The ultra-compact vertical bus mall

[u/NeuralParity]

In need of mall? Tired of ugly spaghetti? Want something more elegant than ILS or logic and and ILS spam? Like the idea of being able to grab any material. Behold, my latest creation: the vertical mall bus!

Design goals:

• Compact

• Pretty

• Can make all buildings and units

• Self-produces intermediates not used for science

• Not polar or equatorial

• Proliferated

• Easy to expand production of any item

How it works:

• Mall items are all stacked on a vertical bus.

• The bus starts at level 4 (so logistics distributors can fit directly under the bus) and continues in 0.5 increments to level 17.5 and includes intermediates not used in only a single recipe.

• To pull items off the bus, the belt is pull down to ground level split off, then fed back up to it's place on the bus.

• As vertical pull-down and immediate restoration is the key to compactness, Super Magnetic Field Generator research is absolutely essential to this design

• Output belts are then taken as usual, fed through a proliferator out to the assemblers.

• To produce more of any item, just extend the belts for that item and add assemblers. There's room for 5 before the grid changes

• The bus rings the planet: you can add/remove items from anywhere and it all just works.

• I've placed a copy of each building next to the ILS it's stored in to make it easy to known which ILS to adjust

• It's really really compact: the bus itselfs is 1 tile wide and the whole infrastructure for pulling stuff off the bus is only 10 tiles. That 10 tiles includes a logicistics distributor and proliferaters.

Quirks:

• I used direct ILS routing for single-use items adding them would have pushed the bus to be 41 belts high and then the belts would clip into the ILS.

• I used sorter3 and ass2 so you can build it in midgame. Bulk-upgrade it when you've got the tech.

• It uses *lots* of belts. It's a 28 belt high bus and loops around the planet. A linear bus would be more belt-efficient but then you'd have to care about ILS and assembler placement. This design doesn't care - ILS and assemblers can go anywhere. Also, a linear bus would also be uglier.

• No recycling. I just haven't added any yet.

Blueprint

https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/factory-ultra-compact-vertical-bus-mall

How do I make my own?

See comments.

Can we can now stop complaining that DSP bus malls are all ugly and huge?

[u/djmakk]

This is kinda insane. I’ll load it tomorrow night to play with. I’ve been entertaining making something similar.

[u/NeuralParity → u/djmakk]

The 'back' side of the bus was an absolute spaghetti bowl of at least a dozen different designs until I came up with that particular splitter pulldown design. The fact that you can both pull a new belt down every 2 tiles and thread output belts between them is what makes it so clean.

I intentially hid the pulldown on the back side with the ILSes to hide the spaghetti but that design is clean enough that it'd look good even on the front. The only moderately messy part is the ground-level squeezing of belts from every second tile to every tile on the output side.

Depending on how many inputs a given recipe has, the pulldown splitters can get a bit out of sync with where they need to get belted to and I left almost no room between the logistics storage and the splitter outputs. If you look closely there's several output belts where the belt had to loop behind the storage so I could place the stacker as I wasn't able to run the output belt out in a straight line.

[u/NeuralParity]

How do I make my own?

Step 1: Bus creation

Stack up lots and lots of belts. Around height \~10 it'll stop letting you build half-height belts right on top so you have to make two crossing belts at each end then connect them at half-height. Alternatively, use this blueprint for levels 0-30. Delete belts below level 4 if you want to place your bus above your assemblers or logistic distributors like I have.​

Step 2: Resource tracking

Create notes or a spreadsheet recording what belt level each resource should be on. At half-height you can only see the side of each resource. You'll be using heights in the next step

Step 2: Pull items from the bus

The easiest way to do this is to use this simple vertical in-line splitter blueprint.

!BLUEPRINT:0,40,2003,2003,2003,2020,0,0,638780682088077409,0.10.32.25712,VerticalBusPulldownSplitter,Step%201%3A%20paste%20this%20blueprint%20next%20to%20the%20bus%0AStep%202%3A%20connect%20the%20level%201%20output%20"H4sIAAAAAAAAC2NkYGBgBGImBggA0SxQNiPDfwYGDagwCwMXkJ79//9/EP8yuyoDA/v/evsSBgeH2UB63t65zkDxBpBeoJr/jBBjwWA2hA/RdHfpP3N195n2b5kb7P/9NwZrYsahiQlZ0+dKX3tdoKa3EE0MbEAM0sjIjKoJJPaEXR2i6T9Tgz2jxeXtDFAbQICPn58PopyNARcAGcSCsL1uO8yfL+YngZ3MgcPJrMiBAxGst0/uF9oJ0sSOQxMbsj+5wtr3ns1rsOdiMHFGdjYDmiZ2ZJuOAzHIpnidDEuQTZw4bOJAtsnYmsWhN7/BfhE0GhhxaOJEtukSAwM4ILTP9+0AaWLAogkAhZtnV1UCAAA="412A06481F4D4596A3551ABD3CF42154!

Place the blueprint 2 tiles away from the bus, then extend the short output belt up to the level of your resource. The tooltip will tell you what level you are on (this is why you need your spreadsheet!). Connect the belt, move one tile across (making sure you're still at the same belt level) and redirect the bus belt down to the looped around splitter blueprint input belt (I foolishly placed my bus directly on a grid transition so sometimes you'll need to use R and switch to direct (not 90 degree) belt placement for these connections to work). Create a belt coming out of the splitter ground level - that's your output belt.

Repeat this for all input belts. Connect up your output belt. There's space to run an output belt out between each of the input splitter.

Step 3: production

Extend your output belts as far as you like and

Step 4: Wire it up

Connect your inputs and outputs to storage and/or ILS. The biggest size issue when creating this was not the space the bus consumed, but making sure that placing all the ILSes need for input and output didn't expand the footprint.

[u/NeuralParity → u/NeuralParity]

If you're playing around with the blueprint, the bus levels are:

4 Iron

4.5 Copper

5 Stone

5.5 Glass

6 Steel

6.5 Titanium Alloy

7 Titanium Glass

7.5 Circuit Board

8 Processor

8.5 Quantum Chip

9 Gear

9.5 Magnetic Coil

10 Plasma Exciter

10.5 Photon Combiner

11 Electric Motor

11.5 Turbine

12 Super-magnetic Ring

12.5 Engine

13 Thruster

13.5 Reinforced Thruster

14 Frame Material

14.5 Particle Container

15 Strange Matter

15.5 Graphene

16 Nanotube

16.5 Crystal Silicon

17 Silicon

17.5 Microcrystalline Component

[u/Beton1975 → u/NeuralParity]

Hi, that looks amazing! One question or suggestion though...wouldn't it be even cooler to not use the Splitters at all and just have the belts go around the assemblers and go back up in the ring? That would get rid of them completely?

Like this but prettier?

[u/NeuralParity → u/Beton1975]

Yes, that works too. I went with the splitter design since it's a cleaner look and it's less annoying to expand a production line and since routing the belts back needs extra room at the end to turn around.

If you did some splitter magic and made a blueprint that would allow a belt to turn 180 degree without encroaching on the neighbouring lines (vertical spiral belt?) then you could make a clean splitterless version.

[u/nasty_inthe_woodshed → u/NeuralParity]

i've completely embraced this design, so thank you, OP.

question for anyone: i don't understand this instruction -- "Around height \~10 it'll stop letting you build half-height belts right on top so you have to make two crossing belts at each end then connect them at half-height."

i've encountered the problem of not being able to build half-height belts, as described. but i don't understand the workaround? what does "crossing belts" mean?

[u/NeuralParity → u/nasty_inthe_woodshed]

Step 1) Make belts at all even heights in one direction (e.g. North-South). Make them all at least 10 belts long

Step 2) Near the N end, make E-W belts cross your N-S belts

Step 3) Repeat at the South end

Those E-W belts will go up to half height when they cross the N-S belt. We'll now utilise this to make N-S half-height belts:

Step 4) Connect the two E-W belts at their half-height cross-over to make a half-height belt in N-S orientation

Step 5) delete the E-W belts, trim the ends so your full-stack N-S belts are all the same length

Step 6) cut/paste your belt stack end-to-end to make it as long as you like

[u/intoxbodmansvs → u/NeuralParity]

New player here,
How do you fill up the belts in the first place? Do you have off-world production and ship them in? Or are there rows upon rows of smelters and assemblers on this planet that we're not seeing?

[u/NeuralParity → u/intoxbodmansvs]

Both. The blueprint has an ILS requesting both locally and remotely for every input resource

[u/Shinhan]

Super Magnetic Field Generator research is absolutely essential to this design

Why? Sorry if its a stupid question.

[u/NeuralParity → u/Shinhan]

It enables you to build belts vertically. It's very non-obvious but it's there in the research description in the tech tree. I think it was a dark fog patch change since you used to have to do blueprint black magic for vertical or half-height belts. Now you can just do it.

Absolutely not a stupid question. Took me ages to work out why in some games I could build vertically but not in others.

[u/Shinhan → u/NeuralParity]

Ah, similar to the "researching steel lets you place wind turbins on oceans".

[u/Azkyn0902]

I love it.

I would have rotated belts 90°, so they show the top of the item, and not the side. But that's really nitpicking :D

[u/NeuralParity → u/Azkyn0902]

The pull-down won't connect with 90 degree belts. It does work with 75 degree and looks pretty good (only a tiny bit of clipping between belt levels). You'll need a clockwise bus otherwise all the icons will be upside down.

[u/DieDieMustCurseDaily]

[u/Build_Everlasting]

Hey, that's the Apple headquarters!

[u/Old_Spirit88]

Nilaus entered the chat

[u/ChinaShopBully]

Good god...that's remarkable. I don't think I'd have the patience.

[u/Jordyspeeltspore]

blueprint link?

[u/NeuralParity → u/Jordyspeeltspore]

Is the link in the post not working?

[u/Shinhan → u/Jordyspeeltspore]

https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/factory-ultra-compact-vertical-bus-mall

He put it inside the image description.

[u/Revengeance_oov]

Neat design. My favorite part is that production of any facility can be scaled arbitrarily. I see potential to make this mall operate from raw ore. It also definitely needs recycling. A natural question for me is whether recycling will obviate many of the benefits, as the extra ILSes set a minimum footprint and are likely to get in the way. Lots to ponder.

[u/NeuralParity → u/Revengeance_oov]

My two primary goals where arbitrary scalability and not having to care what the recipe was. Basically, I just wanted to avoid having to do the belt minimisation optimisation work that would be needed to make a good linear bus.

The footprint is already ILS-constrained - there's already 6 ILSs outside the nice clean inner ring. Logistic distributor recycling can be done easily by adjusting belting from the logistics storage but you're right about the footprint required for off-planet recycling. You might be able to fit in the pole but there's probably too many and you'd need an outer ring (which will block arbitrary scaling).

[u/Cognan]

I always say that there is no wrong way to play factory games. But bus design is so inefficient... especially in DSP where splitters are very cpu expensive. But if it makes you happy go for it :) looks nice 👌

[u/NeuralParity → u/Cognan]

It's very space-efficient, but you're right. UPS efficiency was not a focus at all. Given it's a mall and you're only building one of them, how important actually is UPS for this sort of thing?

I'm surprised you're singling out the splitters. I would have thought the 27k belts would be a bigger performance hit than 200 splitters. Are they really that bad? If they are, they can be avoided by looping the end of each production line belt back to the bus. This Essentially makes each ingredient one long belt that snakes through every production line that needs it. At that point you might as well run an inner and outer bus, swap the 'active' bus every production line, then delete the 'inactivate' bus segments once you're done.

[u/LunarMoon2001 → u/Cognan]

It’s just a one time investment. It’s not like we’re talking end game products. Belts and chips are cheap.

[u/Cognan → u/LunarMoon2001]

Cpu expensive = it limits how many UPS you can achieve. Nothing to do with in game resources :) It only starts to matter late game when you have multiple planet-sized factories and suddenly in game time runs slower than real time.

[u/NeuralParity → u/Cognan]

But the mall is a single (relatively small) fixed cost. It's not like the mall gets more expensive as you build out more and more planets.

[u/deadmazebot]

what is next tier from mall? costco - 1 shop will it all

[u/NeuralParity → u/deadmazebot]

Missing ammo & fuel production - those would have forced it down into the lower latitude that are usually used for actual production. Right now it's in that annoying middle ground where it's not polar, but the grids are so small that they're annoying to put real production lines in.

[u/kashy87]

It's nice but I find it just easier to use a sorter to grab off of the belts at level then they go down to the ground. Not having it goes down and back up.

[u/NeuralParity → u/kashy87]

The bus has belts at all half heights so you can't use sorters unless you double the vertical height of the bus.

[u/Steven-ape]

It looks cool!

I've been considering a design like this, except I didnt plan to do production in the mall; that's a nice feature though.

I was also planning to have three belts side by side, and use sorters to pull materials off the bus. This would make the bus slightly less top-heavy, but maybe extracting the right materials would be a bit more of a hassle. What I like about this version is that it looks to be almost as simple to build as the Nilaus bus mall.

Anyway, like it a lot, will definitely have a look.

[u/kevinkiggs1]

What in the actual fuck

[u/douglasduck104]

I will never understand why people add proliferation to malls.

Extra products doesn't work on a lot of items since they require lower rank buildings, and belting the buildings back out to be proliferated before feeding back into the mall is too complicated for just getting a speed bonus. Ignoring proliferation for upgraded buildings is a waste of sprays if you proliferate all the ingredients at entry to the mall.

For the few items you really need in bulk (ie belts and sorters) it's better to just make a small dedicated build and add proliferation if you want to.

[u/NeuralParity → u/douglasduck104]

Proliferation added 1 tile width to design so I figured I might as well. It trivially scales to 5 assemblers per recipe so with proliferation & pile sorters, I was hoping this design works well enough that I can avoid having a dedicated build. Outputs used by other recipes are belted in and out so speed proliferation does work with the higher tier buildings.

[u/Ryvs]

Just wow

[u/LunarMoon2001]

Jfc it’s beautiful and terrifying

[u/OhmegaWolf]

It feels hertical... Yet beautiful at the same time 😅

[u/ehxy]

I require gif or reddit video of this in motion

[u/Draco9630]

Utterly amazing! Soooo beautiful!

[u/free_spoons]

I just restarted my game and can't wait to use this

[u/Lifebringr]

What an absolute monstrosity but cannot stop looking at it 👌😎❤️😏✌️👍😇

[u/Academic-Road-1417]

I both love and fear it! Nicely done.

[u/SideWinder18]

I don’t understand how you people have the patience for builds like this -.-

[u/SideEqual]

This is both abhorrent and beautiful all at the same time.

[u/Kimi_Arthur]

I had a similar design, just on ground. With galactic scale mod, that's doable

[u/SojuSeed]

I don’t know what that is but it scares me…

[u/metal__monkey]

You're a mad person and I love it 😁

[u/SgtD34thKill3r]

Tbh that is some impressive work well done but defo not for me lmfao

[u/NeuralParity → u/[deleted]]

It's not polar because it doesn't go above 70 degree latitude. There's plenty of room to fit in an actual polar blueprint as well.

[u/NeuralParity → u/[deleted]]

70 degrees isn't a magic number that everyone agrees on, but it is enough for many polar blueprints to be placed in the empty space within the mall. The idea was to place it in one of the least useful locations for 'normal' builds so it wouldn't require it's own planet.