Complexity Corner - The Mall #524
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Another great piece! It does a really great job of explaining the basics of a mall clearly and concisely. I've left a few comments about where you could flesh it out a bit, maybe making it more interesting for more experienced players but feel free to ignore these if you'd rather have it be for beginners only. I've also adding a few notes about adding pictures to help break up the text and make it more visually interesting.
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| So what's the benefit? | ||
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| A typical early-game smelting line consists of 24 stone furnaces if you're planning ahead to upgrade them. In order to feed these furnaces, you need 48 inserters, 24 long-handed inserters, and ~100 belts. If you carry around only raw materials like plates and craft these things as needed, that's 12s for the furnaces, 50s for the belts, and 93s for the inserters; a total of 2m 35s that you're waiting around before you can build that one furnace line. Multiply that by every furnace line, every mining outpost, and every factory cell you build and you'll soon find you're standing around waiting far more than you thought. The mall makes that go away, building things for you while you build your factory. | ||
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Another benefit you could talk about is having all this stuff ready when you unlock robots. I.e. The mall then becomes the production center for robot construction materials by just converting the outputs to passive provider chests.
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the remark is still valid for this section: it could benefit the evocation of bots boxes for mi/late game bot-assisted construction
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| So what's the benefit? | ||
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| A typical early-game smelting line consists of 24 stone furnaces if you're planning ahead to upgrade them. In order to feed these furnaces, you need 48 inserters, 24 long-handed inserters, and ~100 belts. If you carry around only raw materials like plates and craft these things as needed, that's 12s for the furnaces, 50s for the belts, and 93s for the inserters; a total of 2m 35s that you're waiting around before you can build that one furnace line. Multiply that by every furnace line, every mining outpost, and every factory cell you build and you'll soon find you're standing around waiting far more than you thought. The mall makes that go away, building things for you while you build your factory. | ||
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the remark is still valid for this section: it could benefit the evocation of bots boxes for mi/late game bot-assisted construction
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| The alternative approach is building a dedicated area for your mall. Without relying on your science production, a dedicated mall requires its own resource supply logistics, which can be belts branching off a main bus or dedicated resupply trains/bots. Alternatively the area can have its own intermediate item production area, perhaps even including its own furnaces such that it only needs ores. A dedicated mall area is easier to lay out and expand compared to an integrated area, especially when improvising. This approach also makes it easier to control how much of your resources you want to divert to science production versus mall production. | ||
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| [Dedicated mall example from community] |
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KoS was also a big provider of mall BP, and still (widely?) used based on what I can see on different MP games
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(visual example from KoS)
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| ## What is this 'Mall' I keep hearing about? | ||
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| We've all experienced it by now, setting up something to craft manually and then drumming your fingers on the desk while you wait for the mile-long queue to finish. Wouldn't it be so much nicer to walk over to a chest and have some waiting for you? To just go shopping for your next project, instead of crafting by hand? That's what the Mall is for. Without even realizing it, you probably only think of automating things that have an automated end goal, such as ammo for your turrets or science for your labs. The Mall is a place where you automate things that have a manual end goal - You. |
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Would it benefit from a little history part? iirc, the idea have been popularised by KoS vids, and later on by Nilaus (that is naming this concept differently for whatever reasons). May be nice to find some early examples, maybe from the start of factorio MP games in 0.12?
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An early example to show how old the concept is would be cool, yes.
As discussed on discord earlier, I don't know if anyone invented the concept but it seemed to get quite popular after KoS and Nilaus featured it.
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Comment by JD Plays:
First term 'mall' popularised by KOS, but also falls under other names, I use the term Workshop, Nilaus uses a Hub, others use Complexity Corner, as they are complicated to build, but simplify your factorio experience
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| ## **Which recipes should be included?** | ||
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| The ideal mall would include a machine for practically everything, but it would be huge and resource-intensive. It makes more sense to build according to what you really need. For a starter mall, I would recommend including the first-tier items you will need all the time when building the factory: assembling machines, inserters, belts, underground belts, and splitters. The beautiful thing about all of these items is that they are ingredients for their next tiers. As a result, overproducing them is rarely wasteful and you can easily handcraft second-tier items when you have a decent supply of them and intermediate items. For example, with splitters and intermediates in hand, a fast splitter takes only two seconds to craft instead of nearly 30 seconds when using raw materials. Other items that are great to pick up from an early-game mall are gears, electronic circuits, long-handed inserters, pipes, firearm magazines, gun turrets, and power poles. If you want to plan in advance for the mid game, it would be useful for your starter mall to have empty machines reserved for making engines (for vehicles and pumps) and the most common second-tier items: assembling machine 2's, fast inserters, and fast belts.. |
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Does it seem you are from now on only discussing dedicated malls?
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Good idea to add: for integrated malls, the recipe to include simply depends on what is available to you in each area
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| The exception to this rule is highly-used intermediates that would become serious bottlenecks. Namely, you would benefit from having a few assembling machines for electronic circuits and several machines for iron gear wheels (especially when making higher-tier transport belts). Meanwhile, for high-tech equipment and for modules, you need large quantities of expensive intermediate products such as advanced circuits, processing units, and low density structures. Therefore a mall for such items becomes difficult to supply using raw materials alone and it is worth building separate dedicated areas to craft and supply these expensive intermediates. | ||
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| [visual idea?] |
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a general construction mall and on another place, a dedicated module production plant?
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| [Simple handfed mall example, with midgame items?] | ||
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| A more practical input supply method is using belts, which work very well at any stage of the game. Their supplying is continuous and you do not need input chests when using them. For a good starter mall, all you need to supply is a belt each for iron, copper, and steel; and you can make gears and circuits locally. Belt-based malls have no single design and building them is bit of a puzzle. If you carefully select which machines neighbor each other, you can build a decent compact early-game mall with only 3-4 belts. Alternatively, you can easily design your malls using mini-versions of the main bus technique, as presented [here]([Factorio Tutorials: Factory Shopping Mall - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPUcU37hXH4)) by KatherineOfSky and [here]([It is not a MALL; this is a Manufacturing HUB - Factorio 0.18 Tutorial/Guide/How-to - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLnv0O3cAnI)) by Nilaus. |
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maybe you can include some hints from modded games, such as Space Exploration malls, or even AngelBob ones that can be insane to assemble? to highlight even more that on games with an increasing amount of intermediates and machines to use, it requires even more brain fu*****g to get something? ;)
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So you mean belt malls get extra difficult with several byproducts and intermediates being added to the game? Yeah a visual about that would be nice!
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| ## **How are the machine outputs controlled and stored?** | ||
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| The intuitive way to collect the output from your machines is by adding chests. Bigger chests hold more items and passive provider (red) chests will let bots pickup from the mall too. However, you rarely need more than a stack or two of anything at a time. Hence, it would be preferable to prevent overproducing items at your mall and draining your raw materials. |
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you introduce here the bot picking up from chests. it would really deserve it being introduced before too, in the general ideas of the mall
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| The intuitive way to collect the output from your machines is by adding chests. Bigger chests hold more items and passive provider (red) chests will let bots pickup from the mall too. However, you rarely need more than a stack or two of anything at a time. Hence, it would be preferable to prevent overproducing items at your mall and draining your raw materials. | ||
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| The easiest way to control machine outputs is the "red x" inventory limitation option for chests. You can use it to limit mall output chests to 1-2 stacks each. Yet in the early game, sometimes even one stack is too big. In that case why not add a single transport belt pointing towards the output inserter? The belt in this orientation will hold only five (todo* verify) items, plus you'll have an extra handful in the inserter and machine. If you want to restrict outputs to even less, you also have the option of have an inserter place simply onto the ground or having no inserter at all. |
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TODO: check if the 5 items on reversed belt on inserter is correct
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| The more precise way to control your mall output is by using circuit conditions and no combinators are needed for this! The first setup idea here is to wire each output inserter to its own output chest. The wire reads the chest contents. All you have to do is set the inserter enable condition to "*everything* < X" with X being the output count you want. This condition is easy to copy-paste and will work for any output chest. This setup is nice also because you don't have to limit the chest and so you can dump extras of the output item back in it easily, hence making your mall output chests function also as specialized storage chests. | ||
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| Speaking of specialized storage, for a bot-based mall you can also use logistic storage (yellow) chests to collect outputs and set their filters to the machine's output items. This setup will make bots return trashed items to the mall storage and prevent overproduction accumulating across your logistic storage. When you combine the storage chest setup with the circuit wire setup, you get very precise control of item counts in your logistic network. Meanwhile, there is also a zero-wire version of this combination: You can just use the output inserter's logistic network connection tab and set "*output item* < X" there. This alternative cannot use the "everything" signal, though. |
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also valid with storage chests with bots later on, when you convert: so that when you deconstruct your yellow belts, they can be inserted back for red belts production and no crafting new ones waiting for this backlog to be upgraded :)
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I like the yellow belt example to explain the ideas here but i did not understand which sentence you replied to here.
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"Speaking of specialized storage, for a bot-based mall you can also use logistic storage (yellow) chests to collect outputs and set their filters to the machine's output items."
my comment is to complete this idea, to add "recycling" behavior in addition to the indented crafting behavior
| [inventory control method (late game): logistic controlled inserter + filtered storage chest output, with logistic UI shown] | ||
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| Yet another logistic network trick is to output from one machine into a requester chest for another machine in addition to the usual output going into a passive provider chest. Alternatively, you can a buffer chest to achieve both jobs at once. These two tricks are useful for neighboring machines where one's output is an ingredient for the other. | ||
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TODO: also look into upgradeable 'mall' designs by JD Plays
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvxZTLcjmPA
It explains how a upgradeable one works, with recylcing using 'poor mans requester' chests
It is also a very very advanced 'mall' it has included upgrade planners to upgrade the chests to provide more functionality as the player tech increases, and also uses the poor mans requesters with filters set for some recycling before unlocking buffer chests for full recycling
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