Dyson Sphere Program Catch-all

Figured this amazing game deserved its own thread. Early access on Steam but incredibly polished already (especially for a TEAM OF FIVE). If you loved Factorio or Satisfactory, you will likely really enjoy this. Currently only $19.99 on Steam.

Factorio+Satisfactory+No Man's Sky = awwww yeah.

Just picked this up today on Steam. Looking forward to getting some time in with it this weekend.

Yeah I'm pretty smitten at this point.

As stated elsewhere, Dyson deftly walks this line between Factorio and Satisfactory that feels Goldilocks "just right" between dry complexity and sexy presentation in a best of both worlds kind of way.

I've got mad respect for both Factorio & Satisfactory (esp. the former), but neither managed to hook me as quickly & confidently as Dyson has thus far. And it's hard to believe that Dyson has only just hit the ground in Early Access, given how polished and feature-rich it feels so early on.

Been digging around for coverage and happened upon a couple sweet quick-start guides noted above. Consider them spoilers for early game if you want to go in absolutely cold, but I found them pretty insightful for baseline logistics concepts and overlooked features.

Big thumbs up so far.

I'm really enjoying it so far. Looking forward to put some quality time in with it this weekend.

GOTY quality and it's still January. I've put in a bit over 40 hours at this point. It's so gently forgiving, If you've got the pocket space, you can just tear it all down and start over from scratch and make it better. I'm strongly considering doing this instead of restarting again.

Since I love games that allow you to name your game saves, my first planet, Hot Mess, got sacked pretty early because I ended up spending my experience points weirdly. I restarted with Warm Disarray and have fallen into a pretty good grove. I feel my placement is scattershot, and I need to read up a bit more on how to get out and start building in space and commuting things back to my lil planet.

The developer updates are pretty endearing and sweet. These are people who really love their game. It's such a steal in early access at $20, totally worth trying out. The pacing is perfect for me - because it really allows you to play at your own pace. I would have reached an irreversible failstate or been conquered by AI by now in most other games. I'm NOT good at resource management, but this game sure makes me want to try my best.

Loving this game! Im a big Satisfactory and Factorio fan (and science), so it was made for me, but still worth pointing out how very much I love it!

One thing that disappointed me early was Dyson Swarm life span and general swarm control. You can't configure how many you want in each orbit, so your railguns will happily shoot your Solar Sails off forever to die in a swarm that's already way too big for your needs anyway (at least in mid-game)

So I set up a series of splitters to delay them. 4 splitters in a row, each passing to each other with the branches turning off to a storage box. So 1 in 3 gets through the first splitter, 1 in 3 of those 'surviving' sails gets through the next one and so on. In a full day cycle I only launched about 30 sails. They'll last 40 minutes each thanks to some upgrades, so now my swarm will much more slowly grow.

If I want to speed it up I can reconfigure the branches a bit. Slow it down, add more splitters (its exponential though)

What I'll probably do is establish a swarm of a couple 10s of Megawatts and then slow the sails back down into a sort of 'maintenance mode'.

Edit: I like the 'not blindingly obvious tips' video above but I disagree with going for an equatorial solar belt. Without blueprints (not a thing in this game atm) that'll be so f'ing tedious to set up! His massive base is only needing 50MW but he placed thousands of solar panels to generate 500MW. Instead I set up solar panels on each of the planet's poles. You can get a pleasing set of concentric circles out of it too. With maybe 100-200 total panels I'm generating about 60MW and my mid-game not-amazing base is quite power happy. (even without the above-mentioned swarm)

If you haven't tried it out yet, in the game settings you can turn on "god mode" which is absolutely NOT a cheat. All it does is when you are in build mode it decouples the camera from the mech so that you can place things much easier (and will do a snap to grid thing when placing multiples). Build distance from your mech is still in effect, so you arent cheating anything, just takes away some of the frustration and tedium of placement. Shift right click in this mode will move your mech.

Makes placing tons of solar panels a breeze!

Found a planet a couple light-years from my main base with organic crystal. Total game changer for yellow research cubes! Basically frees up 50% of my chemical processing chain to do other things.

I've been enjoying this one. I'm still just at red and blue science, and only now unlocked Glide mode, which is pretty neat. After doing so much couple-minute hiking back and forth from the North to the South poles on my starter rock, it's pretty great to get there in ten seconds.

Now, of course, I'm looking at my original starter base and being unhappy with it. I had no idea what I was doing, and the way the conveyor belts work is particularly annoying. That's one thing I like a lot about Factorio and Mindustry, that their conveyor systems are easy to handle. (and incredibly well-coded, in Factorio.) The 3D conveyors in both Satisfactory and Dyson sphere tend to be very annoying. I'm sure 3D conveyors are a very hard problem to solve well, but trying to route things can be very difficult, especially in tight spaces. In 2D, the rules are pretty obvious and the reason why things aren't working, when they don't, is usually instantly apparent.

I also really don't understand why Dyson Sphere insists on the separation between things that interact with conveyors, and things that don't. There doesn't seem to be any real reason for the loaders. I'd rather just have a few conveyor splitters like Mindustry; routers that send goods in all directions, overflow gates that send first ahead, and secondarily to the sides, and underflow gates, which do the opposite. Instead, there's a splitter building, which is big enough that it won't slot in over existing conveyors, so you can't slot it in. You have to plan for it ahead of time. It's just.... kind of annoying. The whole conveyor system in Dyson Sphere feels like it's unnecessarily complex, and it doesn't seem to be giving much, if anything, in exchange for the complexity. It increases my build times a ton, without giving anything back.

Liking it pretty well otherwise, though. I hope they make enough money in Early Access to do a better translation of the tutorials. The narrator is pretty good, but the translation is poor enough that it often comes out as near-gibberish.

Katherine of Sky has started a Lets Play for this.

Here's the first:

Something I noticed yesterday while watching a KOS video was that when you're moving a conveyor belt you can hold shift to have it ignore things it would normally try to snap to. I tried it out this morning and it felt pretty good for ramped conveyor belts.

I haven't really played Factorio or those other similar games, but I have a science building generating blue science cubes and I have to pick them out 10 at a time to have them contribute to research - should I be feeding them somewhere else? Or does this manual mode run out at some point? I am researching other things that don't seem to be leading me anywhere in particular yet.

I'm being hit by the game not having key rebinding yet. My little keyboard I use for the big TV doesn't have a middle button and I can't rotate the camera.

Have you built a research building? It is the same building that makes science cubes, you just set it to research instead of make science cubes. Then belt the cubes to it and it will automatically use them to do research.

Sucks about the key binding, not being able to rotate the camera will make it pretty hard to do things.

Moggy wrote:

Katherine of Sky has started a Lets Play for this.

Man I love KoS. Her energy/tone is the best.

I recently happened upon a lesser-know, but similar quality streamer, Ic0n.

He's out of Germany and has a similar calm, Zen kind of vibe. He reminds me of Bob Ross. Does great tutorials as well.

polypusher wrote:

Something I noticed yesterday while watching a KOS video was that when you're moving a conveyor belt you can hold shift to have it ignore things it would normally try to snap to. I tried it out this morning and it felt pretty good for ramped conveyor belts.

They explain this with the resource gatherer in the tutorial, but this actually works for anything.

I just got done automating purple so doing the research path to green so i can goto another galaxy.

tboon wrote:

Have you built a research building? It is the same building that makes science cubes, you just set it to research instead of make science cubes. Then belt the cubes to it and it will automatically use them to do research.

Sucks about the key binding, not being able to rotate the camera will make it pretty hard to do things.

Ah, I tried switching it to the other mode, but then it stopped making any blue cubes. Thanks!

DudleySmith wrote:
tboon wrote:

Have you built a research building? It is the same building that makes science cubes, you just set it to research instead of make science cubes. Then belt the cubes to it and it will automatically use them to do research.

Sucks about the key binding, not being able to rotate the camera will make it pretty hard to do things.

Ah, I tried switching it to the other mode, but then it stopped making any blue cubes. Thanks!

You need 2 sets of research buildings... You need the first set to generate the cubes you want and then you feed them into the second set to do the actual research.

You can stack research buildings 3-high as well (along with storage containers) for increased output & space saving.

ranalin wrote:
DudleySmith wrote:
tboon wrote:

Have you built a research building? It is the same building that makes science cubes, you just set it to research instead of make science cubes. Then belt the cubes to it and it will automatically use them to do research.

Sucks about the key binding, not being able to rotate the camera will make it pretty hard to do things.

Ah, I tried switching it to the other mode, but then it stopped making any blue cubes. Thanks!

You need 2 sets of research buildings... You need the first set to generate the cubes you want and then you feed them into the second set to do the actual research.

Yeah it is not exactly clear, I remember being a little confused the first time I set that up.

I was musing that Flat Earthers must hate this game.

tboon wrote:
ranalin wrote:
DudleySmith wrote:
tboon wrote:

Have you built a research building? It is the same building that makes science cubes, you just set it to research instead of make science cubes. Then belt the cubes to it and it will automatically use them to do research.

Sucks about the key binding, not being able to rotate the camera will make it pretty hard to do things.

Ah, I tried switching it to the other mode, but then it stopped making any blue cubes. Thanks!

You need 2 sets of research buildings... You need the first set to generate the cubes you want and then you feed them into the second set to do the actual research.

Yeah it is not exactly clear, I remember being a little confused the first time I set that up.

Keep in mind that you'll need to save space around the research set for 3 sets of conveyors on either side.
Blue/Red/Yellow one side and Purple/Green/(can't remember the other color) on the other.

Might as well plan for that early on so you don't have to rearrange things later.

The last cube is White, its super late game.
Each cube takes a little longer per cube to create than the last, so trying to keep as many flowing as possible is going to require multiple towers of labs creating the cubes. Mostly I dont bother and let it come slowly as long as its not too slow. I have 2 red and yellow towers but only one Purple.

I'd expect some of this balance stuff to be affected most by changes in Early Access, so they might put out a change that requires reworking your factories a bit, especially for crafting times and ingredient quantities. The tech tree moves really fast (like, overwhelmingly fast) if you have reasonbly set up labs.

I hope they add more super-structure stuff. I'd dig building an artificial moon with the orbital properties I want, for example as a power hub and dyson constructing hub for a system.
Un-abstracting the 'brain' we're powering could be interesting too. I think that's the central conceit for why we're doing what we're doing? Having to beam the information to it with a massive communication center would be a thing to do.

We could craft a ring-world for humans to inhabit. We could move stars into an art exhibit with Stellar Engines.

After playing with the game some more, I now understand why conveyor belts work the way they do; it's because of the round worlds. You effectively can't lay out straight north-south grids, as lines always converge toward the poles, so things are frequently somewhat misaligned, and the loader mechanism gives you enough reach to compensate for most of the slop.

Given the nature of how the game works, it's an elegant solution, and maybe better than Satisfactory's, which is cheerful about doing absolutely bizarre things with conveyors. Of course, Satisfactory's world is flat (edit: actually, rectilinear is better, it's not flat), so they don't have to deal with polar coordinates messing everything up. Thus, they didn't have a strong reason to invent a second, ancillary system to compensate.

Space flight can be a bit tricky. I think I've figured out the best way to maneuver so you get where you're going without wasting a lot of energy on moving. Just use W (forward) to orient yourself. Ignore left/right/up/down, just point your cursor at where you want to go and hold W till you're oriented the right way. If you're just getting off a planet you'll need a bit of Shift to build speed too.

Slowing down and speeding up is still a bit unintuitive to me. I tend to press Alt instead of D when I want to slow down, which just points me down instead. I will probably swap them when they add key mapping, unless I get too used to it.

This morning they added some nice controls for logistics drones and vessels, to limit use of Warpers and Energy, for instance by requiring at least 50% load for a drone to get sent and fine tuning the minimum distance at which a vessel will use Warp. The only setting I don't 'get' is 'Transportation range of Drones' it defaults to 180 degrees. Degrees?

Edit: Ooh another tip I just realized: Your foundations are visible from Space, so you can do things like point toward the north pole, circle your 'mall' or a major recharging point.

Do we have any idea how Dyson Sphere 'cells' work? I've got enough of a frame that I can define 'cells' to fill frame gaps. I've set up a few but my launches stopped with 5200/5200 rockets launched and none of the frames seem to be filled in. In Dyson Sphere view mode I can see 0/0/478 for a given cell. No idea what that means or how to start building that part.

Obtuse check. I am trying to build carbon nanotubes, which can only be created in a chemical facility. I only have chemical factories and see no path to create a facility. What am I missing?

Language problem. Its the same building

polypusher wrote:

Language problem. Its the same building

Thanks, I must not of researched far enough as it did not show up as an option in the factory until recently (although I could see the recipe).

I really want markers or some kind of zoning to help remember and plan. Also might have to start working on a printable cheat sheet of production rates and ratios.

Having a blast so far. Not very far in, just getting red cubes going and need a plastic facility to get rid of all my petroleum from refining.

A trick I found for that is to use thermal generators; they take anything that burns as input, so you can get rid of the petroleum without too much trouble. One potential downside is that they might not burn enough to keep up if you've got tons of other power sources, so you may have to keep expanding your base to get them fully online.