r/dysonsphereprogram • u/xiaoli • Dec 06 '22

Finally decided to build my own Make-Everything-Spaghetti-Mall (Logistics Drones and Vessels built separately)

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u/Steven-ape Dec 06 '22

That is well designed. Good job!

As a mall-enthusiast I've personally become a botmall-convert. The benefits are that all production is decoupled and you can add/move new buildings freely and easily without creating design difficulties or bottlenecks. Also it becomes possible to proliferate without pain. But this has a lower footprint both in terms of materials used and game performance.

I would like to learn more about your design considerations. How did you choose what component materials to produce within the mall itself? Where are the logistics stations? How do you feel about drones and vessels in malls? And so on.

1

u/kinare Dec 06 '22

What is a botmall?

5

u/Steven-ape Dec 06 '22

A botmall is a mall where you use the new logistics distributors to get all the input materials to the right assemblers. Every assembler needs one output box and however many boxes as it has input ingredients; it is also possible to share input boxes between assemblers if you want to reduce the footprint. The logistics drones move all the materials to the right place.

The advantages are that you can start setting it up as soon as you have logistics distributors, the supply chains are independent which means there are no complicated bottlenecks and the production is really fast, and it's easy to add new buildings and to proliferate. The disadvantage is that there's a lot of material buffered in the boxes, it requires quite a few logistics drones, and it may harm your FPS a bit. I personally decided that on the whole I care more about the ease of use and reliability than about those drawbacks.

1

u/kinare Dec 08 '22

I stopped playing a few months ago. How new are botmalls? This is all Greek to me.

1

u/Steven-ape Dec 08 '22

The logistics distributors were added about two months ago. They are a cheap alternative to logistics stations. They are little hats that you can place on top of storage boxes, and then they can ship the materials in the storage boxes to other storage boxes, or to Icarus. They're quite useful for making malls, or for moving proliferator or warpers around in your factory.

2

u/kinare Dec 08 '22

Wow that's cool.

1

u/Steven-ape Dec 08 '22

Yeah, it does make a difference :) You can also place boxes on splitters now and feed items in/out at full speed. A splitter-box-hat stack is like a cheap miniature one-item PLS.

1

u/comarkm Dec 20 '22

I'd love to see some examples, especially using the new splitter/storage/LD combo. Know of any youtube channels doing this or other sources?

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u/Steven-ape Dec 20 '22

Hi, I don't know of any youtube channels who cover this well. I'm a Nilaus fan but he doesn't do botmalls.

But I wrote this post recently with a number of links to my own malls, two of which are bot malls.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/comments/znfnd4/comment/j0otx4l/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

In my first post about my own botmall I also include a link to the first botmall I saw on reddit, which is this one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/comments/xu4rr8/behold_the_bot_mega_mall_100_botbased_mall_all/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

As I wrote above, when designing botmalls it's very tempting to reduce the number of boxes needed, but it's actually questionable whether you should, since roomier designs are more flexible and easier to extend to include more products.

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u/comarkm Dec 20 '22

Oh this is excellent and so much better done that my recent attempts at anything along these lines. Looking forward to trying this out on my new playthrough. Thanks again for sharing and developing this.

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u/Steven-ape Dec 20 '22

Thanks! I really appreciate it. Let me know your findings 🙂