Dyson Sphere Program

Downhammer · Feb 22, 2021

Yea, I'm fine with the matrix cubes. I tend to play more zoomed out and all the grey boxes on belts are indistinguishable. I look at the icons on the factories to see what's what.

I've started using the graphs window more to look at production bottlenecks and I was wondering if there's any way to see max potential production in game. If I have enough smelters for 100/s titanium ingots but am only actually using 50/s it shows 50/s production. Any way, outside of putting an empty storage on the line, to see how much I can actually make?

Tuco · Feb 22, 2021

The matrix cubes are simple looking but helped because they emit light. During night they can be almost blinding.

Tuco · Feb 22, 2021

Void said:
Well, this popped up on my Steam front page Friday, and after about 30 seconds I bought it. Spent the entire weekend playing or at least thinking about it. Came here to see if any of you guys had played it, and of course I'm late to the party.

This is exactly the type of game I have been looking for. I bought Northgard earlier on Friday because it was on super sale, but that didn't scratch my itch at all. I think part of my problem is that currently I'm tired of "city builders" that require me to worry more about invaders and rival empires than actual city building. Northgard, I kept getting my farmers and shit killed by wolves and such because you can only have so many warriors at first, but if you want more warriors you need more people, which needs more farmers/builders/whatever, which means more get killed by wolves, ad nauseum. Yes, I only played for like 30 minutes, but I could tell it wasn't what I was looking for.

When I loaded this up and saw that there were zero "enemies" to worry about, I knew I had found it, at least for awhile. I'm so fucking thankful for a game that just lets me try to figure out production lines and resource management and research and all the stuff I want to focus on. Not, how do I do all of that, but kind of half-assed, because I also have to build troops and defenses or manage natural disasters. I hope that if they ever do add some kind of "enemy" that you can turn it off without any change to the actual game. I feel it would be against the intent of the game to even put that stuff in, but I know some people get bored and/or don't want to just relax and let something run without a lot of input, so they might feel the need to do it some day. I hope not.

Anyway, I've restarted like 4 times already, but I think this time I'll stick with it since it is fairly evident from watching a few videos that everything you build early on will eventually get scrapped for much more efficient stuff later.

It looks like there are no Steam Cloud saves for this? I can't verify because apparently the power went off at home and I can't remote into my computer right now, but I was hoping to get a little building in here and there at work~ No saves show up for me here though, so I'm guessing no cloud saves? Don't see an option to turn them on or off, just so used to almost everything having it that I'm a little bummed. I know I can Dropbox it and shit, but was always so convenient to just have Steam do it.

I look forward to wasting the next several weeks of my life on this!

EDIT: Answered my own question. Dyson Sphere Program Save Game location on PC (Steam) No cloud saves yet, they are having problems implementing it.

I can totally imagine them having an adversary in the game, but I can't imagine them not having a sand box mode. I also think they'll add a mode where high resource nodes (ex: iron/copper on lava planets) are infinite to make the game even more low-key relaxing.

Downhammer · Feb 22, 2021

Tuco said:
I can totally imagine them having an adversary in the game, but I can't imagine them not having a sand box mode. I also think they'll add a mode where high resource nodes (ex: iron/copper on lava planets) are infinite to make the game even more low-key relaxing.

On the seed select screen if you move the resource multiplier all the way it goes to "infinite." Nodes still show amount but it's some multiple of billions so essentially infinite. It's all resources though and not just common ones.

Blazin · Feb 23, 2021

Tuco said:
I can totally imagine them having an adversary in the game, but I can't imagine them not having a sand box mode. I also think they'll add a mode where high resource nodes (ex: iron/copper on lava planets) are infinite to make the game even more low-key relaxing.

I went the other way and restarted and put resources as low as it would go so you have to actually go out and get them

Tuco · Feb 23, 2021

Downhammer said:
On the seed select screen if you move the resource multiplier all the way it goes to "infinite." Nodes still show amount but it's some multiple of billions so essentially infinite. It's all resources though and not just common ones.

That's true, but it's a little bit different of a gameplay mechanic than adding infinite veins to specialized planets. If you've got infinite veins on your home planet you can just turtle there and miss a bunch of gameplay relating to expansion.

Tuco · Feb 23, 2021

Blazin said:
I went the other way and restarted and put resources as low as it would go so you have to actually go out and get them

Yeah, and this approach works great if you really enjoy the gameplay of making the same interstellar gateway + mining + smelting layouts repeatedly. This gets a lot more tolerable with the mod I linked above (I haven't tried it yet).

Blazin · Feb 23, 2021

Tuco said:
Yeah, and this approach works great if you really enjoy the gameplay of making the same interstellar gateway + mining + smelting layouts repeatedly. This gets a lot more tolerable with the mod I linked above (I haven't tried it yet).

To be honest I don't get that concern of people wanting these mods, it is so easy to do.

Maybe people are using spaghetti factories instead of Logistics stations. Using logistic stations it is very scalable. I build near the equator pull a conveyor down and line with smelters etc. Takes seconds. To me it's far more time consuming to find and fix bottlenecks than the process of laying things out.

Tuco · Feb 23, 2021

Blazin said:
To be honest I don't get that concern of people wanting these mods, it is so easy to do.

Maybe people are using spaghetti factories instead of Logistics stations. Using logistic stations it is very scalable. I build near the equator pull a conveyor down and line with smelters etc. Takes seconds. To me it's far more time consuming to find and fix bottlenecks than the process of laying things out.

View attachment 337301

I don't think I'd actually want to play a more competitive DSP game where you have a few adversaries like in Anno 1800 (or any number of other builder games), but one fun aspect of that would be coming up with optimized factory layouts that are low-cost, balanced, efficient and fast to lay down. The energy/material/space cost of logistics stations + ships is pretty irrelevant in the current game but would play a role if you were more resource limited and working against the clock.

Right now I view this game as more of an "assembly line painter" and am way more excited about building a beautiful solar sail / dyson component layout than anything else.

Downhammer · Feb 23, 2021

I feel like this game hits a pretty sweet spot where initial production of a component is pretty easily attainable while long term pushing you to expand and optimize mass production. Getting that first green matrix or vertical launcher feels like an accomplishment and then you realize how many of them you'll actually need which pushes you forward.

For the most part I continue to build 3-4 steps of components from ingots to final product all in one location which seems to help diagnose bottlenecks but I'm tempted to start at a new star where every part is it's own logistics node. All my circuit boards for everything being made in one location for example. I'm curious to see how that turns out. It will likely be excessive logistics rather than just setting up some simple chains around out of the way ore patches but we'll see.

Tuco · Feb 23, 2021

Downhammer said:
I feel like this game hits a pretty sweet spot where initial production of a component is pretty easily attainable while long term pushing you to expand and optimize mass production. Getting that first green matrix or vertical launcher feels like an accomplishment and then you realize how many of them you'll actually need which pushes you forward.

For the most part I continue to build 3-4 steps of components from ingots to final product all in one location which seems to help diagnose bottlenecks but I'm tempted to start at a new star where every part is it's own logistics node. All my circuit boards for everything being made in one location for example. I'm curious to see how that turns out. It will likely be excessive logistics rather than just setting up some simple chains around out of the way ore patches but we'll see.

I feel like that approach is kind of a mental crutch. It's easy because you don't have to consider the spaghetti layout, but it just increases your material/energy cost for all your materials.

For whatever reason that tradeoff kind of seems more important when you scale up to infinite research and start to consider the cost of every universe matrix as being the sum of finite iron/stone/copper/titanium/silicon elements.

Beyond that I personally find it ugly compared to a well-laid out spaghetti road. but that's just me.

Tuco · Feb 23, 2021

So if you're clever about building, deleting and then remaking bridges you can make perfectly flat bridges. I'm afraid to build this exploit into my factories, but it's too funny to resist.

Tuco · Feb 23, 2021

my dyson component / solar sail gun line, pre building.

Blazin beautiful spaghetti

Void · Feb 24, 2021

Tuco said:
So if you're clever about building, deleting and then remaking bridges you can make perfectly flat bridges. I'm afraid to build this exploit into my factories, but it's too funny to resist.

View attachment 337397

There is a series of videos that I watched, called something like "10 NOT blindingly obvious tricks in Dyson Sphere Program" (3 videos, so 30 tips) where I saw that one. I'm sure other videos probably have it too, but those are the ones I watched.

While that trick is probably unintentional and not at all obvious, I'm amazed at the number of "tricks" that are spelled out explicitly in the game. Like, most of the people I've seen talk about how you can click the little filter icon on a machine that has multiple outputs and choose which product a sorter pulls out...but while placing the sorter, they completely miss the part where you could hit TAB and choose it right then. The tutorial specifically shows you that. These guys think they are telling this great secret...but they are still missing the even easier tip. Maybe that's a testament to how good this game is already, because practically everything is spelled out somewhere (except stuff that is probably a glitch like those intersecting conveyors) if you just pay attention.

The one thing I'd like, and maybe it is somewhere simple that I'm missing too, is a list of what a resource or product is used in. Like, I forget the name, but the green high quality silica crystals, the things you can make with 10 stone if you have no silica nodes. I'm still fairly early in the game (never gone past the red cubes), so I have no idea if those crystals are ONLY used to make the high quality glass panels, or if they eventually have another use. Currently I'm turning every crystal into panels, but what if later I need those crystals in their raw form? (Ignore the fact that there is likely another stone node I could use for those.) I'd like to know that (without going to a wiki or cheat sheet, obviously) so I can plan accordingly to save some of them up before I need them or something. Yeah, I get that you wouldn't know what future research needs, but this game already isn't really realistic in plenty of ways. And eventually I'll have played enough to just know, but still, seems like it would be a useful feature.

Tuco · Feb 24, 2021

Void said:
The one thing I'd like, and maybe it is somewhere simple that I'm missing too, is a list of what a resource or product is used in. Like, I forget the name, but the green high quality silica crystals, the things you can make with 10 stone if you have no silica nodes. I'm still fairly early in the game (never gone past the red cubes), so I have no idea if those crystals are ONLY used to make the high quality glass panels, or if they eventually have another use. Currently I'm turning every crystal into panels, but what if later I need those crystals in their raw form? (Ignore the fact that there is likely another stone node I could use for those.) I'd like to know that (without going to a wiki or cheat sheet, obviously) so I can plan accordingly to save some of them up before I need them or something. Yeah, I get that you wouldn't know what future research needs, but this game already isn't really realistic in plenty of ways. And eventually I'll have played enough to just know, but still, seems like it would be a useful feature.

I think that info is mostly in your tech tree but as you're scaling the tech tree the first time you don't have the experience necessary to really process the information.

I'd recommend just optimizing for the current problem you have and expect that as you tech up you'll have to either build totally new structures and/or redo current ones. Trying to optimize for future problems is impossible when you're learning the game.

There's also these player made recipe sheets

Gravel · Feb 24, 2021

So I've been trying to avoid reading too much about this one in the event I end up playing it. I've basically run my course in Valheim, so I'm looking for something else to play. Did about 100 hours in Factorio and loved it.

But my question is more about whether this game is in a "finished" state at this point. I don't want a game that's like 30% done and I'll have to drop and pick back up in a year for the finished content.

Tuco · Feb 24, 2021

Gravel said:
So I've been trying to avoid reading too much about this one in the event I end up playing it. I've basically run my course in Valheim, so I'm looking for something else to play. Did about 100 hours in Factorio and loved it.

But my question is more about whether this game is in a "finished" state at this point. I don't want a game that's like 30% done and I'll have to drop and pick back up in a year for the finished content.

The game is unbelievably stable and is feature complete. It features an open sandbox building game with fun graphics and enjoyable mechanics.

What the game doesn't really have is a lot of replayability. Once you play it and hit the endgame you've colonized enough worlds that there's very little reason to restart the game from scratch. This would be improved if they ever added AI opponents that gave the early-mid game a bit more variety.

It's like any other builder where half the fun is learning basic usage of the mechanics and building your first mega-city and the other half is optimizing your build orders and learning how to quickly adapt to new problems in efficient ways. That second half is missing because there's no competitive mode.

Void · Feb 24, 2021

Tuco said:
I think that info is mostly in your tech tree but as you're scaling the tech tree the first time you don't have the experience necessary to really process the information.

I'd recommend just optimizing for the current problem you have and expect that as you tech up you'll have to either build totally new structures and/or redo current ones. Trying to optimize for future problems is impossible when you're learning the game.

There's also these player made recipe sheets

Yeah, I figured there were charts and such just like you posted, I was just saying that there is so much else in the game, I'm sort of surprised there isn't anything even remotely like these in the game itself. Not ratios, obviously, but at least what items are used in which recipes.

Also, after watching a few of those tip videos, I tried getting all of my ratios correct. Very quickly I said fuck it, because as long as shit is flowing as fast as I can possibly make it, I don't care if everything is the proper ratio. Like right now, I have to go halfway around the planet to get enough oil creeps to split into hydrogen to even come close to getting enough hydrogen to keep up with the carbon tube thingies you use for making red cubes. I currently don't have the infrastructure for that, so my red cube production is abysmally slow. So who cares if my other shit is precisely ratio'd, when everything grinds to a halt due to my lack of hydrogen? I would imagine ratios might matter a little more later, but at that point I'll likely just have as many gatherers and processors going as the planet allows.

velk · Feb 24, 2021

Tuco said:
The game is unbelievably stable and is feature complete. It features an open sandbox building game with fun graphics and enjoyable mechanics.

What the game doesn't really have is a lot of replayability. Once you play it and hit the endgame you've colonized enough worlds that there's very little reason to restart the game from scratch. This would be improved if they ever added AI opponents that gave the early-mid game a bit more variety.

I agree with this completely, but it's probably worth noting that the first play through is a lot of value. I'm 50ish hours in and nowhere near done.

You could certainly do it a lot faster by looking up optimised builds and build orders and cheatsheets, but where is the fun in that ?

As it stands though, even if they never add anything else to the game, it's still, by far, the best $20 I've spent on anything this year so far.

Tuco · Feb 25, 2021

Void said:
Yeah, I figured there were charts and such just like you posted, I was just saying that there is so much else in the game, I'm sort of surprised there isn't anything even remotely like these in the game itself. Not ratios, obviously, but at least what items are used in which recipes.

Also, after watching a few of those tip videos, I tried getting all of my ratios correct. Very quickly I said fuck it, because as long as shit is flowing as fast as I can possibly make it, I don't care if everything is the proper ratio. Like right now, I have to go halfway around the planet to get enough oil creeps to split into hydrogen to even come close to getting enough hydrogen to keep up with the carbon tube thingies you use for making red cubes. I currently don't have the infrastructure for that, so my red cube production is abysmally slow. So who cares if my other shit is precisely ratio'd, when everything grinds to a halt due to my lack of hydrogen? I would imagine ratios might matter a little more later, but at that point I'll likely just have as many gatherers and processors going as the planet allows.

I'll typically lay things out with a bunch of space in my spaghetti and only put a few facilities down, then grow as needed. It's a lot easier to learn which replicators / chemical factories suck wind and have long build times by playing than by trying to design it all up front.

By the way, in case you don't know you can unlock xray cracking to increase hydrogen production from oil.

Dyson Sphere Program Hydrogen & Oil build

This Dyson Sphere Program page on Hydrogen and Oil will walk you through how to set up a good refining and cracking station to help produce red Matrix cubes.

www.rockpapershotgun.com

Dyson Sphere Program

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