Hey guys it's StudleyKansas, and today I want
to talk to you about how to build a main bus in Satisfactory. First you might be wondering,
what is a main bus, why would I build one, and then we'll get to how to build one. A main
bus is basically a stack or a set of stacks of pipes and belts that runs the entire length
of your factory from one end to the other and it contains everything your factory needs
to function and it also contains everything that your factory makes and it makes it available to
the rest of your factory. It also has open space at both sides to leave room to make connections
to and from the bus to your other buildings. Basic items like ingots and high volume items
like copper sheets steel pipes and concrete will each get their own dedicated belt while
low volume items like modular frames computers and heat sinks will all get combined onto one
belt that I call a smart belt which I'll talk about more later in the video. And then you have
what I call super high volume items like screws, wire, and quickwire. If you were to put these
on the main bus each of those items would take several belts apiece so rather than dedicate that
many belt spots it's better to make them close to where you need them and not put them on the bus
at all. Here's a quick example of that where i'm making quickwire and feeding it directly into the
assemblers making AI limiters. So why might you take the time to build one of these? Well, they
simplify your factory, they make it easy to expand and easy to make changes while also allowing
you to focus on building one thing at a time, which might save you an aneurysm or two while
you're trying to comprehend something like this all at once. Now before you go off and build one
of these you're going to want to have some idea of how many belts you're going to need. Either
you're a math-headed person who's already buried yourself in one of these calculators in which case
you know how many belts you need or you like to shoot from the hip and just go with the flow.
I'm a little of both myself. If you're more of the second kind of person here's an example of
what I used at my main factory that should get you started. There will be a Dropbox link in
the description for those who are interested. For basic items that you need huge
amounts of I recommend making them at a separate factory and bringing them
into your main factory either by belt, vehicle, or train. This would include ingots,
concrete, copper sheets, rubber and plastic, and depending on the alternate recipes you're
using, you might also need silica and steel pipes. Next you have to decide whether you're going
to build your bus above ground or below ground. An above ground bus is faster to build and work
with and can be stacked as high as necessary, but there is no room to widen it if you decide
you need to later. Now a below ground bus has a cleaner look, it can be widened if necessary just
by adding some underground lanes without affecting the buildings above the ground, but it does
take a little extra time to build and work with. For this example I've built an underground area
that's going to be used as the main bus. I'm going to build it four walls deep which gives us room to
stack up to six belts or pipes while also allowing us to jump down into the main bus from the factory
floor without taking too much fall damage. I've made it six foundations wide which gives us room
for four main bus stacks as well as two access lanes. While you could easily fit more stacks
in here, leaving this extra space makes it easy to access the bus from any direction while the
access lanes at the side are left open to give you plenty of room to make connections to your factory
however you need to, and if worse comes to worst, you can always make yourself some busghetti. Now,
before I get started actually building this thing, I want to point out that I'll be using a few
mods listed here that aren't necessary for the main bus by any means, they just make it a little
quicker. The ExoSuit mod is what allows me to fly around back and forth like this and the Smart!
mod is what lets me build all six belts at once, and later on you'll see me use the Daisy Chain mod
when I connect all my constructors to each other. Now that all the belts and pipes are in
place it's time to make the smart belt, and we're going to start by removing this
top belt and replacing it with one going the opposite direction. This top belt is
what I call the smart belt return and its purpose is to take everything on the smart
belt that isn't needed by your machines back to the beginning of your base where
you'll have an awesome sink and storage. Don't forget to connect the bottom belt to the top
belt so items can return to be stored and sunk. Here I'm going to add a box of iron ingots to
simulate them being brought in from a separate factory and show you how to connect them to
the bus. For the most part I like to raise my belts up off the ground like this to keep my
factory from turning into an obstacle course. And we've made our first connection to the bus,
making iron ingots available to the rest of our factory. Now let's add some iron plates. Without
knowing how many plates I'll be needing in the future, I find in most cases it's best to build
as many as will fit in one row and belt them all together. In this case it's eight constructors
which will completely drain our iron belt while they do their initial fill up, but once the output
belt fills up with plates they'll get backed up and then only use as much iron as necessary to
feed whatever constructors are needing them. Now let's get these guys hooked up to the
bus so we can start making some plates I'm going to use a merger here which will make
the plates available to any factory that needs them as long as it's to the left of this spot. If
I wanted to also make them available to the right, instead of this merger I could dismantle
this belt segment add a splitter with the input facing my lifter, then add belts to
the left and right outputs. Now let's get some screws going. If you'll remember from
earlier, screws are a super high volume item that would need too many lanes if we were to
put them on the bus, so instead they'll bypass the bus and get sent directly to the machines
that need them which we'll be building next. This time, to pull ingots we're going to have to
cross under the other stacks, and in order to keep my access lanes halfway walkable, I'm going to
keep the belts off the floor as much as I can. This gives us 400 screws a minute which
will be enough to feed our reinforced plate machines we're about to
build with a little left over. This time we'll be using assemblers and we'll be pulling plates from the bus to
the left and screws from the right. Once again, the Smart! mod makes this a
piece of cake, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's looking to speed up the job
of belting hundreds of machines together. Smart! mod also has a feature that will
automatically connect the splitters to the assemblers, but since my splitters face two different directions I'll
have to belt them by hand. This is also the first time we'll be using
the smart belt, which we'll be outputting our reinforced plates to. For this demonstration I've
simply hooked the smart belt return line up to an awesome sink to keep it flowing, but normally
you'd want to use smart splitters to fill boxes first before going to the sink. So this gives us
up to 30 reinforced plates per minute which can and should be turned down if you need less than
that. Since the output is the smart belt which ends up getting dumped in a sink, these machines
will never back up and will continue to chew through resources that might be needed elsewhere.
You can either turn unneeded machines off for now, or keep them all running but underclock them to
only produce the amount your factory needs at any given time. I'm setting up modular frames
here but the only thing that's different from what we've already done is we'll now need to
pull reinforced plates from the smart belt. We'll need to use a smart splitter
here, otherwise we'll end up with random items trying to feed our modular frame
machines causing them to stop working. I set the center output for overflow and the right
output for reinforced plates. This means anything that's not a reinforced plate will pass right
through, while reinforced plates will be sent to the right until the belt is full, at which point
they will also pass through and continue on to the rest of the factory. Now that we've got a couple
of different items feeding into the smart belt, I wanted to show you the other end of it where
I've got the sink. The reason we bring it back to this end of the base with the return line is
that you have to have a place to store your stuff, and if you build that at the business end
of the smart belt it's going to make it very inconvenient to expand your base, but if
you store everything at this end you're free to extend the other end of the bus as far as you
want simply by adding more foundations and belts while not forgetting to remove this lifter and
replace it at the new end. I've returned to my main factory to show you a working example of
how I handle the other end of the smart belt. The four belts you see are the only four in my
factory that are directly connected to storage boxes. The rest are filled by the smart belt.
As you can see, I like to stack two boxes on top of each other, with each one having a different
item in it. The left smart splitter output feeds into the bottom box while the right output is
brought up by a lifter and sent to the top box. This lets you fit a lot of stuff in a small
space without it looking like a rat's nest. Here I bring the belt around to the back side to feed another row of boxes
before heading to the sink. In order to fill boxes with basic items that
wouldn't normally find themselves on a smart belt, I like to make a row of constructors making each
of these and dump them on the smart belt return line for the sole purpose of ending up in a
box. This keeps the smart belt free for more important items and saves you from having to
directly belt all of them to their own boxes. Thanks for checking out my custom main bus design.
I hope you got something out of it that makes building your next factory a little easier. If you
have any comments or suggestions for improvements, I'd love to hear them. I'm always looking for ways
to build better, and I'm sure you guys can come up with ways to improve what I've got here. Thanks
again and have yourselves a Satisfactory day.
