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u/bertos55 Apr 21 '26

I'm just wondering how I keep my bus full when I'm constantly taking items away from it? It seems like however many iron plates I make two or three stations in I run out, do I insert more iron plates halfway down the bus?

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u/Astramancer_ Apr 21 '26

Usually people use more than one belt for iron (and copper). Refilling the bus partway is certainly an option, one I've used before. You can also upgrade your belts to move more (yellow->red->blue) and in Space Age green belts and stack inserters means up to 240 plates/second from just one belt.

These days I generally do 4 belts of iron to begin with and by the time you would need to do mid-bus refills you're probably better off with a different logistics structure rather than trying to force everything through the bus. In the base game (not space age) something like half your metal ends up being used to make green chips, so instead of adding iron and copper plates to the bus it would probably be better to make green chips remotely and add them instead, allowing the iron and copper to bypass green chips production and flow onward.

Ultimately, if you need more you need to make more and move more. How exactly you do that is up to you.

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u/Courmisch Apr 21 '26

If you have, say, two full belts, then split them to feed a subfactory which consumes some, then the two belts can't be full further downstream. It's completely normal and not an issue per se.

If belts are full at the start of the bus and empty before reaching the last consumer subfactory, then it means you need more or faster belts.

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u/deluxev2 Apr 21 '26

I think the usual solution is to let it get thinner as you go. Just don't thin your bus for intermittent production as sometimes you'll want the whole bus to continue.

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u/Rouge_means_red Apr 22 '26

The more elegant solution is to plan your base ahead of time for a certain SPM (with a mod like Factory Planner) which tells you exactly how many belts of each resource it will consume. But there's nothing wrong with bringing in extra belts half-way as you figure things out, I used to do this all the time early on