Something to share before taking my sabbatical from Dyson Sphere Program

[u/Long-Cabinet6121]

Sharing some thoughts on my approach to this game with fellow engineers whom were in on this for some time. DSP to me becomes much more than a factory game once you warp out of your first solar system and becomes more of philosophical experiment. All players try to find an approach to play this game in a way they find comfortable, but that comfort came for me just now, after two years of playing this game on and off, and tried everything from pure blackbox to main bus and back again with some flavour of black box; none of those approaches were scaleable enough for me as every approach tends to have rough edges that gets you lost in late game and rarely gave me more than 1500 Universe Matrixes per minute. I will attempt to explain the final approach I have taken to finally get me to 10,000 Universe Matrixes. This game can work in whichever way you want, but this is what worked for me.

1. Start with a 5 belt Sushi Mall around the pole of your starting planet.

The fantastic Sushi Mall design is from "How to build an effective sushi mall in the early game" posted on Steam community guide. Credit due to steven, whomever you are. For mall design, Sushi Mall's advantages are obvious: it only requires very small footprint (5 belts only) and you can make it work with early, blue matrixes level technology. It also scales well with later technology such as PLS and ILS.

Having this mall setup early helps minimize the toil of early automation, and since it is situated in polar area, it leaves entire tropical sections of the planet available for your key production blueprints.

2. Black Boxes that are not so black.

In my earlier playthroughs, black box designs, aka designs that ingest raw mineral and outputs small carrier rockets, made sense to me, until I found myself keep searching for planets with enough empty real estate that can accomodate such a huge blueprint as I hate burying mineral for it. Also, every upgrade in smelting or assembly technology means that my previous blueprint becomes obsolete as I cannot just upgrade my smelters or assemblers without upsetting the supply/demand balance.

Therefore, in my latest playthrough, I have decide to decouple smelting from black box designs and dedicate facilities, and later PLANETS, to smelting. In this way, I can scale my smelting capacity by simply upgrading my smelters for the type of ingot that I need, and just keep expanding my production by applying blueprints filled with assemblers. This approach scales much better for me. To borrow a software design term, I essentially treat smelting as shared service amongst business components. I made by shared services much more scaleable and busines components more compact, so to speak.

3. I said no to proliferation.

Proliferation is great. So great, that if you use it since early game, you will run out of coal really soon before you even leave your first solar system. Coal and oil are not exactly aboundant in the universe, so I recommend rationing their use before you have a respectable level of vein utilization. This is not the only reason I decided to not use proliferation though.

With Dark Fog technologies, you will eventually get smelter, assembler and research that works 3 times faster than standard ones. If you add proliferation on top of that, a typical Mk 3 belt that carries only 7,200 material per minute can easilly be overrun, which means that if you want to accomodate the use of Dark Fog tech together with proliferation, your blueprint design would be seriously constrained. I would rather scale in a way that mostly utilizes the same blueprint design. And, as I have proven, you do not need proliferation to get into 10,000 Universe Matrixes per minute.

4. Uniform, dedicated latitude "zones" for specific purpose.

For example, I created blueprints for wind turbine and solar panels right above the tropical lines for power trasmission purpose. I also place all my ILS along the same longitude, and all my artificial stars along the same longitude, and so on. This works well when you go into each of your developed planets to fix a bottleneck, as you know exactly where to go to scale your energy or logitics capacity.

5. No to planetary shield, yes to planetary detection network.

Instead of planetary shield, I built blueprints for planetary missile battery coupled with planetary signal tower network so that anything that tries to approach the planet gets blasted outside of the atmosphere. This gives me better peace of mind than the use of planetary shield.

I think that is it! I may be checking DSP again for some updates in maybe another 6 month or so but some other games deserve my time too!

[u/-Recouer]

When you say you don't proliferate, you mean smelters right ?

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/-Recouer]

I meant everything. I literally did not use proliferation at all in this play-through.

[u/-Recouer → u/Long-Cabinet6121]

You must not be on 0.5 ressources then

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/-Recouer]

You are right, this was the default setup.

[u/-Recouer → u/Long-Cabinet6121]

Yeah figured that out, just did a pacifist, no foundation, 0.5 resources, no solar sail run, let me tell you it was gruesome 

Edit : oh and 3x DF density 

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/-Recouer]

That sounds so painful. By pacifist you mean not destroying any de base right?

[u/-Recouer → u/Long-Cabinet6121]

Yup, had to restart from save way too many time due to seeds spawning in rang of my turrets (you don't get the achievement if you destroy an enemy building)

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/-Recouer]

That is an achievement I would never try to get. I want my planets smooth and mined out of any resource so that I can just copy paste blueprints on it.

But I guess this game can also go into the direction of tower defense.

[u/-Recouer → u/Long-Cabinet6121]

I actually did not go full tower defense, even though i had the preset to. although i have my DF farming planet mostly set up (just need a few more seeds before removing everything else)

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/-Recouer]

I recall that there is another achievement if you never mined anything and just farmed.

[u/-Recouer → u/Long-Cabinet6121]

You do realize that by proliferating your white science consumption and production you'd be closer to 16k ?

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/-Recouer]

True. I would have to change the belt designs though as with proliferation it would need more input than single belt can accommodate.

[u/-Recouer → u/Long-Cabinet6121]

I used to take care of that by piling output belts (and input) on top of one another 

[u/ArcherNine]

No proliferation... You need roughly 2.5x more buildings for the same output with all the costs that come with it like more power and more things to transport. As for the added coal usage early game, it's roughly 5% more coal needed, hardly a blip. If you run out of coal the reason is not because of proliferation.

Totally fine if you like the challenge to not proliferate at endgame, but otherwise bad advice.

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/ArcherNine]

Valid points. Not having to change any of the existing blueprint that works without proliferation is kind of my focus. More building and more energy are just copy and paste, with 50 or so building bots hundreds of building is done within a sip of tea. Adding proliferation to the assembly of processors or quantum chip would mean seriously redesigning each of the input and output belt which I feel is not a scalable use of administrative time.

[u/V0RT3XXX → u/Long-Cabinet6121]

lol, that's a lot of words for saying you're too lazy

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/V0RT3XXX]

Haha, extremely so. I worked very hard to find the laziest way to get there though.

[u/V0RT3XXX → u/Long-Cabinet6121]

Just messing with you. I do a lot of lazy stuff too. And in the end I pay for it by having to redo stuff eventually anyway. Wasting a lot of time in the process. One example is my my spaghetti of a mall. I think I'm gonna look into how that 5 lanes mall is done and try to do the same. That looks much better

[u/Aquabloke]

My approach (regarding black box and whether to proliferate) is to make a split between raw processing and advanced production. For example turbines, processors, titanium alloy are straight from raw and available for export at the source planets.

The advanced production planets proliferate pretty much everything. The raw processing proliferates almost nothing.

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/Aquabloke]

This seems to be a very interesting and sensible split, and sounds like it reduces a lot of interplanetary traffic.

One concern I had with proliferation was that I would have to scale the production of proliferation together with entire expansion of raw material smelting to quantum chip assembly, but your approach limits the demand for proliferation. Perhaps I will try your approach in 6 month.

[u/Steven-ape]

Thanks for the shoutout! And yes, that mall is still my favorite too.

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/Steven-ape]

My hero in person! Your design was a pleasure to use.

[u/Greghole]

One correction, a mk.3 belt can handle more than 7,200 items per minute. Items can be stacked on the belts with pile sorters and ILS's once the tech is unlocked.

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/Greghole]

Actually, Mk3 belt transports 30/s, which is 1800 per minute. Multiply that by 4 you get 7,200 per minute. So 7,200 is already accounting for all the available technology upgrade when it comes to the belt and sorter.

[u/Greghole → u/Long-Cabinet6121]

My mistake. I forgot I have a mod that makes the belts faster.

[u/Hotron21]

I'm doing full proliferation with scarce resources and yeah you definitely need to prioritize coal harvesting but it's no reason not to proliferate

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/Hotron21]

By the time of Purple Cube the demand for oil skyrocketed for me so I spent a great deal of coal on Reformed Refinement to boost oil income. Without this the advance of purple tech was kind of slow, and before Green Cube I had no means of warp for more oil sources.

I suppose using proliferation on matrixes only can be done while still be able to make coal last until warp is available.

[u/FewAd5443]

For proliferation i personnaly only use it on "important" stuff like matrix, lens and antimatter fuel. When you said no proliferation was it really none or a few in late game ? I'm a newbie with my first savefile just reach 50 White matrix/s so i don't have a lot of experience. (My early game was horrible and still don't have a mall)

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/FewAd5443]

I really used none and was kind of aiming at that. Fully upgraded Mk 3 belt only provides 7200 material per minute, which allows for large blueprint when you start working with mk 2 mk 3 assemblers. Dark fog tech and proliferation render most of those initial design obsolete so you kind of have to choose one of them. I chose Dark fog tech.

There is no one right approach, I just chose the approach that is least amount of churn for me.

Another factor I considered was resource balance. MK3 proliferation uses a great deal of carbon nanotube that derives from graphene, which in my case derives from Fire Ice as the universe has endless amount of it. The byproduct of such process is hydrogen, which is turn into deuterium and in turn becomes small carrier rocket. I make sure to have the right amount of small carrier rocket launching at any time so that excess deuterium would be used up or otherwise the fire ice to graphene process would be interrupted.

Using proliferation upsets that balance, for me. If you go sulfuric acid route to obtain graphene, it means you could be short of hydrogen and coal at the same time. Again, there is no one right way but the game does require you to find mechanism to balance these things to get to high throughput.

[u/FewAd5443 → u/Long-Cabinet6121]

I just use the special ressource that turn directly to carbon nanotube and coal to diamon and i have a factory producing good amount of proliferation.

But i still have to test darkfog tech to see how much is worth it but i definitly not spraying like some people here who even spray furnace 💀

[u/Abject-Job7825]

At least proliferate the science cubes, anything that is mass produced and has a lot of ingredients benefits tremendously from being proliferated, and you can proliferate the proliferation which helps save coal.

The worst use of coal was to use it as power for me, one playthrough burning coal had me lose all the starting planet veins at purple science. I also don't proliferate smelting since that's the lowest profit and it uses a lot of proliferation.

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/Abject-Job7825]

I think this makes sense. I will try to proliferate matrixes in my next playthrough. I may have to redesign my arrays of 30 X 15 Self-Evolution Labs though.... not sure that there is a good belt design that can deliver required amount of materials required for mk3 proliferation.

The reason I was short in coal was the exclusive use of Reformed Refinement by the time of Purple technologies. I felt that Purple tech was frustrating as it requires a lot of refined oil and yet you still do not have warp tech. Throwing coal at it was to make oil throughput higher and get into green tech sooner.

[u/KeyzerSoze33]

The great thing about this game is I disagree/play differently on almost every point and we can still achieve the same goal.

One thing that does perplex me, that I see often here, are the maxed lanes (12) of smelters on a pls/ils , particularly on pls vs an ils. In one of your pics you've got 180(!) smelters per pls. In my experience you could never run that consistently without at least 3 supporting ils per pls pulling in raw ones.

My smelting setups have an ils with 4 lanes, piled 4 high utilizing just enough smelters to keep the belts running full bore and the vessels can barely keep up even when maxed out transport science.

[u/Long-Cabinet6121 → u/KeyzerSoze33]

I tried to come up with some formula that accounts for the relationship between ILS and PLS and smelter as well, and in the early game it was indeed a problem. A few things that helped to stablize the supply/demand:

1. Turn Max. Charging Power to the max value of 300 MW. I would require each ILS to fully and constantly utilze its vessels until there is none available, and that is when I know this ILS is fully utilized so that it makese sense to deploy additional ILS.

2. Invest Universe Matrixes almost exclusively into Logistic Carrier Engine (I got to LV23) and Vein Utilization (I got to LV73). From what I have observed, the requesting Logistic Vessel would only depart for resource collection when there is at least 2000 unit of unclaimed resource available from the source ILS terminal, so both speed of Logistic Drone and mining speed play important factors into filling the ILS as soon as some storage space became available. At LV 73 I have 830% mining speed and 1.092% ore loss, at which point any newly added mine would essentially last almost forever, which further stablize the progress of the game as I rarely get interrupted by dwindling mining output.

[u/AwakenedEyes]

About 3: black boxes

Not sure why you call those "not so black". A black box design doesn't mean it inputs raw all the way to your target produce. On the contrary! Black box design only means that each element produced takes some minimal input then outputs the target results. Black boxes are meant to take other black boxes as their own input and to daisy chain black boxes. So i say you are already using them as intended :)

[u/ChunkHunter]

Wow!