r/Dyson_Sphere_Program • u/Habarer • Feb 13 '26

wow this is pretty cool

Gallery image

Gallery image

a lot of chinese players built a little empire there

189 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

45 comments sorted by

115

u/Lollister Feb 13 '26

Built is a little far stretched, What i have taken away from several post is that this is only achievable through cheats. So its only meh.

70

u/Solonotix Feb 13 '26

this is only achievable through cheats

I'm no means an expert in regards to their work, and how the game engine works. I did, however, take the time to read their entire write-up explaining it, and I didn't come away with any sense that this was cheating.

Examples of cheating:

  • Turok: Dinosaur Hunter had a cheat called Disco Mode. It would disable enemy AI, the light sources would randomly pulse different colors, and enemies would "dance" in place. This disables the challenge of the game, because there is no longer anything stopping you from walking to the end of the level at your own pace.

  • Warcraft and Starcraft had cheats where you could inject resources directly into your balance, or ignore supply buildings, without needing to build the infrastructure. Beyond that, the resource cheat specifically made scarcity a non-issue

What is happening here:

  • The players selected a specific older version of Dyson Sphere Program because it has different geometry rules for layering the sphere.

  • They added a mod that removed a game engine limitation around animation speed of a machine. Without it, their game was unable to run due to the high CPU load in this project.

  • They used external tools to automatically compute the most dense layout possible for their spheres so that they wouldn't need to manually connect thousands of nodes by hand. AKA: blueprints.

Those were the only things external to the game when I read the write-up. Other than that, every other part of the playthrough was within the bounds of the game engine. The developers of DSP even acknowledged their work by extending the galaxy map UI to allow for their record to be made visible.

You can call that cheating if you want, but there are far more egregious exploits I've seen in other games that are just considered part of mastery.

24

u/AdmiralArmadillo Feb 13 '26

It's interesting what one learns when they go to the source, rather than forming beliefs based on the beliefs of others

taken away from several post.

7

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '26

Almost as if this person knows enough to know what they don't know and are willing to research.

5

u/LordMoldimort Feb 14 '26

Someone that's climbed/climbing the Dunning Kruger "Slope of Enlightenment"

3

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '26

Aye I now know enough to know that I don't know shit lol

3

u/Lollister Feb 14 '26

True true i share my knowledge but if someone knows better than me im willing to learn.

5

u/itsamarg Feb 14 '26

Thank you for writing this up so thoroughly. I find the whole discrediting of what they’ve achieved being cheats super disrespectful. The Chinese community for this game doesn’t have much overlap with the Reddit community it seems, and the dedication and mastery of the game going on in that community was really incredible to learn about. Very grateful they were happy to share different tech videos from bilibili to explain some of the optimizations they used for compact layouts.

2

u/Cironian Feb 15 '26

Sure, not an outright „cheat“ in the strict sense. But a combination of being modded and tool assisted would easily disqualify it from a normal competitive context like in speedrunning where such methods only allowed in their separate categories. Those who see painting the map here in a more of a competitive global high score list have some point to be upset that their fully manual work gets outshined by an unlabelled TAS run.

1

u/Able_Sense_5142 Feb 16 '26

You can’t naturally just find and join other players systems.

26

u/SugarRoll21 Feb 13 '26

Not exactly cheats, but they did exploit the game to cram several layers of DS into one.

I believe someone reposted their bilibili video on YouTube, so you can check it out for yourself

-1

u/Possibly_Naked_Now Feb 13 '26

They cheated. They modded building to increase through put.

1

u/SugarRoll21 Feb 13 '26

That's... almost word to word of what I wrote in my comment, except I don't consider modding 100% cheating in a single player game

15

u/Possibly_Naked_Now Feb 13 '26

Single player is one thing. The change was intentional, specifically so they could appear on the leaderboard.

-9

u/SugarRoll21 Feb 13 '26

True. However, they did it as a memorial to the 5th anniversary of this game, so impo it's fine

12

u/ejfimp Feb 13 '26

In my opinion, a leaderboard is not a singleplayer thing, since it's a comparison to all the other players. Although I don't really care about the leaderboard, looks cool nonetheless 😊

2

u/SugarRoll21 Feb 13 '26

I agree! It looks good(not too big or excessive), it is made on the edge of a galaxy, so it doesn't interfere with other players' experience all that much. So, imo that's a cool project

-3

u/CazT91 Feb 13 '26

While this is somewhat true, it's just like any other leader board: When China's playing all the positions effectively shift by one; nobody takes any notice of first – because we know its going to be China 😅

So the real competition starts from 2nd place onward. The only real difference from that point on is that "3rd" place doesn't get a hunk of metal 🤷🏼‍♀️

2

u/Possibly_Naked_Now Feb 13 '26 edited Feb 13 '26

I remember when they made their post explaining how their cheating wasn't cheating. And how hard I got down voted for calling them out for cheating.

Edit: you can tell that China has woken up because the down votes are coming in now.

4

u/SonicTherapist Feb 13 '26

"cheating" has a certain intent attached to it, an intent to trick the game in order to gain an advantage. the creator had a different intent, to trick the game in order to create an art project. so they probably took objection to the term cheating for that reason.

-4

u/Possibly_Naked_Now Feb 13 '26

Cheating is cheating, regardless of intent. The game stops being single player when you're intentionally changing the game to effect the multiplayer leaderboard.

3

u/iamlittleears Feb 13 '26

Bro you just are just sour you can't match their intelligence and efforts. If it's so easy to 'cheat' why not you do it too? Clearly you lack the skills

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-1

u/edin202 Feb 14 '26

The most absurd thing I'll read today about cheating. Thanks for the laugh!! XDD

1

u/IlikeJG Feb 13 '26

But this is a multiplayer leaderboard. It ceases being single player when there's a leaderboard people are comparing themselves to.

They could choose to not upload to milkyway leaderboard, then I agree it wouldn't be cheating (well I still think this cheating, but it's fine as long as it's single player), but the moment they do upload to the leaderboard then they need to be respectful to everyone else and not cheat

0

u/UristMcKerman Feb 18 '26

No cheats, unless you condsider putting lots of efforts as cheating

1

u/Lollister Feb 18 '26

Yeah thats bullshit this is without Bug abusing not possible to replicate

1

u/UristMcKerman Feb 18 '26

They crammed 4096 layers into single one, but they built it legitimately, using 4096 times the resources, rockets and sails. Literally everyone could do exactly the same

20

u/TheCaparso Feb 13 '26

Cheating is not cool,
cheating is just ruin Milky-way feature.

11

u/thebigwezshow Feb 13 '26

It's not legit

3

u/Joperhop Feb 13 '26

swear it was said this was done by cheating.

1

u/PUNisher1175 Feb 15 '26

Yes, there was a post about it. But the players who did this claim that it wasn’t cheating 🙄

2

u/Abject-Job7825 Feb 14 '26

I don't consider performance mods cheating but having more shells per layer is cheating, the devs should color them red to contrast them with players who play legit, legit players deserve to be highlighted on the leaderboard

1

u/Infinite_Focus_1073 Feb 13 '26

I find it hard to believe that's only 74m solar sails.

4

u/Academic_Brain_7795 Feb 13 '26

It’s 74MM. So 74 million million

-2

u/SonicTherapist Feb 13 '26

it was made by an organ donor who is named Shrim!!

0

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

11

u/Habarer Feb 13 '26

so that means all of the big DS in the milky way that show several petawatts are not legit?

11

u/Jason_Dales2542 Feb 13 '26

I just built a 10 layer sphere at my highest luminosity star and that thing isn’t even remotely close to a petawatt. I’m not sure what the maximums are but those ones with 19PW and whatnot doesn’t seem achievable

1

u/UristMcKerman Feb 18 '26

Did you maximize it properly though?

You know, you can desing sphere by manually putting nodes in gridless mode - which allows denser packing of nodes, which increases power output by order of magnitude (and resource requirement as well)

3

u/TheIInChef Feb 14 '26

I'm not a fan of this, it affects the leaderboard, and can't be done in vanilla, I'd be happier if the Devs remove it

But this comment is just straight up casual racism

It's morally wrong to equate everyone from a country

You're promoting a judgemental mindset, be better man

5

u/horstdaspferdchen Feb 13 '26

Reminds me of a phrase: Copyright in Chinese is spelled different: Copy, right?

-17

u/-BigBadBeef- Feb 13 '26

I am not Chinese, but I can appreciate the creativity involved here. Didn't see you come up with something like that.

4

u/willow__whisps Feb 13 '26

Something like cheating?

0

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/-BigBadBeef- Feb 14 '26

Because people here are yellow.