed the ILSs, but by pressing the R key a couple of times you can make the belt ignore the grid and go straight, which will be prettier. Then take the belt coming out of the splitter to the left and run it all the way up until it's right next to the exit belt, then connect it to the circular sushi belt.


It is now time to set up the left ILS to import materials so that the sushi belt becomes operational.

I recommend importing all materials locally, so that the inner 6 ILSs don't need any logistics vessels or space warpers - they don't have any input slots to spare for that. This also ensures that the responsibility for providing the materials is on-planet, and there are as few dependencies on off-world production as possible. A storage size of about 1000 or 2000 per item should be plenty.


You should now have one running sushi belt!

Step 6: set up the other two sushi belts.

The other two sushi belts are set up in the exact same way. Unfortunately you can't do this with blueprints because they don't snap right, I found no better way than to redo the previous steps by hand. However once you get the hang of it it's pretty easy.

When you're building the second and third belts, you'll have trouble when you need to cross the exit belts of the earlier sushi belts you made. So make the new belt hop over the earlier ones using the smallest possible hop; that way it looks pleasing and at most one of the assemblers will have trouble accessing all the belts. (To make such a small hop, first make it hop all the way over, then delete the end part of the belt except for the first raised bit.) It should look like this:


You should now see three belts with lots of stuff running in three concentric circles. So far so good!

Step 7: place the assemblers and boxes.

The assemblers are installed directly against the outermost sushi belt, in ring 2-2. That ring is 200 grid cells long, so if they are spaced 4 cells apart you can install exactly 50 assemblers. Magically, that is precisely the number we need to build all the buildings.

Here we can make a choice: either we decide first what assembler is going to produce what item, and then use carefully installed sorters with product filters to grab the right ingredients from the right belts. That is more work, but it will ensure the fastest operation of all assemblers.

But I think a better solution is to just attach the assembler to each belt using three sorters without input filters. That way the assemblers will simply grab what they need, and the sorter setup can be simply copied all around the ring. However, IMPORTANT: if you do this you cannot use Mk 3 sorters, because they have sorter stacking which will block the system. (Or alternatively, you can choose not to upgrade sorter stacking.) My recommendation is to simply use Mk 2 sorters for this. For most assemblers, these are easily fast enough to grab materials faster than they are needed. (I optimised what materials go on what belt for this purpose.) For the few exceptions you can still tweak the design so that they use input filters and Mk 3 sorters if you like.

There are some issues connecting the assemblers to the sushi belts near the exit belts. For that reason, to place the first assembler, (a) find the place where the outermost belt is rebalanced (this is the most troublesome location); (b) place the assembler such that the gridline that runs through its center enters the 3-1 ring unbroken, and (c) if the assembler cannot be connected to all three belts, move it two grid cells to the left or right and see if you can connect it then. (In the image you can see that it would have been hard to connect that first assembler if it had been placed two grid cells to the right on the thick line.) Once you get that first couple of assemblers in place, install three Mk 2 sorters on one, and copy it around the ring with a spacing of 4 grid cells (which you can do by pressing TAB three times).


I powered the assembler ring with a Tesla tower in-between every other pair of assemblers, as close as possible to the sushi belts.

Next to each assembler, a bit further out from the poles, drop a Mk 1 box to buffer the produced items. Leave either one or two spaces between assembler and box. Initially I set all boxes to a capacity of only one square; that can later be expanded if you want a lot of a thing. Interestingly, the boxes are in ring 3-1, but it should still be possible to place them in exact correspondence with the assemblers, as long as they are 6 grid cells apart rather than 4. Connect the assembler to the box using your preferred type of sorter, and copy that box around the ring at a spacing of 6 grid cells.

Step 8: set up the assemblers.

The setup is such that you can almost hope to just set any assembler to any building and have it just work. But there are several issues to work around:

• At the exit belts, it may be difficult to connect the assembler at that location to all three belts. (It is possible to get all of them hooked up properly, but it is a bit tricky.) One solution is to make buildings there that don't require materials from the belt you can't reach.
  
  
• Some buildings use additional materials that can be conveniently manufactured on-site. For example the spray coater requires microcrystalline components, which can be produced in an adjacent assembler so that it doesn't need to be imported.
  
  
• Some buildings are used in the production of other buildings. For example, Mk 1 and 2 sorters, belts, and assemblers, as well as smelters, tesla towers, wireless power towers, logistics stations and reinforced thrusters, are all used in the construction of other buildings. It is convenient to put those next to each other so the assembler of the first building can be fed directly into the assembler that produces the second.
  
  
• Some buildings use additional materials and we don't have many ILS slots to spare, so ideally we import every additional material only once, and feed it to all assemblers that need it.
  
  
• You will want to spread out where the additional imports happen a little bit, so that each outer ILSs can remain more or less aligned with the four or five assemblers nearest to them.
  
  
• If you want to build a recycling hub, then additional recycling boxes are needed in between all the boxes you've already placed. (If you want to build a recycling hub yourself, it's best to read the relevant section in section 10 first.)

You can play with the placement of which building to produce were under these constraints if you like a bit of a puzzle; in case you want more guidance, here is how I have set up the 50 assemblers:

chemical plant, splitter, geothermal power station, ray receiver, solar panel, spray coater, microcrystalline components, vertical launching silo, belt mk 1, belt mk 2, belt mk 3, particle collider, assembler mk 1, assembler mk 2, assembler mk 3, matrix lab, tesla tower, wireless power tower, satellite substation, planetary logistics station, interstellar logistics station, orbital collector, reinforced thruster, logistics vessel, energy exchanger, logistics drone, thruster, storage mk 1, mini fusion power plant, storage mk 2, sorter mk 1, sorter mk 2, sorter mk 3, water pump, electric motor, plane smelter, arc smelter, storage tank, thermal power plant, wind turbine, advanced mining machine, mining machine, oil extractor, oil refinery, artificial star, em-rail ejector, automatic piler, traffic monitor, fractionator, (unused).

If you set up the assemblers like that you will be able to connect everything up to the logistics stations in the next step properly.

Step 9: install the outer ring of ILSs.

The next goal is to export all the materials to the galaxy and to provide the remaining materials to those assemblers that still miss something. We will need another ring of 12 ILSs, to be placed just outside the boxes in ring 3-1. The ILSs are spaced 25 grid cells apart and can conveniently be placed at the corners of the outermost 5x5 boxes within the 3-1 ring.


12 ILSs have 60 import/export slots. Around 45 of those will need to be used to export the buildings we're producing; the remaining slots are needed to pull in additional specialty materials that are needed for some buildings but that don't fit on the sushi belts.

Belts are run from each box to one of the outer ILSs. The outer ILSs and boxes do not perfectly align; in order to make it visually clear which boxes are serviced by which ILS, I like to run belts from the outside of the first and last box that is exported by that ILS, straight out and then into the side of the ILS, as a kind of delimiters for that ILS. The picture below shows how setting the belts up like that makes it visually clear which ILS belongs with which boxes.

Each ILS has a number of buildings that it exports, as well as possibly a number of additional materials that it imports. For exports, all these outer ring ILSs need logistics vessels and (if available) space warpers. The space warpers can be requested in one of the ILSs and then fed in a ring around all 12 of them, without requiring any additional slots in any of the other logistics stations.

For most of the exported buildings, I set the storage maximum to 100 and the minimal load of vessels to 10%, so that I can request that building and receive only 100 of them when I don't need 2000. The only exceptions are items that I need in large quantities, such as belts, sorters and solar panels: those do get a larger storage maximum.

For the imported materials, I again use local imports so all ILSs that have any imports are given some logistic drones as well. I set the minimum load of drones to 100% because I want to minimise the amount of unnecessary airtraffic. A buffer of 500-2000 is reasonable for such imported items. (Note: if you ever decide you want to proliferate, using local imports also makes it easier to deliver those additional materials pre-proliferated. However, as discussed below I don't think proliferation is the way to go with this design.)

To describe exactly how to hook up the ILSs would require too much detail, but it isn't hard if you set up the assemblers as described in the previous part. You will need to run some materials on little belts in between the assemblers and the boxes. It should look something like this:


In case you want to see my build in more detail, or you don't like to do the build yourself, you can also use the blueprint provided in the introduction.

Step 10: final tweaks.

If you've completed the hub, congratulations! There are some final tweaks that you may or may not want to carry out that I want to mention here.

Storage sizes

For some items, it's a good idea to stockpile a bit. There are two questions:

• Do I want more than 100 of this item to be delivered if I request them? If so, set the storage maximum in the exporting logistics station to a higher number than 100. (You can then also set the minimum load for the logistics vessels a bit higher if you want.) I have increased storage maximums for belts, sorters, assemblers, smelters, logistics drones and logistics vessels, and solar panels.
  
• Do I want to stockpile this item so I can request more quickly if I need to? If so, set the capacity on the mk 1 box to a higher value. It is really annoying to request, say, 200 chemical plants, or 400 ray receivers, and 100 arrive promptly and then... nothing.

Proliferate?

It's possible to add proliferation to the three sushi belts without disrupting the build too much, by running a fourth belt with proliferator next to the sushi belts, and installing spray coaters on the belt running down from the multiplexing splitters. However, I don't think it is worth it to do so, because there are a number of problems this creates.

First, all the assemblers that are directly fed by their neighbours won't benefit from the proliferation. This is important because the items that are created in by far the largest quantities are belts and sorters, and their assemblers are directly fed like that.

Second, all the additional materials that are imported by the ILSs would have to be pre-proliferated, which adds another bit of hassle.

I like proliferation but I don't feel that it's very important for a buildings hub, and it creates some issues that I feel are definitely not worth the hassle.

Batteries

Admittedly the hub doesn't produce batteries. That's for several reasons. First, the orbital collectors require charged batteries, meaning that the batteries would be produced here, then exported to some charging station, and then re-imported for the orbital collectors. That doesn't seem very elegant. Second, if you use energy exchangers at all in your play, you will likely need batteries to be produced at a faster rate than what can be provided by just a single assembler. All in all, I think it's just better to handle batteries elsewhere.

Sorters

You can use whichever sorters you like in this build, except for the sorters that input from the sushi belts, which probably shouldn't be Mk 3 (because of the cargo stacking). However if you find that an item is produced too slowly for your liking, you should check if you can improve the production speed by removing the Mk 2 sorters and installing Mk 3 sorters with filters set to the correct materials.

Conclusion

I hope you found this guide fun and inspiring for your play. Remember that you can find a link to the blueprint in the introduction.

I welcome any friendly feedback! If you experience any issues with the hub, or if you see scope for further refinements and improvements, please let me know and leave a comment.

Best wishes!

[steven]

For anyone reading this today, this guide is not up to date and now deprecated; please follow the link at the very top of the post to find the modern version of this mall, which can make many more buildings, includes instructions how you can start building it in the very early game, and uses pile sorters for much improved throughput.

[OldManLoki]

Great!!!! Love it, use it!!!
But... Do you think you could build a new version for all the new buildings? 😁

[talitore]

Hello! What are the "unknown" components in the blueprint? Are they based on an old version or mods? Thanks!

[dragonsphotoworks]

Nevermind i finially saw PASTE icon lol

[dragonsphotoworks]

How would i use/get this blueprint? Copy to clipboard didnt seem to work for me.

[Star]

@steven thank you ^^ and no probs on the advice, this builds excellent btw its really helping me out

[loinbread]

The only change I made was making it so that the unused Assembler is paired up with a second one to make Graviton Lenses on-site. Very interested in the recycler... I accidentally built like 10,000 Water Extractors early on, lol.

[steven]

@Basil yes, I should. Thanks.

As a rule of thumb, when you are manufacturing anything of importance on the same planet, this hub will not really dominate power consumption, except maybe briefly during the initial charging.

During initial charging it will request 18*60 = 1080MW just to power the ILSs, which might make your grid unhappy for a while. However the ILSs will not be in heavy use, so after they're charged up they will need a very limited amount of power.

But this is all handwavy. I'll do a measurement later and add some ballpark information.

[Star]

you should probably put down the power usage of it and what would probably be needed to fuel it if your creating this on a planet with no power source up yet, so people know what and how to plan ^^

[steven]

Hi Slartiblarghfast (and thanks for designing those beautiful fjords) and VIP IP, thanks very much for the kind feedback!

In case you're interested, I've updated the design with a recycling system for buildings you want to get rid of. It's not perfect, but it was a feature that people on reddit expressed an interest in, and I find it somewhat convenient too.

By the way, if you came up with interesting variations on the design, or if it gave you ideas for other builds, I'd definitely be interested to hear!