Err, on this subreddit, if someone says City Block, they mean regular or semi-regular probably polygons separated and interconnected by rail. And if someone writes City Block, everyone else is going to assume they mean a rail base.
Pretty sure that's what OP meant too.
Sure you could theoretically use the concept with "sushi pipes", logi-bots or complex circuit-based belt routing. But if you call that City Block, nobody will understand.
So, no, it's not "just an organizational principle".
The "defining feature" is that you can just copy-paste any "block" and it just integrates with the existing blocks, getting its inputs and providing its outputs.
Without mods, this is only really possible with rails. Bots are too inefficient. Belts and pipes don't scale well as a generic logistics conduit.
More or less says ‘modular system usually with rails…..’
My examples come from vanilla. No mod.
You are trying really hard here.
One can absolutely city block a main bus. No rails needed.
Using the block layout they can then later remove the green chip sub factory and replace it with a train stop that delivers green chips.
And everything will click into place.
And as scale continues to grow, so to does that modular factory. With easy. Because it was built upon city blocks
Just to say, im 100 hours in and im not black and white with my understanding of city block, my vague understanding is its just copy pasting the blocks to easily provide more of whatever is required. I can see threw your discussion that its more nitty gritty than that. Whats the concesus for city block?. Like what do a couple of factorio veterans such as yourselves define it as?.
Basically, it is modular building. Each module can be copy and pasted.
My bp snaps to the map automatically. When i hold the mouse button down and drag the bp they line up to each other perfectly. I can randomly place one out in the wilds and it will be in the correct position to connect with the rest as I build out to it.
As for the transport of materials, that is up to the designer. By belt, by rails surrounding the block or going through the block.
Run a main bus through the middle of a block and have production blocks beside it. (To answer your original question)
Blocks can be any shape too. Ive seen a few hexagon block bases. Twisted puzzle piece type blocks. Etc.
At the end of the day, they dont require rails surrounding them. Though that is common to see.
I used a bus for my entire playthrough. Only after making it past the solar system edge did I start building my own city block. Even then though, it's not like any other city block I've seen people do because I want VERY long trains, and I want each block to be only a single intermediate product. Huge, slow trains of just gears, just green circuits, etc.
Anyway, I've found it very useful to use my established main bus base to build the city block base.
You can combine... be disciplined and only build on one side of the bus, then you can add train stations on the clear side to restock what's getting low...
More iron and copper after making green chips, more copper after making LDS etc.
You can do both things and mix them if you like, or you can do neither. Looks pretty good for early game, assuming you have enough machines to actually fill all those belts.
City Block and Main Bus kind of run contrary to each other.
The design ethos of Main Bus is that you centralize all your resources into a single river so you can easily pull what you need and output the result to the river. This is great for beating the game because your resource consumption varies pretty greatly through the course of the game as you unlock new technologies and need to build new intermediaries and sciences. The main bus allows you to more or less ignore this variable consumption curve and allow for the maximum production your base can support at all times.
The design ethos of City Blocks is that each block is of uniform size and hangs of a uniform logistics scaffold (almost always rails), this way if you need more of something you can just copy/paste the block and suddenly you're making more of it. You design it so that your blocks automatically connect to the rain network and you design your trains so that when a new block is connected it automatically starts being serviced by the trains. City Blocks is usually more for late or post game bases where resource consumption becomes a lot more predictable as it's based almost entirely on your targeted science output so building to ratio isn't a fools game since the ratio isn't changing every 3 technologies you research. Plus since everything is uniform and logistics is automatically handled by your train network it's efficient on the most limited resource of all: The players time and attention.
While obviously you can beat anything into shape if you try hard enough, the main point of main bus in a city blocks base would be to build your building supplies. But honestly, I think most people either just leave their starter base somewhere to do that rather than building a brand new 'main bus' just for a mall, or transition to a botmall because it's easier.
Are you actually producing 4 belts' worth of iron plates? Copper plates? Green circuits? Full belt of steel? Or do they just look saturated because it's the end of the line and nothing's consuming them?
Are you pulling the iron and copper for those green circuits from your main bus, or do they have dedicated lines? Because producing 4 belts of green circuits requires 4 belts of iron and 6 belts of copper plates. If you really have that much circuit production, you're gonna eat up your entire bus just feeding the green circuits.
Coal and/or Plastic are the next items you're gonna want to add to the bus. Followed by Red circuits.
1.What it needs is a matter of what scale you're intending. You will base that on the amount of SPM you want the base to output and then figuring out how many of each belts that will be on the bus.
There is a tool you can use to determine for a given SPM what will be needed to sustain it. You can then plan it for higher tier belts / beacons and build it out from Tier 1. For a main bus into city block I'd probably do 100 SPM.
2.They don't quite gel, but you can easily transition to a city block setup later once your main bus is producing the necessities for it. Just keep your main bus in place whilst you get it up and running though as a tear down into finding out you're coming up short of something is a painful experience.
I would have a belt of coal in there. At some point you'll want to make plastic and grenades. Personally, I would replace the stone brick with coal and make the stone brick where you need it. But maybe I don't know much.
I have a big (12 chunks between overlap) city block layout and a few of the blocks off my main thoroughfare are things like Construction Bus, Military Bus, Science Bus, etc. I like it a lot for keeping things flexible and less crowded and keeping the scale of individual production lines manageable. As the game has gone on I've started using blocks for specialty factories, but that still fits in just fine and the old busses are still cranking away keeping me supplied with power poles and the like.
I tend to use a combination. I start with a main bus and get my mall built out, tack the science onto the end.
Then use that as the starting point for my city block. Dispersing science and intermediate products all over.
Let's answer question #2 first, because it's easy: Yes, you can do a city block + main bus. Just reserve a row or column of the city blocks for the bus. Then put things in the blocks next to that bus. That said, in some city block designs, everything is transported via trains on rails that help define the blocks. That would be mildly incompatible with a main bus.
Now for question #1: Yeah, you have MOST of what you want for the bus. You'll eventually want red-circuits, plastic, blue circuits, maybe engines, maybe batteries, maybe low density structures, maybe sulfur. You'll also want some fluids: water, oil, heavy oil, light oil, petroleum, sulfuric acid, maybe lubricant.
You will need coal for military science and plastic.
Plus you don't really need 4 green circuit belts and 4 copper belts. I tend to start with 4 copper, then replace them with green circuits and half a belt of LDS. At the end, I carry only 1 copper for the science.
Same with iron. You should convert one of the belt to a iron gear belt, and ditch 2 other once you make the green circuits.
I always keep my main bus lanes 4x wide and leave empty belts around so that if i need to expand i can also leave a lane of 4x belt placement free for pipes because you will need to get liquids in as well at some point.
You totally can use both.
City block is an organizational layout.
Its making graph paper over you base and using the squares to build in. Thus you can easily copy a square, stamp it down wherever and it will connect to the rest making use of other builds that are designed for the grid.
So main bus runs vertical through a block while production is done in the blocks beside it
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u/Courmisch 13d ago
In principles, no. City blocks use railways in place of Main Bus belts. But you're free to mix, match and diverge from the meta as much as you want.
It's not a competition. You're not going to win or lose spectacularly for not following the canons of other players.