Introducing a vertical circular bus - A giant O of belts and lifters fully connected allowing for input / output anywhere along the bus.
Pros :
- Modular, you can build anywhere on the vertical bus stack
- Limits spaghetti by providing a clear and easy to access API for all players.
- Very fast to reach all parts of the factory since everything is very concentrated into a cube of productivity.
Cons :
- Satisfactory netcode doesn’t like SUPER dense areas, so it could become problematic for multiplayer.
- There is no priority mergers yet in Satisfactory, so if you want to prioritize a input to the bus you downgrade the belts/lifters feeding INTO the priority input, that way the belt will back up and the priority input will provide the bulk of the material.
Details/Photo Galleries:
- Vertical Bus Details https://hackertalks.com/post/4670602/5288896
- Demonstration of the Vertical Bus in a base: https://hackertalks.com/post/4670602/5288887
- Prototyping details https://hackertalks.com/post/4670602/5288866
I don’t play satisfactory or understand this picture, but it does look cool.
It is a thing of beauty. Thanks for the description and pictures. Any chance you can share the blueprints?
Vertical Bus
Access to the vertical bus is done via vertical stacks of merger’s and splitters, a label blueprint keeps the interface organized.
Using floor holes helps create compact access to a vertical lifter.
The top and bottom of the bus are connected with belts that bridge the gap, as well as provide a nice visual indicator of bus activity. For lifters the delete tool will tell you how many items are in a segment to help narrow down issues.
Extensive use of blueprints is necessary in multiplayer to ensure the API is maintained across sessions. It is recommended to have a label on the blueprint with a version number - this will ease refactoring and upgrades later.
Note:
- You can build out empty floors without putting any bus access by using lifter floor holes which allow for connections of any height, useful for placing spacer floors for future growth. its natural to want to put the mall/hub at the top of the base.
Mall / Depots
At the top of the Vertical bus is a Mall that provides a industrial storage container for high volume and early game resources, labels showing where every input comes into the bus, and a dimensional depot for late game access. The industrial storage container is attached to the circular bus and acts as a item buffer for the bus itself. A recycling loop threads through smart splitters attached to every organizer to ensure precious resources are not wasted early game.
Here is a side-view of the mall blueprint stamp, note the input and output belts are kept straight for easy future maintenance.
This is what I would dream of making if my computer’s performance was any better. I’m amazed.
Sadly with significant lag incurred the last time I tried to make a mall even half this size, I ended up switching over to a distributed storage model kept at factories dotted around the map and tapped remotely via drones.
Coffee Stain has really improved the game performance lately, i’ve been happily impressed.
What Jet said, if it was over a year or more ago you should give it another shot. The optimizations they made around loading and lag has been a night and day difference. Same with multiplayer lag.
This was last week unfortunately, haha.
Oof, nevermind. Maybe send your save to Coffee Stain for science 😆
The Starter base itself
With 9 levels divided into north and south sides the starter based provides 18 independent work areas. By strictly only using the vertical bus for any floor inputs or outputs the starter base is easy to expand out for extra capacity and limits the amount of spaghetti due to the strict floor based API
Each floor pulls from the Vertical bus, has its own power priority switch.
As a dirty engineer, who loves floating platforms, I’ve found that walls don’t improve game performance much, its object density that really impacts FPS. I did experiment with walls, but didn’t see much of a performance change. So floating platforms for everyone!
A train station at the top of the base, provides access to remote resources. Train stations are HUGE, and the depot quickly became the largest single floor of the starter base.
The verticality keeps the entire base very compact, as seen in this map everything is built in the bottom left, with only some feeder stations / power stations elsewhere on the map.
R&D
Always be iterating on better ways to do vertical stacks! Fun note I can fit 41 floors into the map before hitting the skybox!
A mini-yeet cannon for throwing employees around the factory in a closed loop hyper cannon system
