I took a trip out west recently, out to the mountains. Nice to just disconnect and enjoy nature. I live in a heavily urbanized setting, and there’s a particular highway that is notorious for 18 wheelers, where it feels like there’s more of them than personal vehicles. The why of it is fairly clear, logistics. Getting things to urban centers relies almost exclusively on trucks. Out west though, trains are the major logistical method – perfect for grains, oil, and other basic materials. There aren’t any trains of bluetooth headsets, but there are trains that are 200 wagons long of canola. As I’ve often been fascinating with logistics, it made me think more about optimizing deliveries.

Moving a few tons of items has interesting factors to evaluate. Is it the same stuff? Can the stuff mix? Does timing matter? Does it all go to one location? Do I have the infrastructure in place? If I need to move a bunch of different things that don’t stack, and need to do it quickly, then large volume logistics is unlikely to work. If it’s bulk raw material, then it’s likely best to ship it all in one big package.

From start to end product, the logistics of distribution change on scale. All of this is macro logistics, getting things to factories. Once they are in the building, we have micro logistics.

1. Basic materials are extracted and put in buffer storage while waiting for transport. Miners, Pumps, Harvesters.
2. Materials are transported in bulk (often a train) to a refining process that normally has a train station built in – think a large scale foundry. Ore to bricks, crude oil to refined.
3. The refined items are also transported in bulk (again, trains) to major distribution hubs. It’s possible some locations actually have train stations built-in, but this is less and less common.
4. From the hubs, the materials are shipped by trucks to production plants and set in storage.
5. Inside those production plants are forklifts/loaders to move items between production floors.
6. Products are put into final storage and distributed by truck for saleé
7. Steps 4-6 can repeat numerous times for complex production chains. Car manufacturing is a great example, where dozens of production steps are required to reach final assembly.

Side note, even a basic toaster has complicated steps in production. This TED talk covers the high level parts.

When we ‘gamify’ logistics, the same concepts are applied to things that follow a progressive pattern of complexity. You’ll mine iron, make bars, make plates, make gears, make engines, make rockets, each step requiring more complex pieces and more raw items. Where an iron bar may take 2 ore, a rocket may need the equivalent of 1000 ore.

Where games truly differ is that they apply macro and micro logistics to the same interface and generally at the same scale. In that sense, I mean that a train generally takes a similar amount of space as a belt.

Micro Challenges

In the real world there are infrastructure challenges that impact the micro. You factory has a limited physical size, so you need to optimize the footprint to get the most amount of items produced safely. If you run out of space, you need to find another factory. If you want to build a train station close to the factory, you need to buy land, get permits, remove buildings, get permits, build buildings and connect to the existing rail system.

In a game, you can just build more. If you need to connect to a rail, select what’s in the way, press delete, build and connect. Rarely, very very rarely, are you ever space limited. You will however be rate limited, where the belts have a max amount they can transport. The answer? MOAR BELTS!

The Bus

I like the idea of a bus. It’s been part of software/hardware architecture for a long time and to key principles boil down to standards.

You have a bus at home, and you use it every day when you plug something in for power. You don’t care (or maybe don’t know) how the power gets to the outlet, you just care that is works with your standard plug. The power company cares. Construction companies care. Insurance cares. Maybe power is solar, or nuclear. Maybe it’s produced and converted on-site, or distributed across the country. Maybe the connection to your house is above ground or below. You likely don’t care at all, as long as the lights turn on.

If you live in North America, odds are you have used Amazon. That’s another great example of a complex bus that gets you that special pencil delivered to your door tomorrow. Sure, it’s slave labour to create it, and vastly underpaid ’employees’ all the way to your door, but does it matter when you don’t have to leave your couch?

Game buses work the same way. You collect material whatever way you want, and deposit it into the bus. You can then extract from the bus using a template (or blueprint!), do what you need, and either expand the bus or store the item for use. The game will dictate is you have a simple bus (say, a dozen or so raw items used for nearly everything) or a master bus (one that continually expands as you create more complex things). In some games, you don’t need material past a certain point and can stop that flow to be replaced by something else. In others, you need base material all the way to the end.

The main advantage of a game bus is that it’s nearly infinitely expandable. There are always going to be optimized distribution methods, and they often rely on the dual sided complexity/simplicity of the mechanics.

• Factorio used to be focused almost exclusively on belts through a main bus, with trains supplying raw materials. Space Age added terrain challenges, and significant improvements to bots and logistics containers, so that later planets really work a whole lot better without belts or trains. And that doesn’t include rocket logistics. There are tons of tools to optimize logistics.
• Satisfactory has very poor tools to build trains, and their throughput is exceptionally low given the complexity. Tier 7 belts are dirt cheap and with few exceptions much more efficient in transport. Rocket Fuel is super easy to make, and drones are ridiculously easy to set up, making them far superior to trains as well.
• Dyson Sphere Program is an exemplary use of both master bus and distributed logistics through vessels/shuttles. Well.. it was until the Dark Fog addition that added 30% more items to the bus and made things more complex without simple solutions. You can play without Dark Fog and ignore that part (highly recommended).
• Foundry is a very weird game. The master bus is the only option until you reach end game, where you effectively stop producing anything on planet and simply ship it in. The market interface becomes the bus, which is like ordering from Amazon. Not sure if that was the idea.
• Outworld Station doesn’t have a bus in the traditional sense, as you can only place factories. The station itself is the bus and each new building you add brings a new path for items to move.
• The Crust is a master bus, plain and simple. To point, it’s also the only way to get rid of slag and at that, extremely inefficiently.

There are other games in the genre. Captain of Industry, Timberborn, Microtopia and so on. With only a couple exceptions, most apply the concepts quite well but start to strain under higher volumes and complexity. Games that offer the option to set general priorities (high/regular/low) rather than logic gates (more than 100 ore) are almost guaranteed to see this issue.

Personally, I think DSP has the best logistics system for the widest crowd. It’s easy to set up, easy to expand upon, and rate limits only apply at the ultra end game. Factorio has the most complex, and acts as a huge hurdle in the space portion if you can’t figure out the logic gates. But those are the ones that work for me. Think it may be time for another pass through..

And all of this, because I was looking at trains in the mountains.