A bus is a service that transports lots of things efficiently. For most, we think of public transport in a city. Engineers see this in designs. You can also consider a sea port where ships deliver products as a bus (though more like a logistics hub). Production games “succeed” on the concept of buses, as no logistical chain can scale without a bus.

The basics of a production chain are production –> distribution –> production. If you want iron bars, you need iron ore. If you’re going directly to the supplier, you are limited by their own production rate. If you need 500 ore per minute, and each miner creates 100 ore per minute, you need 5x distribution lanes. Everytime you increase production rates, then you need to create the entire distribution chain again. That doesn’t work at scale. What you’ll find instead are distribution centers that change it to production –> distribution –> storage –> distribution –> production, effectively turning the multiple branches into a sort of hourglass figure.

A production bus focuses on simplifying the distribution –> production portion, so that the same materials can be used in multiple production steps without adding more distribution. DSP has 9 items that can be crafted from stone, iron bars, iron cogs, circuit boards, and magnetic coils. I could run 45 (9×5) connections to build these items, or I could simply run 5 lanes and collect the material for 9 production stations. Clearly the latter is the better option. Add 3 more base items and you can produce another 15 or so items, making a slightly more complex bus of 8 items. This main bus allows you to produce almost every basic item (except motors) and get to the mid-game rather easily. My first playthrough I did not use a bus. It was pure spaghetti, with belts and machines running everywhere.

It bears note that production ratios matter at the initial stages of the game. 2 miners per node cluster, 6 smelters per line, and then the various bits and bobs (cogs, circuit boards, magnetic coils) to get the basic production bus going. Ratios do not matter at all past the mid-game, as you have ample storage options and tools to measure consumption.

Early to mid-game has a drone system that allows you to move items between locations without belts. This allows for quick injections of materials for unique production chains, like titanium alloy. Planetary logistics allow you to quickly ship across the planet in larger volumes, effectively allowing for “harvesting hubs”.

The mid-game moves from planetary construction, to solar system construction in that you need to distribute things between planets. The only way to do so is with planetary logistic centers, which are massive towers that take a ton of power to operate (and cargo ships). You’ll still need the production hub for basic materials, but scale starts to be a problem. When you need 3000 iron bars per minute, well, you’re going to need a production hub dedicated to that sole purpose. One planetary logistics takes in ore, sends it out to 50 smelters, who send the bars back to the tower. You can add more smelters and scale up as need be. You’ll eventually have a single planet crafting everything from dozens of towers, and hundreds of drones shipping things between them. It will look like a beehive, which is simply fascinating to just watch.

The late-game focuses on the actual Dyson Sphere, which requires a massive amount of material/power to produce. This creates multiple production chain roadblocks and scaling issues, and you end up with power issues. A single carrier rocket takes ~700 raw material to create, and you need thousands of them. Isolating bottlenecks, and then expanding production to get back onto the bus is the name of the game.

The end-game focuses on interstellar production, where entire planets are dedicated to single production chains. Entirely reasonable to have a planet with a few hundred smelters just making iron bars, which in turn will require a planet as a distribution hub collecting from the galaxy. The goal is to produce as much white science blocks as possible, which is required to unlock the infinite upgrades. Hitting even 100 white science per minute is a solid achievement, and aiming for 1000 is at another level.

It is entirely possible to get to the end game (4000 white science created) without leaving your starting planet, and running massive spaghetti monster belts. That was certainly my first playthrough. If you’re aiming for a “complete” Dyson Sphere, you can also stay on the starting planet, but you’ll end up terraforming a ton of it to get there. In both cases, a production bus is the only way you’ll get to that point. Putting it on a different planet, same system, has more to do with a blank canvas than anything else. If you want to run end-game, well, you’re in for a galactic level bus, with at least a dozen planets required to get the complete scale in order. I’ve only dipped my toe into that…wildly crazy space to be in.

My recent playthrough is just a tad over 60 hours, and that’s shy under 400 white science per hour. To get to 1000, I’d need to move towards dedicated planetary hubs (the current production planet is simply full), and that would need about double my current harvesting power, and a much different energy relay system. The good news is that blueprints allow MASSIVE time savings. If I did it the original way, that’s close to 10 hours of work to lay it out. With blueprints, which can be planet-sized, it would be closer to 2. Recall that setting up a nuclear power plant in Satisfactory was 20+ hours of effort and it still wasn’t working.

At some point I’ll get to true end game, but there’s Baldur’s Gate 3 calling me, as well as Blasphemous 2.