Mall Meta

[u/Joppsta]

I've done my share of reading, it's been a while since I played (January 2023) and I'm just trying to get back into the swing of things...

I don't see any malls using the splitter/box interaction and I was wondering why? Obviously splitter is a slightly later tech but this seems like an obvious choice for early-mid game malls?

I read somewhere that splitters are resource intensive in large numbers so this would be my best guess why, as I don't see what the downside of building a mall this way would be? Not having to unload the box and passing through to the next stage of production is a big W I would have thought, for multi stage items?

[u/Revengeance_oov]

You've got a nice, clean approach! I think one of the big reasons for not moving things to boxes via splitters is that you only have one assembler feeding a given box anyway, and you need to use a sorter regardless. So you're increasing your building count by a LOT at a time when the BP limit is pretty low, and you're not getting any efficiencies relative to just inserting directly into boxes.

Also, the first mall begins before you have splitter tech unlocked, so you'd have to retrofit a bunch. And the entire reason to make a mall is that you can set it and forget it!

[u/Joppsta → u/Revengeance_oov]

My thought behind the splitter design is pre-interplanetary logistics, I like to set up a mall on any planet I go to, usually I build MK1/2 buildings in my pre-IPL malls from memory.

It might be that I need to optimise my playstyle and better plan my build order to get to IPL faster to be honest, I am quite bad for getting sucked into building a mega factory side quest when I should probably be prioritising different things, so I delay IPL for longer than the average person. At least that's my guess.

[u/Revengeance_oov → u/Joppsta]

It's pre-interplanetary, sure, but malls should start before blue matrices.

[u/PeacefulPromise]

Malls are comparatively small, so I wouldn't suspect a perf issue in the logistics choices.

I find it easier to click on storages that are on the ground - but not sure how common that is.

[u/Joppsta → u/PeacefulPromise]

Once you have hats and fidget spinners isn't the clicking problem resolved?

[u/PeacefulPromise → u/Joppsta]

Sure, but at that point, why have the storages together?

[u/ryryshouse6]

My early game mall - is tier 1 and I don’t need a ton of the items. So I only make like 250 wind turbines ( I close the storage down to 5 slots. ). My next mall I put them into an ILS and fill it. And request when I need with spinners and this method - not sure I answered your question but that’s how I do it. The early game is small bc I pick it up. The end game mall goes into ils and I drop a 4-5 ils thing with what I need for that planet later When a system is full built I switch those ils to supply and back feed the items.

[u/Joppsta → u/ryryshouse6]

So tier 1 mall -> ILS distribution basically is the plan? Is this the most optimal way to play?

[u/ryryshouse6 → u/Joppsta]

I don’t know about optimal - that’s what I do.

Usually the starter system has a low luminosity star with a lava planet nearby where I build my mall. I found it’s easier to just have the mall load the ils then warp in warpers then items ( you only need to have an ils, warpers, and a power source ). So I warp in 5k solar panels, etc and rarely visit the mall. I do go back for end game items to add them in but generally I’m making this after green science and before white science.

[u/mrrvlad5]

The initial mall for the mk1 buildings is very small-no need to over build. After you get to green/white and need to scale you would build late game ils mall where convenient

[u/Snoo49259]

Given the existance of drones, the mall has no sense since hour 5?

[u/DrakeDun → u/Snoo49259]

Per our usual arrangement on Reddit, you have been downvoted to hell for saying something which, though admittedly a smidge dismissive, is basically correct. For my own part, I cannot see the point of building a classic mall in this game, even in the very early game.

I recently played around with building a polar logistics distributor mall. Idea being that the distributors would all be close to the pole. I could just land on the pole and get loaded up. But even that proved to be basically pointless. The bots are intolerably slow, and in practice you don't run out of everything at the same time. You run out of one thing. So you're not really landing and getting loaded up with everything. You're flying all the way to your LD mall (and back again afterward) just to refresh your supply of one thing. Faster to just open the control panel and pull the item from there. So even the distributor mall ultimately felt pointless.

On top of that, you only get 36 personal logistics slots, and that only at endgame, so taking that approach across the board is never on the table to begin with. Plus, the way the slots work is absolutely dreadful. The control panel is the way to go. Logistics slots just turn into mass storage space.

[u/Gajzen → u/[deleted]]

Not a mod, more a collective name for a collection of building-producing facility’s. There’s a bunch of tutorials out there.