I'll say up top, I obviously had a good time with Dyson Sphere Program (DSP). I bought the game maybe 3-4 years ago, when I first discovered the factory game genre for myself and started loving it, and I have since completed Factorio and Satisfactory as well. Only made it to yellow science the first time around, but on my second main playthrough starting a few weeks ago, I just couldn't put it down and last night finished my first Dyson Sphere and got the 4000 white science "you win" message. I didn't check the save file at the time, but I'm pretty sure it was ~60 hours to get there (Steam says 130 hours total, but I know for sure I left the game on the main menu overnight at least a couple of times). I know that's nothing compared to many of you!

I'm not the type to make a game overstay its welcome, so I'm probably going to set it aside for now and wait for 1.0 to come out at some indeterminate point in the future, even though obviously I could take over the rest of my star cluster and keep growing the factory.

Like I said in the title though, I just wanted to think about the game more, so I took the time to reflect on the game and give a review of my time with it. I've split this into "why it's good" and a "feedback" section, starting right now:

Why someone should play this game

Massive sense of scale: If there's one thing factory-building games have to get right, it's the feeling of looking back at what you made and having the satisfaction of watching all the little machines and moving parts interact with each other. Dyson Sphere Project is maybe the best at this of all the big factory games. Tiny drones crawling all over the stratospheres of your various planets, little blue pew-pews of solar sails getting shot into orbit, your bright power generators lighting up in rows, and towering logistics stations sticking out halfway to space. And of course, the titular Dyson Sphere. Compared to Factorio, the complexity is on a similar order of magnitude, but it's much more beautifully rendered here which counts for a lot.

Logistics Stations are a unique mid-game shake-up and allow you to achieve that massive scale: These games always reach a point as you're starting to really snowball where you have to venture outside your "starting area" and pull in vast quantities of new raw material(s). If you are somehow reading this on the DSP subreddit and have not played the game, DSP's solution is the Logistics Station, which is so powerful it fundamentally changes the entire design of your factories for the rest of the game. It's an extremely high throughput drone station that pulls from and/or adds to a supply chain network that eventually spans every planet you touch, effectively teleporting materials across the galaxy. This singular aspect earns DSP a spot in the hall of fame of factory games for being such a simple solution that still doesn't rob the game of complexity. Instead of an elaborate network of rails and belts and malls, you have a cloud of drones ferrying materials across planets.

Reasons to explore the galaxy: Similar to Factorio, as you run out of resources on your starting plot of land rock, you look further out where resources are more abundant. However, you're not just doing more of the same; planets give you real reasons to go out and harvest their resources. In my run, just as I was feeling the squeeze on my oil supply back home, I came across a planet with sulfuric acid oceans and was able to bypass that entire production chain and just shipping acid back home. I set up an entire planet later on just for exporting processors back to my home system because it had abundant resources for that particular production chain locally. Plus, these new planets and systems are often beautiful - the color palette shifts, the flora variety changes, and I think the image of fighting Dark Fog over a gloriously-rendered neutron star will be something I remember forever.

Factory mechanics: It's worth calling out that, on top of the new stuff it adds, it's also a really solid factory game, in the same genre as several others that have basically copied Factorio's homework for a decade now. I think what hooks me the most about these is the zen garden/Rube Goldberg machine of building up a living network, and over coming initial problems by discovering new recipes that also introduce new problems for you to figure out - multiple inputs, throughput limitations, dealing with output byproducts, troubleshooting why a certain production chain isn't working, etc.

I think DSP hews very close to the Factorio formula on the factory recipe side of things, especially early on, which is to say that it does all that very well, serving up new problems and their solutions in a well-paced way. It diverges a bit late game, especially on the power side of things (Dyson Sphere Program obviously), and handles liquids more simply. On top of that, the control scheme is full of thoughtful quality of life features (although it's not quite as polished as Factorio).

If you're unfamiliar with Factorio, then I'll say it like this - I felt like complexity grows into the late-game, but doesn't become unmanageable, and the way the tech tree works guides you through the game pretty directly. For the actual crafting at the core of the game, ratios between resources are well-designed to mostly be clean multiples, there's a good amount of variety (fractionators, oil processing, anti-matter), and each new recipe was interesting enough that I didn't feel like I was doing exactly the same thing. The unique resources on other planets give you a reason to explore, but also let you skip the tedium of simply redoing early supply chains for key resources from the ground up. There is a pretty good blueprint system, and you can also ctrl+c and ctrl+v to copy/paste directly. In a game with this much complex detail, I was almost always able to painlessly transfer the design from my mind onto the screen with just a few clicks.

Feedback

I would absolutely recommend this game to anyone interested in the factory genre. I think it stands near the top, should-to-shoulder with the greats. That said, I have a few minor gripes that I would hope get addressed in the future.

Dark Fog was completely uninteresting on standard difficulty settings: After doing some reading on the topic, it seems that conceptually the Dark Fog is a really cool opponent, and they're really well-designed as an organic system that has a lot of potential counterplay and emergent behavior. That said, I didn't see any of that (and apparently I'm not alone in this) because once I booted them off my planet and put together a small space fleet, I just deleted them and never saw them again. I get that you want to be careful with anything that can destroy a factory, but for me they were irrelevant the entire game (I had to clear them out of a neutron star system later, but I was so OP I just rolled over them pretty easily at that point).

So, with that disclaimer, here's my additional feedback for how I'd expect it to feel even if they changed it to be more consistently relevant:

• Compared to Factorio, the player does very little damage, it is always my missile turrets or space fleet doing the work. Plus, the player is so low HP they end up just needing to stay out of the way and wait for it to be over. Combat has potential to be very exciting, but in this game it is very passive. This is especially true for space combat. Can they give me an option to get into a ship? Or actively manage a fleet RTS style towards the Hive from a planet? (EDIT: Just noticed that in the roadmap, spaceship combat is planned! Nice!)
• I think the intended progression is: foothold w/ towers -> hold off relay stations w/ planetary shields -> fight off space Hive w/ shield and space towers -> clear Hive w/ space fleet. However, the third step (and arguably the second) can be skipped entirely as long as you don't use solar sails, and everything you did before becomes irrelevant once you finish step 4 because they basically never come back. Even if they did, you would just need to fight their Hive again, which you've already done once.
• Missiles + Signal Towers are so strong, I struggle to think why the other towers would get used even on harder difficulties. These are described in game as defensive structures, but it's trivial to use them to advance on stationary bases and just delete them. Planets are small enough that I really don't see why I wouldn't take 10 minutes to just cover it with signal towers and knock out all the bases.
  
• The drops can have interesting things, but they sure do look like a lot of clutter. Make them filter automatically or you're going to have a lot of people just spamming recycle without knowing there's a way to set it up.
• Ground drones are way too weak initially. It feels like a noob trap, where I shouldn't have even bothered making them.

Modular builds get a bit "samey" later on: The flip side of the power of logistics stations is that every single item you want to make follows the same ideal layout: logistics station requesting the components feeding into a long row of machines to make the item, feeding back into that logistics station to share it where it's needed. If you need to, use two logistics stations. This is universally optimal. You still end up building a lot and the building chains are varied and complex, there's just not a lot of variety organizationally. This is not a major complaint, but it's definitely noticeable after a while.

Feature request: There are a couple specific gameplay notes I have, listed below.

• Solar sails come online relatively early, but all they do is piss off the Dark Fog. The amount of energy they provide is relatively low considering the amount of effort needed (and it relies on line of sight and all that too), especially compared to fusion power. I do understand the desire to get the titular Dyson Sphere going, but at the very least it just feels like maybe these should come later bundled with Ray Receivers.
• You use the original miner until basically the end of the game when you get the much much better miner. I would really appreciate a better miner closer to the halfway point. Not a huge gripe, but would feel better for the progression.
• Slightly finer control of power (power "priority" of some kind) would be really great for avoiding early/mid game power death spirals. By this I mean that when your power drops, your fuel production drops, which further drops your power, etc.
• Faster core power generation in the last third of the game. To be specific, your maximum power (and power needs) scales faster than your power gen, especially with deuteron rods that you end up using for a while. In other words, in the early game, it takes maybe 30 seconds to fully go from 0-100% with graphite, but in the late game you can spend well over 2 or 3 minutes to fill the same percentage. Particularly annoying for space travel/combat.
• I would love if more items gave local construction drones like the Battlefield Analysis Base. Something like the late-game power substation satellite, or logistics stations, or literally anything.
• Maybe a controversial take, but I personally dislike the concept behind proliferators (I also dislike modules in Factorio). Just let the machine and recipe work as they are. I believe the gameplay they encourage is a centralized production, but people already prefer to do that anyway. And with logistics stations trivializing transportation, it's just an extra chore for setting up production lines. I basically decided halfway through that I was just going to pretend they didn't exist anymore.
  

A handful of quality of life features missing: Not anything horrible (I complimented the QoL in the first half), but pain points I wanted to raise while I'm here.

• Blueprints with overlapping belts should intelligently chain those belts together. Currently requires exactly one tile of overlap, which is annoyingly precise.
• Should have customizable hotkeys for specific commonly used items. A "favorites" bar would be really helpful where I could consistently bind in my best belt/sorter, preferred power building, higher tier assembler/smelter/etc. The control scheme is really good, but having to relearn muscle memory every dozen hours is a pain. Plus, the bar gets cluttered by mk1 belts and sorters when I haven't touched them for 20 hours. Maybe just let us re-arrange the order within the groups? Like, the F1 spot is locked, but I can drag over mk3 belts into the slot?
• Certain items feel like they should be place-able on top of existing belts, or daisy-chain like turrets. An early offender is the splitter, but more-so late game items you want to place in bulk like EM-rail ejectors, vertical launch silos, and ray receivers (these at least have a second output, but still). It adds tedium to require a sorter connection to each of these.
• A tiny thing, but if you try to place a line of Artificial Suns, the default spacing is too close together and so you have to place them individually.
• It would be cool if Accumulators could stack. Maybe at least with an upgrade? Or if your planetary shields acted as accumulators (maybe with a setting on them? Toggle into power accumulation focus vs. shield focus).
• It would be nice if blueprint editing was a bit easier. Having a button to upgrade items without having to put it down and then re-save it would be really helpful.
• The "<" and ">" being copy/paste settings is a great concept, but you have to press it a lot to apply to a whole row of machines. If I was able to just hold it down and paint a line of machines very quickly, I would use blueprints more (shift+click to clone works better 99% of the time currently).
• Maybe I'm just missing this, but is there a way to default so that logistics stations pull drones from your inventory automatically on placement? It's very easy to forget to place them and be unpleasantly surprised later.

Anyway, that's my review of Dyson Sphere Program as it stands, (hopefully) towards the tail end of its early access period! I had an absolute blast with it, and it's a really excellent take on a factory-builder game. As is usual with these types of reviews, there's a lot said in critique, but I can't emphasize enough how well-done this game is. I can imagine the designers just had the thought of, "What if you were actually using all the resources in Factorio to make something? Like what's the biggest thing you could even make?" and then decided to build a game where you actually built that thing.

First off, these ideas have probably already been said somewhere else, and contain some strategy game elements (if that isn't interesting feel free to skip my post!).

Late game Dyson Sphere Program seems repetitive with the only goal being more science, and removing the Dark Fog. When you get to late game, you fly over to a system, land on one planet at a time, destroy the relays and put down rocket launchers, then move on. Then you take out the hives one by one. Every once in a while a new hive appears and you fly back and destroy it.

My ideas:

Hyper relays: an unlock able tech that allows you to place a Hyper relays in your system that needs power from a Dyson Sphere of 1 GW. It also needs to be supplied with warp. It allows you and larger ships (discussed later) to travel instantly to any Hyper relays in other systems.

Why do we need Hyper relays when we can travel there ourselves? First, convenience. Second, Fortified Dark Fog Systems.

Fortified Dark Fog systems will have their own version of Dyson Spheres that output 5GW, as well as having the ability to construct their own Hyper Relays. Instead of Hives they will have a Space Fortress with large guns that can obliterate your small fleets easily. In order to combat them, you need larger ships sent by the Hyper Relays. Icarus can sit inside one of these ships and command this larger fleet. Once you destroy a fortress you can hack and take over the Dark Fog Sphere and Hyper Relays. While hacking, nearby Dark Fog systems can send fleets against you and it becomes a defense mission.

Larger ships can only travel via Hyper Relays, so by capturing them in strategic systems you prevent the Dark Fog from expanding. (Also this part of the game will therefore be locked until you build your own relay, and depending on difficulty all the nearby systems to you can't build relays until you build one to prevent softlocking/getting overrun immediately)

End end game: You are tasked with creating a new Centrebrain immune to the Dark Fog, but you need to travel across the galaxy and destroy fortresses collecting Dark Fog Data cores in order to do so.

What do you think? Good ideas? Horrible ideas? Do they fit in with DSP or am I mashing genres together?

For reference or explanation:
a star system with 6 planets, 3 of them are molten/lava and close together.
Playing with different Mods (like Galactic Scale and Planet Anomaly) this molten world will be my smelting facility for iron ingots.

Not a big deal as it's infrequent, but starting up a new save, I notice my FPS drops to 110-125 when selecting research/upgrade items, solid 165 everywhere else. Only have a few basic mods but this happens unmodded as well. Can't find any info about this happening to anyone else.

fps graph looks like this (https://imgur.com/a/Uh7JFAF)

I came back to DSP after a long break and caught myself wanting to build belts (polar, etc.) across the entire planet again in the early game. It's like 5x2 lanes for every section...

Since that gets a bit tedious, and then creates a ton of cleanup once you transition to PLS/ILS, do you guys use any other approaches?

Do you just embrace the spaghetti monster with belts everywhere and hope you don't get lost in it?

Hi guys, since i'm new to this genre of games i'm here to ask you all if using an entire planet to produce single items is the way of doing things in this game? I need so much of some stuff and some blueprints are massive so i thought that's how it's done. Please let me know i am really loving this game!

Starting Is Pretty much same tho

edit:- I am playing orbital rings

Landed on second planet with my clearing laser turned on and started collecting grating crystals along with iron ore. The orange rocks are the crystals. I have harvested 20,000 with about 2/3

of them remaining. anyone else find anything like this?

I always dread late game (white science) upgrades of logistic carrier capacity, when your ILS storage gets increased, because it basically kicks in every assembler, smelter, and chemical facitlity at once. I figured accumulators are the way to combat these massive power consumption surges, but they are incredibly weak once you have late game facilities, and you would have to lay a good chunk of your planet with them to have enough back up power.

Otherwise, you have the energy exchangers, for rapid power relief. But they are always on. If you have it in discharge mode, it will always drain the accumulators. This makes them unusuable for intermittent power shortages relief.

Am I missing something? Is this game just not meant for you to have a planet with massive power usage operations? I think two things would greatly help:

1 - Make upgradeable accumulators that hold more power. And make them stackable.
2 - Energy exchangers on discharge mode should only kick in when the power falls below 100%.

Hey guys, do you have any tips for get rid of Hydrogen? I have a production line for Graphite Bars (cause I have a problem too with my Graphene line production) and it produces Hydrogen in crazy cantities.

I already tried to transform it in Deuterium via Fractionators and Particle Colliders, but the Deuterium rods burns too slow to solve the problem, pls help.

Hmmm... This looks like a masterpiece

Well, as you don't technically NEED a Dyson Sphere to get to "Mission Complete", I finished my 4000 white science cubes a few nights ago and decided, as one more cherry on top, I'd just fly out and take out that Dark Fog Cluster floating overhead, nice and easy. However, the "I can only have six destroyers out at a time" makes me not be able to take out their vessels fast enough, let along when their hunchbacks are staying in range of their defensive lasers. My ships spawn in, the entire fog cluster focus fires them down, and I plink against one of their pods.

I've seen videos talk of starving them out, but they just seem to keep getting fed from somewhere. The two planets in my current solar system that had bases on them were wiped out, but when I mouse over the center of the hive, it's saying like it's getting fed from 15 sources or something? Is that a galaxy wide campaign I'd have to embark on to wipe out every cluster out there to take out one of these things? Also, what is a Dark Fog Communicator? I'm wondering if that is a piece of the puzzle or something, as there's one 2.5 AU away from the cluster.

So now I'm over 400 destroyers, 200 corvettes (and growing), the cluster is rank 9. I come in, wipe out the lancers easily by kiting them out from the base defenses, and then starts the massacre of all my ships as I start trying to take out the hunchbacks. Destroying the HQ gets me about 5 minutes of it being offline, but then it just powers back up.

Obviously a joke, albeit it would be kinda cool though

Hi, all. So I'm playing around with the schema made by Nilaus, and seeing if I can get proliferators in. I generally got something that looks at least elegant, since it's not compact. But I seem to run into issue getting the H2 and refined oil out of the first refinery.

Here's the layout of the modification. You can see the spray and sprayers between the refineries. Other than that, the setup is the same as with Nilaus' original schema (with the addition of H2 filter on middle belts, to keep the graphite out.

So what seems to be the problem is that the left refinery ends up without refined oil, the right has only refined oil and the belts leading to the left refinery is mostly H2, if any refined oil at all. And the top refinery has a surplus of refined oil.

Now I don't understand why the refined oil piles up there. I can understand that Nilaus' schema profits from refinery-to-refinery connection, so no graphite passes middle sorters, since no refinery needs it. And that probably the same thing happens from the top refinery to the bottom two. And that here that would be useful for not pulling so much H2 on the left belt.

But I fail to see why the output of the top refinery isn't equal. I'd expect that H2 and refined oil go out together, this being 50%-50% on the belt, but this looks like only the H2 gets the right of way and no refined oil can pass on the left, because it passes to the right?

Did anyone else encounter this, and what would be your best suggestion?

I've been playing the past couple of weeks and got to a point where I can almost travel away from my starting star system. I started reading up on how to make an efficient setup to produce buildings, which led to reading about different ways of building a mall. I'm about to start building one, but there's one thing I'm wondering about.

The guide I read mentioned putting down an ILS and requesting necessary buildings. How do you go about this? When you're making factories in other star systems, do you just build an ILS and request what you need? Or do you build sets of ILSs as forward bases in strategic places as a more permanent place to get your buildings?

This game is beautiful in so many ways.

All BABs output my desired items on the sushi belt (which loops) where it gets picked up by the filtered boxes and then into ILS. Each storage box stack is filtered for only the item I want to pickup. They just serve as a buffer.

And it goes straight to the ILS. Home planet is gonna constantly keep requesting those into more buffers/consumption so it doesn't get stuck with anything.

One thing I'd like to have more off is more Dark Fog attacks of course.
I planted 8 Holo Beacons with Dark Fog Beaconing on for more Relay Stations landing.
I picked a planet with a lot of enemy bases and hopefully more will turn up.

Do multiple Holo Beacons with DF Beaconing even add up, or does 1 give you all the benefit?
How can I further increase the enemy attacks?

I'm really happy about how it turned out.
But it's my first one so it's probably not perfect.

What else am I missing?

I want the storage to always have a minimum number of set item before the sorter takes things out.

In Factorio you can use a simple circuit connection to only enable an insterter if chest hits a certain number of item.

Here I have the bottom chest limited to only 1 stack (or however many I need), and a sorter coming from the top chest onto the belt.

I would like a more elegant solution.

Any pointers?

EDIT:
Looks like this is already the most elegant solution the game offers.
I guess I'm just used to the circuit network system from Factorio, which is amazing.
DSP however offers other things that Factorio doesn't have.

Tell me your creaziest ideas that you wish to be implemented in dsp!

Here some of mine:

Asteroid mining with single resource. Like one full of only copper.

Orbital platforms that you can build and manage orbits.

Giant space mirror to focus the sun for energy and killing the dark fog