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Plastic bars (sometimes replaced by coal from which plastic is produced).You will need many of these to handle advanced circuit and processing unit production later on. Iron gear wheels are seen on some buses as they take up half as much room than iron plates and see usage in a lot of recipes.You need about as much copper overall as iron. Several belts of iron plates, usually a multiple of four as that is the length one underground belt can pass under.Here are some things people have put on their bus in the past: Some items are a good candidate to be built "on-site" meaning not carried by the bus but rather made where they are needed.Ī good example of this are copper cables as they consume more space on a belt than in the form of copper plates. What items one puts on a bus is a personal preference. The orientation of and how wide the players monitor is also plays a role in this decision.Ī corner is not unheard of but very unusual and is often only necessary when a lake appears that is not planned for. The direction of a bus, being horizontal or vertical depends on personal preference and how one likes to work on the production that splits off it, which can almost always be expanded for greater use later on. This can be done to reserve room for later expansion, blueprint-ghosts are a good usage for that as they don't allow the belt to be filled with non-usable items. This is especially deceiving when the item isn't moving and all belts have filled up as these belts can't carry the amount they lead one to believe they can. When one doesn't have enough production to saturate a belt (or splits it into more) then this can be called a "fake"-bus as it can not be saturated. Whether one uses a bus is often decided before starting a map or when first building an array of furnaces.Ī bus often starts at the smelting of iron, copper and steel, and then over time and distance gains more and more different items. This is also a downside as there are more belts used and therefore more room for belt-buffer and everything is less compact. This is a good measure to combat "spaghetti factories" as it forces someone to plan a structured layout and move everything to use items from the bus. The concept of a Main Bus is to put the most used and useful ingredients in a central spot to use for assembling machines. The main bus in use with several different items and some production