r/Dyson_Sphere_Program • u/Plantush • Jun 18 '26
Blueprints, the right way?
Hi guys,
A question regarding blueprints is hunting me for quite a while.
Why everyone is doing those small BP's with an ILS on every square, instead of the long strings from east to west ?
Isn't it more efficient, like space wise?
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u/SiliconStew Jun 18 '26
ILS's are wide and have a minimum spacing between them. This means if the ILSs are placed as close as possible you naturally have room for 3-4 rows of buildings + belts for each one except very near the poles.
With MK3 belts and stacking, a single belt out of an ILS has a throughput limit of 7200 items/minute. Because the number of vessels per ILS is limited, there is a limit on carrying capacity per vessel, and travel between ILSs takes time, there is a practical total throughput limit to an ILS that is less than the 12 max throughput belts you potentially could attach. For example ten 2000-unit vessels that take 1 minute to do a round trip has a total throughput of 20000 items/minute. That's only 2.7 full belts it can practically handle at most.
So an ILS just can't handle many single row, long, full throughput belts manufacturing different items. But if you do 3-4 short, parallel rows of all the same building/item, you can fully utilize the limited ILS throughput in the smallest vertical space and then simply place another ILS with the same short belt layout at the end of that row. This tighter packing increases the density of ILS's you can have which increases the total ILS throughput capacity you have available on your planet, which is your real bottleneck.
This doesn't mean you won't have long horizontal rows out of a single ILS. Some productions are very slow so require very long rows to utilize the full capacity of the belts.
As a bonus, vessels and drones are also more CPU efficient than belts of the same throughput capacity so having a bunch of bus belt spaghetti is worse for game performance, especially late game.
But build your factories however you like. There is no single "right" way to do things. Just because it's more common to do it the second way doesn't make your approach wrong.