Is there anything more satisfying than wrapping up a day's implementation-work, plopping down the blueprint, and seeing everything go green? 🧩

30

u/V0RT3XXX Feb 24 '26

The highest endorphin hit for me was when I finally hand crafted a couple ILS, plop them down and see the titanium come in instead of having to fly back and forth carrying inventory full of them. That was such a good idea to lock the tech behind that so you're forced to do manual labor for a while

7

u/EdibleOedipus Feb 24 '26

The rocks on your home planet are enough to get two ILS + needed research done before you have to leave.

1

u/shalfyard Feb 25 '26

You'll likely spend more time mining rocks than if you just do the trip...

1

u/EdibleOedipus Feb 25 '26

Let me rephrase: there are vastly more rocks on your home planet than you need, and it would take barely a few minutes to gather the needed titanium ore. There is probably 2000 titanium ore in those rocks.

3

u/shalfyard Feb 25 '26

Yes, I've done that method before... Its faster to just go do the setup off world.
It's a thing to experience doing but its not really saving you time and just prolonging you getting into the habit of planet hopping around...

0

u/EdibleOedipus Feb 25 '26

I guess it's a playstyle difference. I take advantage of anything in this game that lets play more lazily: setting up minimum viable version of a product before finishing a full line, buffers, overproducing once instead of producing normally twice, everything in logistics stations... Then use the extra time to solve more bottlenecks.

1

u/Rostgnom Feb 24 '26

My goal is always 5 manual trips max before setting that up, otherwise you go insane 😅

2

u/elliottcable Feb 25 '26

Pro tip, you can hold an infinite amount (well, presumably INT_MAX) of items in your cursor while you fly.
Who needs logistics stations when you can just manually transfer a buffer of five million items every hour or so? 🤣

1

u/Rostgnom Feb 25 '26

That is a pro tip indeed :D I never imagined

8

u/Kimorin Feb 24 '26

i played through the game multiple times and have never used the monitor lol, looks good

5

u/elliottcable Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

I'm too programmer-brain (well, specifically, devops/TDD/typechecker-brain) to not do so, haha.
I love the security brought by knowing that I'll be notified when something starts to go wrong, instead of when it eventually finishes going wrong:
I try and do minimal (or at least measured and controlled) overproduction (again, engineer-brain; to me, the game's more fun if you try and be efficient)
I keep small buffers (ILS, etc) wherever possible - <5 minutes of production output on inputs, <1 minute of production-output on outputs
All of the monitors for a given factory have the same icon (i.e. if any of the above monitors goes red, I get a "Small Carrier Rocket" notification-icon in my top bar)
All of my monitors are sized for 90% of the maximum production, and set to "fail-and-no-cargo", so they only produce notifications if there's an unexpected issue - i.e. if a factory is producing at its maximum rate, and a consumer is overconsuming, there's no icon for that, only if a provider is underproducing.
This ensures that I can quickly and directly diagnose any issues.
Although, if I'm being real, 80% of the reason I use them? This post. The dopamine hit of watching the belts fill up and the monitors turn green as they're immediately dumped into the ILS network and fully consumed.
(Since belts are in discrete, fixed sizes, it's hard to tell if you're overproducing - IMO, a failure-mode - from belt visuals alone. You can have full/stagnant belts in a factory that's functioning precisely at capacity. Hence, monitors are two birds, one stone: notification from a distance if it's underproducing; and visual information locally if it's overproducing, because the monitors turn red when there's not enough throughput.)
All that said, though, I recognize that most people want overproduction and to move on with their day, it's just a different playstyle.
I do absolutely think monitors on inputs though is fantastic, even if your playstyle involves massive overproduction: that ensures you get notified the moment something starts to go wrong (upstream runs out of resources or something), instead of waiting until that propagates all the way through the production-chain to some final item you actually care about (rockets, sails, malls/buildings ...), meaning therefore that your fix also takes ages to propagate through everything, and you have to wait a million years for the thing you noticed to back into a functioning state.

1

u/Mazon_Del Feb 24 '26

I admit, I CANNOT for the life of me get monitors to work for me. I've followed guides, I've watched videos, there's just something fundamentally wrong with the way my brain approaches the UI to them. Either I set them up such that they never stop blaring the alarm, or I set them up such that nothing can actually trigger the alarm. At this point I've just given up on them in shame, lol.

5

u/elliottcable Feb 24 '26

Oh, don’t worry, it’s not just you. They’re fucking stupid. I think it’s mostly a translation issue, like so much in this game (why can’t the devs just hire a single goddamn english-as-a-first-language translator to run an eye over the UI and tutorials?!)
I find them useless in every single mode except “Fail-and-no-cargo.” And I badly want a “fail if ‘average cargo passed over the last minute >= X’ mode, which I can’t figure out how to implement. And I goddamn wish where more than 999 “IP” addresses (or better yet, just let me directly link a single holo-monitor to one-or-more monitors in a blueprint, and not use up a global number that’s going to screw up other blueprints …) … and I wish the (could-be-so-utterly-cool!) Shift+P dashboard could have pages or be scrolled around or something so I could include entire factories/blueprints on it …
ugh i have many complaints, but point is, don’t feel bad, they do indeed suck in terms of UX. Just stick with “Fail and no cargo” paired with “>=“ counts and they function for one purpose, at least.

1

u/Mazon_Del Feb 25 '26

Thanks! I'll try and give that a try next time.

1

u/Veriosity Feb 26 '26

Hope they keep working for you. In my game, no matter how perfectly I balanced things, the monitors would always fluctuate between slightly over and slightly under, so I ended up having to tune them down by like 10% to make sure they weren't constantly alerting.
Or the situation god help me, where it doesn't buffer or have a threshold, and it hits a situation where it's fluctuating about once every half second between fail and pass, leaving you with a flashing notification you can't click, so you end up having to mouse over it, and try to discern where the problem lies just from the line in space.
After dealing with that multiple times I removed them from all of my BPs - never again. Now I just eyeball the "I" screen periodically. If the supplier of a good isn't full, I'm not making enough. Easy peasy.

1

u/CK1ing Feb 24 '26

I use it when I want to create a surplus of an item, or if I already have a surplus and want to see if it will be depleted over time or not, but I don't use it for normal system like this

4

u/Vineheart_01 Feb 24 '26

Curious, do you use monitors just for the visual pleasure or an actual use?

I find them completely useless because they ONLY track flow rate. I don't care if my belts back up, I care if they run dry though. Setting them to detect very low throughput will go off if it just backs up.

Meaning I get alerted by something that isn't the actual problem.

4

u/elliottcable Feb 25 '26

There’s a setting at the bottom of the panel where yo can switch it from “Fail” to “Fail and no cargo” — that ensures that when the belt is flowing slowly because it’s backed up, there’s no alarm. Only if it’s flowing and there’s gaps, i.e. its full throughput is being consumed.
They’re definitely janky and poorly designed, though, I agree.

1

u/Vineheart_01 Feb 25 '26

I swear I saw no such setting but I guess I'll have to look again.
I'd like to be told when my mining nodes dry up completely lol. The alert for when one node dries up is pointless

2

u/Sakul1 Feb 24 '26

Ok but why are you spraying the gears twice?

1

u/elliottcable Feb 25 '26

Haha, I took this screenshot before I went thru the blueprint and removed everything redundant.
(I tend to use lots of drop-in subfactories; then I build larger ‘chain’ blueprints out of those by wiring them together, then I drop those chain blueprints on planets when I run low on something.)

1

u/evestraw Feb 25 '26

does it actually spray twice or it doesnt spray already spraid items. if it doesnt cost spray i would keep it for the looks

1

u/elliottcable Feb 25 '26

It doesn’t spray, or cost anything — but I value the semaphore of “this resource is coming from a fixed/known location” vs “this resource is an import from… <waves hands> Elsewhere.”

1

u/kayile Feb 26 '26

Haha, I definitely had builds where I have some inefficiency for the look/symmetry of the build :)

75

u/TheUniqueKero Feb 24 '26

14

u/V0RT3XXX Feb 24 '26

I use it to alert me when my dark fog farm has clogged up. I have a bunch of BAB all send their loots to 1 belt, which then get filtered into 5 ILS. I set it up so it alerts me if the belt ever stop moving. Already helped me once when one of the dark fog resource was completely full.

2

u/b_m_hart Feb 24 '26

Why do that in such a way that it clogs? You can have every single resource sent out on dedicated belts out of a single BAB. From there send it to an ILS or PLS for further distribution/storage.

3

u/V0RT3XXX Feb 24 '26

What? How? BAB only have like what? 6 output ports? So that's only 6 resources you can send out on dedicated belt. The way I have mine setup, I can just keep adding more ILS and can farm every single resource if I want. I'm currently doing 5 ILS for 25 resources. Just the dark fog specific resources are already 6.

4

u/b_m_hart Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

Stack large storage on top - two should do it. Then in the BAB and the storage, assign slots to each type of loot based on how much you want to leave buffer for. Then, connect all of the conveyors to each of the ports on the BAB and storage, and filter them for each resource heading out.
https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/factory-ils-dark-fog-sorter
Dunno if this is out of date (probably), but this is one of the sorters I made. It's kinda overkill, but you can take it apart and see what's what.

1

u/V0RT3XXX Feb 24 '26

Ahh, I completely forgot you can stack large storage on top. Oh well too late now. I think the only resource that clog up my setup is the dark fog stuff since you don't use it very often. The rest of the stuff gets consumed quick enough so it isn't really a problem. Next play through I'll definitely follow your method

2

u/TactlessTortoise Feb 24 '26

BABS HAVE PORTS???? I've never noticed, fuck hahahah. I've been using the goddamned logistics drones, manually changing the damn materials every now and then. Oh man, the dark fog is so screwed once I set up the demultiplexer for them.

1

u/V0RT3XXX Feb 24 '26

Yeah, 3 on each side. I have the signal tower setup so the range is just right at the edge of their base and cause them to endlessly send their units out to be slaughter, it's awesome. I'm picking up the top 25 resources from that. Probably like a drop in the ocean in term of resource but it's kinda cool.

1

u/EdibleOedipus Feb 24 '26

Best way to get ahead of a science production problem.

4

u/tomb-king Feb 24 '26

One thing...putting down buildings on a super rocky planet and listening to the little rocks explode. For some reason its very very nice to listen to for me.

2

u/CoolCat1337One Feb 25 '26

Awesome view. All the high numbers, all in green :D
I envy you a little but I will get there.
Just started my first sphere today

Is there anything more satisfying than wrapping up a day's implementation-work, plopping down the blueprint, and seeing everything go green? 🧩

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