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Dyson Sphere Program (Early Access): Interstellar Factorio
- Thread starter Ultron
- Start date
Nice, would it be possible to get pictures of it ingame? I often find them a bit easier sometimes to get a general idea of the flow once you start getting used to the game. Plus I love me some nice factory porn.I'm at the crossroads where I can blast off into another system and potentially set up/restart there, or doggedly continue on building a sphere on the home system with pretty much only 1 rare resource. I think I might go with the home system route just so I have a barometer on just how much easier it is to migrate to a far better system in subsequent runs
p.s. moved all the diagrams (some of them had errors that have since been corrected) to a steam guide:
Steam Community :: Guide :: Dyson Sphere Program Production Chain Layouts
Compact production chain layouts for most common products that need to be made indefinitely...steamcommunity.com
This game looks really interesting, but reports of the english translation not being great give me some pause. Some even said descriptions of what things are, or what they do aren't accurate? Is that true?
Another question. Can you use the mousewheel to scroll left-right to select things on your quickbar? I always find using number keys to be akward selecting things.
Another question. Can you use the mousewheel to scroll left-right to select things on your quickbar? I always find using number keys to be akward selecting things.
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I had a starter one doing a bunch of stuff- belt, sorter, assembler, miner, power pole, smelter, etc off
electromagnet
circuit
glass
<assemblers here>
iron plate
gear
stone slab
with the outputs going perpendicular. This was upgraded to a makeshift second lane with chemical plant, oil refinery, oil extractor, mk2 assemblers, belts sorters and mk3 belts/sorters with some mini-spaghetti as the run progressed. I have enough understanding of the production chains now that I could probably redo the mall to make it much neater with those additions along with accumulator, dyson swarm gun but I'm getting by with those other a little all over the place.
I actually was messing around with in-game screenshots since that was the fastest way to show blueprints/layouts in factorio, but the game really does not play nice with screenshots for showing what's going on (lil tradeoff for how gorgeous it looks lol)
stuff like what sorters output what for multiple output recipes, obscured belts, etc
It's honestly not as bad as it looks. The game starts out simple enough, so long as you can remember a few hotkeys. Run around a planet, drop down a few miners, research the very earliest technologies, and very slowly grow into creating systems far more complicated than you'd dreamed you were capable of creating. Usually after getting just enough knowledge to be impressive but inefficient, and then seeing how other people do it and going Duh!
But yeah, it starts simple beyond being a little cumbersome with the menus. If you can handle that, the rest grows out organically from there.
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My Satisfactory playing really makes me want to be able to pull things into an Assembler off of a set of stacked conveyor lines. But it doesn't seem like that is possible because the sorters can't go very far vertically. Similarly I wish the splitter was a just somewhat smaller, it feels so huge. So I'm often ending up using sorters to split off a belt instead, but that feels not great.
Definitely enjoying it, just some foibles to get used to for this specific way belts work.
Definitely enjoying it, just some foibles to get used to for this specific way belts work.
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Thanks for this pic, was helpful for getting my similar mall design going! I ended up going with 3 lanes on one side, 2 on the other, so that I could just do a direct sorter output into the crates on the side with 2. Though what you have there with the perpendicular lanes does look pretty nice, might use that when I extend it further. When I then needed to bring more items in past those initial 5 I'm just kind of swapping stuff in and out by raising and lowering lanes. So if I don't need stone for an item, for example, raise that belt up, and bring the glass in from the side.
I currently just have my gear and exciter (I think that's what the glowy tubes are called...) assemblers in line directly connecting to the components for the items that need them. It spreads things out a bit more, but results in a few less things to carry along with the line. The Exciters aren't really keeping up if I grab multiple things that use them, but once the storage crates fill up, it's fine.
The one thing I'd recommend to anyone new to this kind of setup is to use the option in the storage crates to limit how many of each thing you're building. Filling a box completely with miners is just a waste, so you might as well just make 2 or 3 stacks of them at any one time.
Now it's finally gonna be time to figure out oil!
This is where it's at, I've been manually dumping to automate mk2 assemblers and handcrafting everything else but it's about time to expand the mall and feed it (esp. the iron/copper/stone) via interplanetary logistics since my home planet is hardcore running out.
I'm going to be adding:
mk3 belts/assemblers/sorters completely auto
power satellite
EM gun
Accumulators
a planetary->interplanetary->orbital chain but with no output box (10 or w/e stack internal size should be enough i think)
both drone types
Particle Colliders and rocket launch platforms would be nice but are a little too costly to make en-masse right now so I'm OK grabbing those parts from crate and handcrafting. Maybe in second system with interstellar rare tapping in place.
edit: After refactoring- have an idea of how to make the rest in that list above but done for now since a lot of stuff was moved around already.
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...in 4 days (from their Discord.)
Dyson Sphere Program - Dev Letter & Short-term Plan & Patch Note 0.6.15.5666 - Steam News
Dear engineers, How fares your interstellar factory? It’s been a week since the launch of Dyson Sphere Program. We’re exhilarated that Dyson Sphere Program is loved by such a great number of players. We never expected to hit 350,000 sold copies in one week! This comes as a surprise yet gives us...
Looks like they're at 350,000 copies for their first week.
Really happy for the team as this game continues to impress the more I play.
It truly nails that sweet-spot between Factorio and Satisfactory (think the dry complexity of EU4 vs. the eye candy/simplicity of modern Civ).
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So glad to see how successful this has been!
Very surprised they're saying they want to add combat to the game. I wonder where exactly that would fit in to the overall gameplay loop. This game looking so much like Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander does certainly make there a ping in the back of my head for robots blowing each other up on these planets, but I feel like it's missing a lot of the features you'd need to make things attacking your factory not be just an incredible annoyance.
Very surprised they're saying they want to add combat to the game. I wonder where exactly that would fit in to the overall gameplay loop. This game looking so much like Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander does certainly make there a ping in the back of my head for robots blowing each other up on these planets, but I feel like it's missing a lot of the features you'd need to make things attacking your factory not be just an incredible annoyance.
My guess is more similar to Factorio, where you need to have some level of "defence" for wildlife (or pirates in space I guess), so you would also need to have some military ships moving between your planets to protect the trade lines.
Unless they simplify the game a little down the line, I pity people who jump in after combat is a thing lol
There's definitely a lot more constant mental juggling going on than Factorio
edit: For clarity, I don't think Factorio is a simpler game in terms of production lines, but things like Blueprints take out a lot of the rote busywork so you can concentrate on other things.
p.s. nice to hear that upgrade-in-place is targeted in the next week or so. gonna hold off on mass-upgrading a few key things till then and just build elsewhere
There's definitely a lot more constant mental juggling going on than Factorio
edit: For clarity, I don't think Factorio is a simpler game in terms of production lines, but things like Blueprints take out a lot of the rote busywork so you can concentrate on other things.
p.s. nice to hear that upgrade-in-place is targeted in the next week or so. gonna hold off on mass-upgrading a few key things till then and just build elsewhere
I bought this for my 10 year old kid, he's enjoying it a lot so far. He just started over after 6 hours to get a more optimal solar system and to build things more effectively now that he knows a bit more about the mechanics. I haven't played it myself yet, but it looks great.
Consider me interested then... The combat is the biggest thing that turned me off of Factario.
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Ha, well since I made that post they've said in their dev messages that they're interested in adding combat at some point down the line during the EA period. Though I have to assume they'd make it optional?
And just fyi, you can totally play Factorio in peaceful mode where the bugs don't attack until you attack them or with enemies turned off completely if you wanted to try it without combat. I did that my first time through because I just couldn't countenance my entire factory getting eaten. There's plenty to do in the game even if you aren't worrying about bugs.
I can't say I was much different :) I'm impressed by what I see my kid doing, especially because English isn't his first language, but that's hardly a barrier for kids these days (My daughter who is a little older is near fluent in English now because she talks so much with her English speaking online friends).
No game seems to be too complex, he just looks up stuff on YouTube if he gets stuck on mechanics. He is completely self-learning everything he sets his mind on. He's very scientifically curious and loves games where you build stuff. He also likes Zelda games and has completed BotW a few times and most recently he played through Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.
He mastered Kerbal Space Program before he was 9. He looked up everything online and taught himself to play.
He has around 60 hours in Factorio, but at a certain point I think his 10 year old head has to check out until he's a little older as the complexity becomes overwhelming for him. But this game can murder the brains of adults. I'm curious how far he gets in Dyson Sphere Program, currently he seems to be making steady progress.
Big thumbs up to the people who make these games that inspire our kids and massively accelerate their learning and info gathering ability. I think the first "builder" game I mastered was Utopia: The Creation of a Nation on the Amiga, but I was already 14-15 years old at that time.
Yeah, when I was your son's age all we had was 2600 & Intellivsion.
I do remember fiddling with BASIC Programing for 2600 and it was certainly intriguing at the time. But without any online resources for guidance & motivation, it was difficult to stick with beyond the honeymoon phase.
It's definitely awesome how the power of the internet has sped up early learning for the younger generations.
I do remember fiddling with BASIC Programing for 2600 and it was certainly intriguing at the time. But without any online resources for guidance & motivation, it was difficult to stick with beyond the honeymoon phase.
It's definitely awesome how the power of the internet has sped up early learning for the younger generations.
Latest dev blog said keybinding will drop sometime before they take a holiday break (Chinese New Year) on Feb. 11th.
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.
Quick note that I've more or less finished every layout block necessary to automate all research and launch sails and rockets, i.e. complete the game and posted them on the Steam guide, albeit the newer ones are probably error prone because I've been at this for... uh... quite a while, lol.
Still need to do some very basic housekeeping like layouts for oil->sulfur, oil->graphene, oil->organic crystal (even though some of these are already included in the early game layouts), automating logistics and drones, and setting up fracts for deuterium
Still need to do some very basic housekeeping like layouts for oil->sulfur, oil->graphene, oil->organic crystal (even though some of these are already included in the early game layouts), automating logistics and drones, and setting up fracts for deuterium
After 45 hours I am trying to automate the last research matrix(green). One thing though, they need to either nerf the solar panels or make the Dyson sphere construction speed much faster. Because right now the best way to progress is to just ignore the dyson sphere project completely and just line up solar panels across the equator. I am generating over 400MW that way and i dont thing I will ever need more than that.
i always wanted to try factorio but never got around to it, plus i recall the dev not being a great person?
i played a little satisfactory but the reward loop felt really long in that game
played this for the first time last night and i didn't move for 4 hours. tons of fun and instant satisfaction. i'm not sure i'll ever be able to make the crazy automation farms though
are green sorters slower than the basic conveyor belt? any downside using just a sorter between two buildings instead of a conveyor +2 sorters?
i played a little satisfactory but the reward loop felt really long in that game
played this for the first time last night and i didn't move for 4 hours. tons of fun and instant satisfaction. i'm not sure i'll ever be able to make the crazy automation farms though
are green sorters slower than the basic conveyor belt? any downside using just a sorter between two buildings instead of a conveyor +2 sorters?
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These games have such an amazing ability to snag you and keep you there for so long. Because it's always "oh, this belt is empty I gotta go fix ____" then you find another thing you can optimize, and another thing, and another.
I'm pretty sure sorter between the two buildings is perfectly fine if they're close enough. You can always double em up if you need to if it's not going fast enough for a quick item.
redesigned into this, taking it for a test run now (the layout itself works, need to retrace the diagram on a completely fresh run to make sure i didn't cock up anything lol
Automates
Assembler mk1
Assembler mk2
Assembler mk3
Belt mk1
Belt mk2
Belt mk3
Sorter mk1
Sorter mk2
Sorter mk3
Storage mk1
Storage Tank
Water Pump
Mining Facility
Matrix Lab
Tesla Tower
Wireless Transmission
Satellite Substation
Thermal Generator
Smelter
Fractionator
Oil Extractor
Oil Refinery
Chemical Plant
Planetary Logistics Hub
Interstellar Logistics Hub
Orbital Collector
Logistics Drone
Logistics Vessel
Accumulator
Electromagnetic Railgun
Ray Receiver
Doesn't automate:
Artificial Star
Fusion Gen
Wind Turbine
Solar Panel (lol)
Energy Exchanger
Splitter (lol)
Storage Mk2
Miniature Particle Collider
Vertical Launching Silo
Factorio developer is fine.
What information are you going off of?
iirc some "keep politics out of games" stuff after one of (lol) pewdiepie's heated gamer moments. following daniel vávra, notch and jordan peterson is also not the best sign. i would be glad to be wrong but its more of a time thing anyways
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they changed factorio's release date to steer clear of cyberpunk therefore you should do what is right and play Dyson Sphere Program instead which is totally made by people who probably support CCP
edit: wanted to put an /s but figured it might be mistaken as 'per second' considering the thread
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It's not feature-complete yet but what is there is already incredibly polished & deep.
The 1/28/21 dev blog did mention an upcoming roadmap.
"A more detailed Game Development Roadmap will be published after Chinese New Year holidays. Tons of contents you are looking forward are included in it - such as "Combats", "Assembly Space Platform", "Workshops", etc."
And the Early Access info panel on the store page goes into further detail.
How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
"Generally speaking, the full release version of Dyson Sphere Program will expand on the exploration mechanics, as well as polish and fine-tune the experience of designing and operating an automated factory, fleshing out the experience the current build can provide. To be more specific, these are some of the features we are planning to implement:
- More types of planets and celestial bodies for players to discover
- More exploration events, like being sucked by a black hole
- Mecha editing: players will be able to design their own mechas
- Monsters: alien enemies that can attack your factories and spaceships to bring more tension and excitement to the whole experience
- More construction types, like suspended platforms to extend constructions from planets to space
- Quality-of-life improvements and balancing
- More music tracks and sound scenes, cutscenes…"
"Generally speaking, the full release version of Dyson Sphere Program will expand on the exploration mechanics, as well as polish and fine-tune the experience of designing and operating an automated factory, fleshing out the experience the current build can provide. To be more specific, these are some of the features we are planning to implement:
- More types of planets and celestial bodies for players to discover
- More exploration events, like being sucked by a black hole
- Mecha editing: players will be able to design their own mechas
- Monsters: alien enemies that can attack your factories and spaceships to bring more tension and excitement to the whole experience
- More construction types, like suspended platforms to extend constructions from planets to space
- Quality-of-life improvements and balancing
- More music tracks and sound scenes, cutscenes…"
I'd suggest that now is a fine time to dive in as this is one of the most polished and feature-rich EA titles I've seen in a long time.
I personally take no issue with Early Access as a concept but I do swing back and forth between diving in early vs. waiting for 1.0 release. For example, I jumped on Factorio & Project Zomboid the moment they launched into EA on Steam. Both saw years of EA dev and I was totally satisfied every step of the way. Yet other titles like Subnautica: Below Zero I purchased and shelved pending release as it was 33% cheaper early on but I'm still waiting for the story elements to finalize in 1.0 before firing it up.
Is it from Draw.io ? Otherwise, which modelisation tool that you used? (that's my job btw)
As a huge fan of both Factorio and Satisfactory I think this game is amazing, really excited to see where it goes.
so i'm about 6 hours into my first playthrough and now that i understand the concepts much more, i kind of want to start over. my planet also doesn't produce silicone or titanium, which seems like a problem?
i wish there was more of a "favorites" hot bar. I guess i could hotkey belts and sorters to number keys. i also wish there was a way to automatically craft the thing you're trying to build if you have the components needed.
i wish there was more of a "favorites" hot bar. I guess i could hotkey belts and sorters to number keys. i also wish there was a way to automatically craft the thing you're trying to build if you have the components needed.
Very close to picking this game up, I just have some work and home stuff to take care of this week before I drive into a game that'll probably suck away all of my free time, haha.
I've been itching to play a game like this, but I actually never have. I've been drinking around with a very simple Idle game called ExoMiner that gave me a taste for it, but it's ridiculously simple compares to games like this.
I was debating whether to get Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program, and I'm leaning more towards this one. I love Dyson Spheres and the whole space exploration angle of this game, and it's $10 cheaper than Satisfactory. I almost never get games full priced these days, but $20 isn't bad at all.
I've been itching to play a game like this, but I actually never have. I've been drinking around with a very simple Idle game called ExoMiner that gave me a taste for it, but it's ridiculously simple compares to games like this.
I was debating whether to get Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program, and I'm leaning more towards this one. I love Dyson Spheres and the whole space exploration angle of this game, and it's $10 cheaper than Satisfactory. I almost never get games full priced these days, but $20 isn't bad at all.
Starter planets should have a common shared resource pool so rerolling won't likely yield different results. The game starts you with the basic resource types to serve as a tutorial and launch you off to your first planet hop.
Also it's important to remember that you get 100% return for any item you dismantle. So if you want to rebuild (most people do anyway as they tech up) you won't lose any resources in the process. Restarting is fine and all, but at the same time you're losing all the resources you've already gathered as well as tech-tree progress.
That's incredible. What an inspiration your son is! I just started playing Surviving Mars with my 6-yo this weekend. We're doing the tutorials at the moment, but he seems to be enjoying it so far. It's his first game of this type - I hope we can continue to enjoy these experiences together as he gets older.
i wish i had the chacne to play these types of games. At that age I used legos to build my imagineray starships and pretend to lead a galatic empire XD
There's so much good stuff out there for kids! It's always just difficult deciding what and how much is right for them.
Lego is still fantastic, though. A great gateway to our beloved builder genre :)
Played some this weekend. VERY impressive. Immediately made a good impression with it's beauty and the way it presents the planetary system. Worked great in 21:9. I never played factorio so it took a minute to figure out this was all about setting up automated resource gathering and secondary processing lines that then feed those resources to factories. Very interesting. The research tree could take a LONG time to get through, though I imagine things accelerate once you have more and more lines set up.
Is there a way to constantly have your research facilities making cubes if you supply then with lines, instead of having to select them every time? Also is there a way to select a building and give commands to them without your mecha close by?
Is there a way to constantly have your research facilities making cubes if you supply then with lines, instead of having to select them every time? Also is there a way to select a building and give commands to them without your mecha close by?
Really wish there was an easier way to see 100% inputs and outputs before setting up a line. I like mathing out all this stuff in advance and using external resources is kind of a PITA.
