Vertical bus mall

This guide shows how to build a convenient, effective and extremely compact mall based on a vertical bus. The mall can build any building in the game as well as all drones and bots.

It is inspired by Nilaus' mall which is one of the easiest malls to build. In the spirit of that mall, I have attempted to prioritise ease of use as much as possible, while dramatically reducing the space requirements by stacking the belts vertically.

The guide contains links to blueprints that allow you to start constructing this mall early in the game. You will need to place vertical belts, for which you need to have super-magnetic rings unlocked.

Introduction

This guide describes a vertical adaptation of Nilaus' popular bus mall. His introduction of his mall can be found over here.

A bus mall is a mall that is organised around a collection of parallel belts, carrying all the materials to the assemblers. (See my mall guide for an in-depth discussion of the different types of malls.)

Nilaus' bus mall is the most well-known bus design. It is probably the most convenient mall to build, which may explain its popularity. Whenever you want to produce a new building, you extend the bus a little bit, draw the right materials to an assembler, and Bob's your uncle. The drawback is that the mall takes an enormous amount of space.

In Nilaus' mall, the bus is organized horizontally: all the belts run at the same elevation. Since at least 19 or 20 materials are needed to make a majority of important buildings, and it's convenient to keep the belts separated by one cell, the space requirements are really substantial.

Another issue is that if you want to be able to add additional belts to the bus, you can only draw from the bus on one side, further harming space efficiency.

The goal of this design is to preserve the qualities of Nilaus' mall as much as possible (most importantly, its extreme ease of use), while drastically reducing its space requirements, by arranging the bus belts vertically. I would say that this version of the mall has the following advantages compared to Nilaus' design:

• Dramatically reduced space requirement,
  
• Less pressure on the size of the bus: there's just no reason to limit the number of belts on the bus. So with this version it is easier to carry more materials and make even late game buildings without hacks or spaghetti.

As far as I can tell, this design has the following drawbacks compared to Nilaus' design:

• It is more finicky to grab materials from the belt. Setting up a new assembler in this new design may take roughly twice the amount of time, and requires a little bit of practice to do quickly and efficiently.
  
• It requires the ability to run vertical belts, which is unlocked when you research the technology for super-magnetic rings. This is on red science, so if you want to build this mall while you're still on blue science, you will have to use some meta-data to unlock that research. You can also just wait, as red science is still quite early in the game. From then on this mall will take you all the way.

This mall is built in two phases. Phase 1 is the part of the game where we first build the bus mall, but have not yet unlocked interstellar logistics. In this phase, the bus carries 21 materials. Later in phase 2 the bus is augmented to 39 materials, and interstellar logistics stations are used to import materials and export the produced buildings.

I think this is my second-best mall design, after the sushi mall, which is just as small and just as effective; however this mall is more straightforward and easier to understand for newer players. If you ilke this mall, check out my sushi mall next.

With that out of the way, here are the blueprints!

Blueprints

You can download the blueprints here. These will be referred to in the rest of this guide.

• Buffer[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]
  
• Horizontal to vertical bus fan[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]
  
• Mall segment[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]
  
• Importer part 1: replaces early game spaghetti with logistics[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]
  
• Importer part 2: extends the bus for the late game[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]
  
• Mall segment 2: for after you extended the bus. Includes ILSs.[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]

• Reference implementation of the full mall[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]
  

Phase 1: Beginning to mid-game

You should start building the mall when you're on red science and you have already researched super-magnetic rings.

This mall can be built anywhere there is enough space, but I recommend building this mall in the area just outside of the equatorial zone. This is large enough, while at the same time the mall is out of the way and won't occupy your best building space.

In the image below, Icarus is satisfied that he's found a good spot for it.

Eventually the mall will grow large, so you should not use the same land area for other stuff!

Buffer

In the early game, you won't produce all materials yet, so it'll be convenient if you can add stuff to the bus gradually. To make that easy, it's best to start with a buffer, that's easy to connect your production to without belts getting tangled up.


This buffer is the first linked blueprint. It fits in the 300 blueprint limit. It should be placed such that copper is in the center of the building area, and the little copper icon is exactly on a grid line, like so:


The buffer is convenient for several reasons. For one, it can be nice to just put materials in one of the boxes instead of connecting it up via a super long conveyor belt. You could even use logistics distributors later on to move materials into the bus. And I like to have a buffer in order to smooth out spikes in consumption, and make sure that there are always materials available.

Starting the vertical bus

Now that we have all materials buffered, we want to collect them all together into a vertical bus. The fan blueprint will do that for you:


Connect it to the buffer blueprint so that the icons line up. We now have the vertical bus started. The first thing you'll want to do is add a mall segment to the bus now, again making sure that it connects by lining up the material icons:


Now we're getting somewhere; at this point we can set up the four assemblers to make any building that requires materials available on the bus.

To set up an assembler, we need to draw a belt from the right height level to the assembler, but the interface makes this difficult. For this reason, it's easier to draw a belt from the assembler to the bus, connecting to it at the right height.

Important: some players are not aware of this, but you can use the Tab key to switch between vertical belts and belts that rise at a gentler slope. Make sure you use vertical belts for this mall!


Of course the belt now runs in the wrong direction, but you can click on the belt and select "reverse path" to correct that; this will also disconnect the belt from the bus, which is what we want.

Now, use a sorter to grab the right material and move it to the belt. This is a bit finicky and doing this quickly may require some practice. Angle the camera right, and you should be able to connect a sorter to the right place on the bus.


(Note: for buildings that require more than three materials, you have to run belts alongside the assembler, rather than straight at it. If you are like me, you want this belt to angle upward in alignment with the other belts, which now won't happen automatically since it starts at a different spot. To get the bend at the right position, first click the belt on the side of the assembler, then run it along the ground until it peeps just past the assembler, then click it onto the bus.)

The 21 materials on the bus have been chosen such that you can make anything up to and including logistics stations, drones, and vessels in the mid-game, so from here you should be able to get quite far into the game already! We'll continue once you're able to build interstellar logistics stations and mk3 belts.

Adding logistics

Once you've got an extensive mall, and you've started producing interstellar logistics stations, you may want to hook up your buildings to the logistics network. The assemblers are spaced the way they are to make that easy.

We will need one logistics station per five assemblers, so they will be spaced 30 cells apart. The logistics station should always be aligned with the middle of five output boxes, which should be on a grid line if all is well. This is what it looks like:


Now connect five boxes with belts, and set up the logistics station like in the picture:


Note: it's important to set "min. load of vessels" to 1%, because otherwise the vessels won't leave the station with less than the current vessel capacity of buildings.

Replacing the early game spaghetti

At this point you'll also want to use logistics stations to import materials, so that you don't have to produce everything on-site or run long belts. The importing station blueprint replaces the bus buffer and fan blueprints we started with. So first you have to delete those:


Now, important, upgrade the belts of the bus to mk3 if you haven't already, because otherwise the importer blueprint will not connect.

The importer blueprint requests all materials with ILSs, and also proliferates everything to get slightly more effective production here and there. Place it like this:


And then the start of your mall will look like this. Remember to extend the belts with warpers, as you can see in the pictures, so that all ILSs are supplied.


Note that the importer also requests space warpers. These are intended to be daisy-chained along all the ILSs so that they can easily export all the buildings.

Congratulations, you now completed phase 1 of the mall!

Phase 2: extending the mall for the late game

Now it's time to expand the bus with even more materials, so that late-game buildings can be made by the mall as well. To do that, you can use the second importer, for which the blueprint is also linked above. You can connect it either directly to the first importer, if you want to build a late game mall from the get-go, or to the 21-belt bus at the end of the mid-game mall you made before.


With this bigger bus, you can now use the late-game mall segment blueprint to keep expanding the mall. This segment uses the larger bus, and has logistics stations built-in:


This allows you to add all buildings you like; you'll get something that looks roughly like this, which does give really pleasing switchboard-vibes :)

Final notes

• If you're already in the late game and you wish to build this mall from scratch, it's easiest to just connect the phase 2 importer directly to the phase 1 importer, and not bother with the 21 material phase of the bus at all. The reference implementation of this mall was built like that.
  
• A blueprint for the full implementation of the mall is linked above. In that blueprint, 100 of each building are stored in every ILS; if you want to receive buildings in bigger batches, you should increase the ILS storage for those buildings. If you do, it's also good to increase the storage capacity of the corresponding buffer box to hold the same number of buildings, so when you request them from half a cluster away, they can be replenished quickly.
  
• This version of the mall does not recycle. If you want to add a recycler, you can use a design like this[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com]. It does make your mall a LOT bigger, so in this case it should probably be in the equatorial area.

I hope you have fun with this mall, feedback is always appreciated!

[steven]

@Lokius: (2) I didn't put proliferation on the bus because I wanted to prioritize ease of use. While you could add proliferation in all places where the mall currently uses direct insertion, in those cases proliferation can only be used for production speed up, and production speed is typically high enough to begin with. More generally, I think that it's not really worth squeezing proliferation into mall designs that involve direct insertion. I do like proliferation in my bot mall design, where it fits more naturally. But again, there is absolutely no reason not to add a belt with proliferator if you like such a variation.

[steven]

@Lokius: (1) I left missiles out of the mall mostly because I personally don't prefer to play with Dark Fog, and so I don't have a good feel for the throughput required and whether the mall would be the right place to build such things. For the stage 1 version of the mall, I didn't include coal because I didn't have comfortable room for more belts in the design, and I wanted to make sure the bus carries everything you need to make everything up to logistics. In principle there is nothing against having it on the bus, but you would of course have to tweak the blueprints.

[steven]

Sorry I missed some of your comments before!

@KnifyMan, BelSamRog, Arcane, and Lokius: thanks for your kind words, it's really great to hear the design is appreciated!

@BelSamRog: I haven't really run into a desire to have buffer planets. Do all of you guys like those? Is it to speed up delivery? Because I usually just plop down one or two ILSs on a new planet I want to build on and request all the important stuff. I delete the ILSs when I'm done building. That has never seemed slow for me. I guess I could make a blueprint for such an importing station. Can you explain why you want a buffer planet?

[Lokius]

First of all, really stellar work, this fits so nicely with my playstyle and I am going to use it a ton. Secondly, I have a couple of enhancements I plan to make, but before I burn those hours it may be that you already thought of these and decided against them so I thought I would check with you first to see if I am not thinking far enough ahead.

1. Why don't you include some items on the bus? Most specifically, why do you not include coal or it's products on the bus, or things like combustible units which would allow the manufacture of missiles early on to deal with dark fog.

2. Why don't you include proliferation on the bus? This way for example if you were making conveyor belt 1 and next to it conveyor belt 2, you could proliferate in between.

[KnifyMan]

Great stuff, keep it up

[BelSamRog]

I didn't have time to thank you for the recycling factory, but here's the new "best". Thanks for the convenient and interesting thing! But I like the recycling one better.

If you also make buffer planet warehouses, then everything will be perfect.

[Arcane]

Very impressive, thanks! Copying the mall and the segments for my use

[steven]

Hi X1Alpha, good point about the meta-data - I never use it myself, but it could be a great use for it. I'll add that suggestion to the text.

[X1Alpha]

This is exactly what I was looking for when I was trying to think of what kind of mall to make, but I was trying to make it with stacked splitters but kept running into the max stack height for them. Bot malls always seem like a waste compared to stacked belts since they don't use a requester system like Factorio that allows multiple items and ILS/PLS isn't something you can start with.

Also a counter point to not being able to build this until red science, it would make it a good target to spend 350 red meta-data if you have previous saves which means you can easily make an early game version of while still only at blue science without the resource investment of a bot mall.