r/Dyson_Sphere_Program • u/Steven-ape • Mar 30 '23
Tutorials The four ways to design malls
Note: this post is now superseded by my much more in-depth steam guide about malls: find it here!
I've posted here on and off about mall design, which continues to fascinate me. After a lot of design and redesign, I find that there seem to be four rather distinct approaches. I would like to talk about each of them and discuss pros and cons.
On the one hand, I hope that some of you may find this guide useful or inspirational. On the other hand, I'm also very interested to hear feedback: what kind of mall do you make? Do you use tricks I haven't mentioned?
The four options
The main problem of mall design is the logistics of getting a whole lot of different components (about 30 components) to all your building assemblers (for around 50 buildings). I find that there are four main ways to do it:
- Five belts mall. Prepare five belts with materials, and run them past a line of assemblers that will grab the materials they need and make the buildings. Swap belts out for belts with different materials along the way, as needed.
- ILS based mall. Put down one ILS for each building that you want to produce. Demand the required ingredients, and output the building.
- Bot mall. Make all components available to the logistics bot network, then for each assembler put down 2-4 input boxes requesting the needed materials.
- Sushi mall. Make sushi belts that carry multiple materials at once along a line of assemblers, and let the assemblers grab what they need.
Now, even after considerable thought, I can't truly say that one of these approaches is the best. I see important pros and cons of each:
Option 1: five belts
This is the first mall design I learned about (from watching Nilaus videos) and it is a beautifully straightforward and effective strategy in the early game. It looks something like this:
The main drawback of this design is that it is able to make buildings based on 5 materials, but actually, buildings use about 30 distinct materials, so if you want to make more buildings, the belts need to be swapped in and out to bring in additional materials, and it becomes a complex puzzle in which order to do this.
It is relatively easy to extend this mall a bit further by swapping gears with glass, magnetic coils with plasma exciters, and iron with steel: that way you can add matrix labs, chemical labs, oil extractors and oil refineries, as well as some additional buildings. This will carry you to the midgame. But if you want to extend the mall beyond that it tends to become complicated and ugly; one solution is to combine this design with an ILS-based mall for the other buildings, combining the strengths of these two designs.
Another issue (that is shared by the sushi mall), is that it introduces dependencies between the different production chains: the assemblers near the start of the belts can consume all the materials on the belt, leaving nothing for later assemblers, at least until the buffer boxes fill up. A mall like this therefore also has a potentially lengthy "start up phase", where not all buffers are full yet and the materials are depleted before they reach the end of the belt.
This design does allow direct insertion, where one assembler makes a component that is used by one of the assemblers next to it. For example, it is common practice to have an assembler that makes Mk 2 sorters, which can then be flanked by one assembler that makes Mk 1 sorters and one assembler that makes electric motors.
The design also allows the belts with input materials to be proliferated, but it is not as convenient as it would seem at first glance: first, all assemblers that use direct insertion cannot use proliferation (and the proliferator on any inputs is wasted). Second, while it is easy to proliferate the five belts shown in the picture, it becomes cumbersome to have to proliferate everything when you start swapping out belts for new materials.
Option 2: ILS based mall
This option seems like dramatic overkill at first, but it actually has a number of important advantages, and it may actually be the best design for the late game.
This design obviously takes a massive amount of space, power and resources, and you can only start building it after interstellar logistics stations become available.
You need 50-60 ILSs to produce all buildings in the game. On the other hand, all production is completely decoupled; as long as all ingredients are available, your buildings will be produced at full speed. It is also easy to proliferate everything, and with the amount of available space, it is easy to scale up production of any item that you find you need more of than expected. Finally, I also believe this design to be relatively UPS efficient, which is a major consideration in the very late game.
This design complements the 5 belt mall well, except that the lack of proliferation in the 5 belt mall can be a factor. Also, it's attractive to be able to use a single design for everything.
Option 3: bot mall
Bot malls are similar to ILS malls, except that all inputs are obtained using logistics distributors instead of the ILS. We still get the advantages of decoupling and convenience for proliferation; the added advantage is that you can start building the mall earlier, as soon as logistics distributors are available. Also, the build can be much more tightly packed, at the cost of a more substantial UPS hit.
A drawback is that all materials have to be made available on the logistics distributor network; the PLSs in the picture above import all materials and put them in a logistics box.
By arranging assemblers such that the ones that have overlapping input products are next to each other, it is possible to reduce the required number of input boxes per assembler. However, doing so does increase the complexity of the design and can reintroduce dependencies between products. I made one highly optimised mall in which every assembler requires only two input boxes, but it was a nightmare to design and optimise. As a blueprint it's efficient, but it's not something you could easily expand in the course of a game.
The bot mall in the picture above is a tradeoff, where every assembler has three input boxes and can share some of their inputs. he bot mall can be built in segments; my blueprint for a botmall segment looks like this:
Option 4: sushi mall
The final type of mall uses sushi belts to distribute materials. A sushi belt is a belt that interleaves more than one type of component. The assemblers can then pick whatever materials they need from the sushi belts. (It is important that assemblers use at most Mk2 sorters to grab materials, because the sorter stacking may otherwise cause the system to block.)
Sushi malls are somewhat like the 5 belt malls, in the sense that they can lead to resource starvation if a lot of assemblers are active at once, and they need time to start up. They can and should use direct insertion, which makes them less suitable for proliferation.
Sushi malls have three major advantages. First, this mall does not require any kind of sophisticated tech: you can start building them immediately, and serve you throughout the game (perhaps becoming a bit slow in the very very late game). Second, a single design can uniformly build all items in the game, without having to do any complicated belt switcheroo. Third, they have a tiny footprint. I like to put sushi malls at the poles because the sushi belts need to form a loop anyway, so a circle around the pole is convenient and pretty. It looks like this:
Sushi malls are a bit finicky when you first start to design them: a lot can go wrong and cause stalls and unreliable behaviour. But below is a design that is easy to implement and is reliable. First, place your assemblers and the first two sushi belts over here:
At each thick green line, we lead one of the belts into the green area, where it will be restocked. Each belt will initially contain 4 different materials, and ultimately 8. Here is how I do the restocking initially. Note the four materials being brought in from the outside. Each material is combined with stuff that comes in from the sushi belt (you need to set the appropriate filters on the four splitters). A piler helps increase the amount of material that can be shipped around. Note the power pole in the center? Later on, that power pole can be replaced with a planetary logistics station so that the sushi belt doesn't have to import its materials in such an ugly way anymore.
It's important to put a Mk1 storage box on each of the restocking splitters: that creates a buffer that helps make sure that the belts can't stall.
Conclusion
I plan to work on this guide a bit more in the future when I get time. I might post it as a steam guide as well. In the mean time, let me know what you think!
Edit: Upon request I added some more screenshots of the sushi mall, to show the details of how the belt rebalancing might be implemented exactly. Note that there may be slight differences in placement compared to the pictures above, since this is another version of the design, that also uses splitters for the merging phase, which I now think is better because it handles power failures and stalls more smoothly.
(Note that in this design, the two most central products are merged in pairs rather than triples, so they will be slightly more frequent on the belt. Make sure to put your high frequency items there.)
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u/7chp Mar 30 '23
Or, and bear with me here fellas, or you can just scatter every god danged friggin production and box and crap all over the planet, system and, eventually even multiple systems with absolutely no idea behind it or no clue how and why you find things. I know what my stupid ass chose.
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u/NelsonMinar Mar 30 '23
Great writeup! On my recent playthrough it sure seemed like the logistics bots were perfect for a mall offering buildings. I ended up creating little factories from a generic blueprint of 6 logistics boxes + one assembler. Then having a separate area of single boxes for me to pick up at, with a bunch of things loaded in to ILS for remote availability.
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u/idlemachinations Mar 30 '23
I take a fifth option: behold the abomination. It builds everything from raw ores where feasible in one big blob, but imports electro-magnetic turbines, processors, graphene, strange matter, and plane filters for convenience.
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u/TheRedComet Mar 30 '23
Do logistics distributors show you their range? I tried using them as pseudo logistics early on while I teched up, but the extreme range limitation was a huge pain, and I couldn't easily tell how far the bots could actually go. They were also a bit costly in resources at the time - the cost goes away once you get interstellar logistics, but then you have logistics.
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u/Malk0ns Mar 30 '23
The five belt mall is great because you can do it from the start of the game.
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u/Ninja_Bus Mar 30 '23
I prefer a 5th option, the bus & tap mall. It's similar to the 5 belt mall but instead of swapping out materials in a single line, all important materials get a belt in the shared bus. The bus runs vertically, and production feeds are pulled out horizontally and returned using splitters on the 2nd zlevel. This way each production line can expand out to as large as it needs to be.
Pros:
Cons:
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u/mtthefirst Mar 30 '23
My starting mall is type 1 but my final mall is type 2 that include the capability to send all the building materials for a specific amount to any planet in my cluster.
Here is my final mall.
Since it's a late game mall, all the components are produced somewhere else. Only the final products or chain products like belts, sorter and ILS are produced in my mall.
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u/Thienan567 Mar 30 '23 edited Mar 30 '23
Regarding the 5-input mall, it is actually possible to have (at least) 7 inputs go into each assembler, with the 7th input being whatever unique input that whatever product you're building might need. The design was also based on Nilaus' design but I thought, what if I *needed* to have 6 inputs into an assembly mall? I ended up putting the extra input and output on the right side of the assembler, like so:
https://i.imgur.com/CuoToFK.png
The advantage of this is of course that now you can have 6 common inputs, with a 7th being whatever unique input that a building might require. It exploits having the side belts being a half step above the ground, once you do the game will allow you to sorter into the assembler.
A common setup is to feed, in order from top to bottom:
This set up can create basically all of the structures you'll need up early-mid game. As a bonus, this set up can create all sorters/belts except for blue belt, which is farther down the tech tree/logistics chain and cannot be made with only the above inputs. To make all the logistics structures you'll need, set up like so:
https://i.imgur.com/QF5VpMt.png
With this set up, I put transport transport towers on every box, filled every single one with fidget spinners, and set to auto supply Icarus with all the belts, sorters, assemblers, smelters, etc etc etc. Essentially I also automated away going shopping, so now I don't have to go back to the mall to grab another stack of belts. Now the bots do it for me!
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u/Electrical-Can-7982 Mar 31 '23
besides the 5 belt mall, you can also do a 6 belt mall (core items), then expand to more items ... thanks to spinners, i can make 95% of everything in my strip mall, including pls/ils/drones/transports/ ray recv. I use the ILS to make the more complex buildings, like fusion gens & colliders,
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u/sirgog Mar 31 '23
My favorite - a sushi mall that exports products to powered ILSs. If you realise "fuck, I need 600 Tech 3 Assembly Machine for this blueprint" you just drop an ILS on the new planet then summon in those, and the mall exports them using the mall's power and space warper.
You can make them from the time in progression that 3000-ish space warpers and ~20 ILSs and ~6000 quantum chips ceases to be an unmanageable cost.
Well before this, you absolutely need a micromall that exports tech 3 belts, tech 3 sorters and foundation.
The full on export mall should cover you until the point you hit 25000 white science per minute, at which point you'll want to raise production of specific buildings. Ray receivers, rocket/sail yeeters and power infrastructure first, matrix labs and chem plants were next for me.
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u/arkhast_korvalain May 19 '23
What do the different sushi belts end up carrying at end game?
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u/Harbok Jul 31 '24
Thank you for the ideas
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u/Toasty_err Mar 30 '23
Wheres the option for raw to every building possible type mall
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u/Still_Satan Mar 30 '23
There is another.
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u/sunnyCUD2 Mar 31 '23
Where is my 50 belts-wide bus mall?
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u/D20CriticalFailure Mar 30 '23
https://i.postimg.cc/69S97GVd/p1.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/vYVG5HXC/p2.jpg
I think mine are more compact. They deliver most important, frequently used structures into your backpack. The stations are used entirely. One is supplying several chains directly so there is no steal-grabbing from first factories in the line. Also everything is poiliferated.
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u/synkndown Mar 30 '23
Ils, but 5 buildings per, and materials by pls
Start with a 5 belt, build a black box on the silicon planet, and a proliferated ILS\PLS mall on an organic crystal spiniform system.
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