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
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.