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Recycling PLS mall segment
Pro:
- Can export any produced item to anywhere in the cluster, and can also recycle any produced item from anywhere in the cluster.
- Fully proliferated.
- Can make 10 buildings or other items.
- With three re-composing assemblers per building, using product speedup proliferation, the mall can build any building up to 18x the speed listed in their recipe. For example, it can build three ILSs per five seconds, 11.25 pile sorters per second, and 30/s mark 3 belts. If you should need even more speed, you can dedicate two columns to the same item.
- You can easily start small and add to it as your game progresses. Whenever you need to make more buildings, you can add a mall segment (which clicks into place perfectly), adding space for ten buildings. The order in which you add buildings is unimportant.
- Four materials can be imported per building, which is usually enough; it is also possible to share the middle belt between two adjacent assembler columns, which makes it easy to set up those few buildings that need five inputs.
Con:
- It uses PLSs to import materials, which may be inconvenient if you want to produce all the input components off-world. (That said, I recommend producing the components for the mall on the same planet as the mall itself, to reduce off-planet dependencies.)
- If you use it to build a full mall, it comes out a LOT larger than other full featured mall designs.
- It buffers a lot of material, since for every building all inputs are imported separately and buffered in a PLS somewhere. For high throughput, these PLS buffers cannot be too small either, and the ideal buffer size depends on your production capabilities, usage patterns as well as logistics upgrades, so it may need to be hand-tweaked. For example, a complete mall makes 20 items that require iron ingots. If 1000 iron ingots are buffered for each, that means that when idle, the mall stores over 20000 iron ingots. Same for other common products.
- A full mall contains 40 ILSs and 100 PLSs, so it is power hungry, especially during the start-up phase.
- The mall bulges into the equatorial area slightly, meaning that you might not be able to place ILSs everywhere you like in the equatorial area. (Sorry!)
Placement:
The design is 80 cells wide, and can be tiled. It should be placed one tropic line out from the equatorial area towards the pole, with the ILSs towards the pole. It is tileable, and should be expanded by placing copies side by side as you unlock more technology and want to add buildings or other items.
This area of the planet has a circumference of 800 cells, so you can stamp down the blueprint exactly 10 times to complete a ring, allowing you to make 100 buildings in the mall. There are currently not nearly that many buildings in the game, meaning that there is plenty of room also if the game should be updated with more buildings. (Of course there's no requirement that you complete the ring; it's just pretty if you do.)
Setting up:
The ring of ILSs closest to the equator import all the buildings to recycle them; the ring of ILSs towards the pole exports all produced buildings. So, if you want to produce a new building, first add it to the inner ILS. Leave the storage capacity at maximum and set it to "local storage" and "global demand". Set the output filter on one of its outputs to that building.
Now add the same building to the outer ILS; leave this one at "local supply" and "global supply". Set the product limit to the amount you want to receive if you request that building from somewhere across the cluster. For me, this means I set most product limits to 100, except for the items I use most, like belts and sorters. Leave the "min load of vessels" setting of both ILS at 1% (or at most 10%), so that vessels will fly out even if the ILS contains only 100 buildings.
The next step is to find the column that corresponds to the output filter you just set on the ILS. Set the three assemblers in that column to the building you want to produce. Note: although it's not strictly required, I like to keep the buildings in the ILSs settings and the assembler columns in the same order.
Find the PLS for that column and import the materials that the building requires. Setting the perfect product limits in the PLS is tricky: the best number depends on many factors such as: how much of this material does your mall need, how far away is the production, how fast are your drones, and how much do you want to avoid overbuffering. If you don't really know, I recommend setting each product limit to 1000 initially. For low throughput building materials you could use an even smaller buffer, and for high throughput you might sometimes need to make it larger. Keep an eye on your mall after you've built it so you can detect if some materials are not supplied quickly enough, and increase the buffer size if that should be the case.
If your building requires more than four input materials, there is the option to share one input belt between two columns of assemblers, namely the middle belt out of the five in-between buildings. Since only relatively few buildings need this, in the blueprint only one column of assemblers grabs from the middle belt, but you can easily add sorters that supply the material on the middle belt to the assemblers in the other column.
If your building requires fewer than four input materials, then you can choose which of the four connected belts to use. If you like, you can delete the remaining belts, spray coaters and sorters that were attached to it.
Set the PLS output ports to the right materials. Production should now start.
The storage boxes buffer the produced buildings. In the blueprint, these boxes are set with a storage capacity of 5 slots, which should be okay for most use cases. However, again it's better to think it through in a bit more detail for every building you're making. In the early and midgame, fewer slots might suffice and save resources, but this mall is aimed at the end game, where you might often want substantial buffers. As a rule of thumb, you should set the number of slots such that the buffer contains somewhere between the same number of buildings as the ILS product limit, and twice as much. This means that you should usually give buildings with small stack sizes more buffer slots. For example, Ray receivers stack in groups of 20. If your ILS is set up to supply them in groups of 200, then your buffer box needs a capacity of at least 10 slots to buffer an appropriate number of them.
The storage boxes buffer the produced buildings. In the blueprint, these boxes are set with a storage capacity of 5 slots, which should be okay for most use cases. However, again it's better to think it through in a bit more detail for every building you're making. In the early and midgame, fewer slots might suffice and save resources, but this mall is aimed at the end game, where you might often want substantial buffers. As a rule of thumb, you should set the number of slots such that the buffer contains somewhere between the same number of buildings as the ILS product limit, and twice as much. This means that you should usually give buildings with small stack sizes more buffer slots. For example, Ray receivers stack in groups of 20. If your ILS is set up to supply them in groups of 200, then your buffer box needs a capacity of at least 10 slots to buffer an appropriate number of them.
As a finishing touch, you can change the alarm icon on the traffic monitor to the building you just added; it's not necessary but it can be nice if you want to be told exactly which building is failing.
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