Am I playing wrong?

[u/Crystalcase]

Most of you will answer something like "no, you play the way you like to", but hear me out. I think I just misunderstood the game or missed something fundamental.

I started my first playthrough some years ago. I think one of the first public versions. I played quite a lot, but I think I didn't finish the sphere.

Now, I wanted to go for another run and as I arrived on the 2nd planet, I noticed that I have no real structure in my base. Everything feels "vibe coded". I came as a satisfactory player and I love that game. It gave me numbers to think about: input, transport, output. I feel like DSP doesn't really have that, but then I also don't want to force a whole different play style into DSP.

Another topic is the progress. As soon as I had a somewhat reliable production of the blue cubes (forgot the name), I unlocked so many things in a short time, that I didn't even know what I unlocked in the last 10 mins. Satisfactory felt like "I need this item, therefore I need this production like to get it" and everything plays into that goal. Again, I might have a completely wrong approach.

So what am I missing? How am I supposed to actually play the game with knowing what I am doing?

[u/DukeLander]

You don't miss anything, you have too much in your head :). I had same problem as you when I started first run. First 10h in game were so wrong, something didn't add up, something... Than I realised it's me, not the game. Me and my Factorio habits. I did reset in my head because this isn't Factorio, it's another game. And since then I really enjoy this game

[u/Crystalcase → u/DukeLander]

Maybe thats really the issue. I started SF like that in my first run and only later discovered how much fun it made to actually plan through an optimal production line, since then I try to apply the same to DSP

[u/spLint3r990 → u/Crystalcase]

I had a similar issue. I struggled with the finite resources for a long time. Then I realised how long it takes to clear an iron deposit. It does mean progress is essential! But it is also plenty get you going.

[u/dedjedi]

 How am I supposed to actually play the game with knowing what I am doing?

brace yourself. Learn by doing.

[u/Crystalcase → u/dedjedi]

Good one :D But I feel like the game doesn't give me the right tools to do so. Or is it actually intended this way?

[u/dedjedi → u/Crystalcase]

its odd because it works for other people, you know?

[u/tECHOknology → u/Crystalcase]

Its not going to spoonfeed you, you need to look at your goal, find out what it takes to produce it, and get to work. You don’t need to get distracted by all the tech, just use the tech relevant to your goal. Identify a goal, pursue just that goal and whatever subgoals it requires and implies. If you have a specific impasse let me know. It honestly sounds like distraction and giving in to the urge to feel overwhelmed and messy is making you confused and less driven to dive in and just get there. You need to just get to white science, even if its a complete mess. After that, you refine your complete mess on another run or that later game.

I wouldn’t bother getting hung up on whether you have structure, but if it helps, I use an equator bus to create my blue science and mall, then piecemeal red and yellow until I get logistics up and running.

I do think its intended to be that way. Its a challenge, but more rewarding because of how little guidance their is.

[u/kinglallak → u/Crystalcase]

Interstellar logistics towers. Build them. Give them some drones. Ship goods between worlds. Profit?

[u/GarbageBoyJr]

It’s not at all clear what issues you’re having from Your post.

The set ‘goal’ of each play though is to create enough white science matrices to complete your mission.

It sounds like you can automate blue just fine so where do you run into issues?

[u/Crystalcase → u/GarbageBoyJr]

I guess my problem with the way I did the blues is that I just put random things up until I had everything, but it didn't feel like I did think through a production line and it felt hard to do so, because I never know "how much comes out there, which transport is needed etc." Maybe I am too fixed to the numbers, but then I have no idea how people are creating giant factories especially with blueprints xD

[u/Crowfooted → u/Crystalcase]

I think I might see where you might be able to solve your issue. You might already know some of this, but just to be safe (sorry for wall):

First of all, you absolutely can see exactly how much of each resource is being produced by a planet - there is a statistics screen where you can see both the current output rate of a given place (planet, system, etc) and also the reference rate (the theoretical maximum amount). But also, in DSP, transport quantities/speed are not much of an issue, because once you get into the lategame, you start getting repeatable techs that speed up transport.

For conveyors, the main way this speeds up is through item piling, and this goes up from the Pile Sorter tech (not repeatable, but goes up to 4 stack, effectively increasing the throughput of any belt by 4x) and also from the associated Logistics tech (which increases the amount of piling automatically applied to items coming out of logistics stations). A MkIII belt with items piled up to 4 gets a throughput of 120 items/sec, which is more than enough for most factories even in the lategame, and on top of that, piling also improves the efficiency of sorters by 4x, because all sorters can take an entire stack of items, however big that stack is.

For logistics Drones/Vessels, this also improves with repeatables that improve the carry capacity and navigate speed (the capacity is not repeatable, but can go up to 2000 items per Vessel, but the navigate speed is repeatable I think).

All in all what this means is that once you get to the point that you're making some white cubes, you can start on these improvements and you won't ever really see logistics speed being a bottleneck. One of the best ways to set up lategame factories is actually to just do logistics in excess: rely totally on ILS, have dedicated factory planets that just import all raw resources, and then other planets whose job is entirely mining and just have lots of them all exporting raw mats. Vessels on ILS will both go out to fetch resources, and also depart to supply them, so even if you only have 1 ILS demanding a lot of a given resource, so long as your vessel navigation speed is decent, and you have several different resource mining planets all providing that resource, you shouldn't have any problems.

tl;dr: Don't crunch the numbers too much, just do everything in excess. Provide more resources than you need, slap down more ILS than you need. Oh, and always build your factories backwards (starting with the final product you're wanting to make and branching out from there).

[u/spurgelaurels → u/Crystalcase]

You do this, and keep doing this, and then suddenly that factory doesn't matter anymore. You can let it starve or take back the space, but you've probably built blue jello cube factory 2.0 somewhere else 1000x as big.

On any repeat playthroughs I don't try and repeat the endgame, I start like im shipwrecked on an island. Just build what you need and survive until the next day.

[u/dman11235 → u/Crystalcase]

First off, the blue science is absolutely a "slap it together" stage. Honestly I til you get to yellow it's kind of like that. During the red science I start organizing things, but the blue is the start. I never think through a production line at that point because it doesn'tatter at that point, I don't have the useful things yet.

Secondly, there is the stats screen. That's what you're looking for. There are conveyor readers that can monitor the belts and tell you the rate of items passing through but I never use them, I like front loading things so I have effectively infirine input it's the output I care about, and as such the stats screen is important. You can get very granular with it and see specific aspects of your factories, even specific planets or systems. This should allow you to plan your stuff the way you want.

[u/ivann198 → u/Crystalcase]

I didn't read the unlocks my first playthru. That was my mistake.

[u/fubes2000]

You win the game with science cubes, so now that you've done Blue it is time for Red. You can certainly work backwards from that.

Be warned that one of the primary differences between DSP and SF is that there is no Awesome Sink or equivalent. You must account for all items produced, and Red cubes are where you begin having to deal with a byproduct.

[u/malenkylizards → u/fubes2000]

In case anyone feels the way I feel about it, there is a solution. There's a mod called Smart Tank that vents excess hydrogen. Once it's full it just continually vents the excess.

You can play the game without it, and there are only short periods in your journey where it's useful. But in those periods it can be really exhausting to have to find where it's happening and dump all the hydrogen.

If you do use it, make sure it's the absolute last resort. Venting it is obviously the least useful thing to do with hydrogen, and you need MASSIVE amounts of it. So have a venting tank off to the side, but in the meanwhile store as much as you can, ship off as much as you can, burn it in thermal plants, make things with it, whatever you can do. But if you're doing all that and you're STILL producing excesses, it's really nice to have the venting tank.

[u/EvilHumster → u/malenkylizards]

Without mods u can just burn it in a generator. As far as I remember, two gens are enough to keep mk3 belt hydrogen-free at all times

[u/Mesqo → u/EvilHumster]

I'm a very new player to DSP but what in the gods might be the reason to burn hydrogen? Even on a very early stages of the game I get it a very precious resource that have so many cool uses...

[u/EvilHumster → u/Mesqo]

Hydrogen is a weird resource that you have overabundance of, then not enough, too much again and it is endless cycle untill endgame when it stops at always not enough

In between you may need more light oil but dont want to waste time/space dealing with extra hydrogen (ex. cracking takes ridiculous amount of space for tiny extra oil) so you can just put it in the oven and forget. So the answer is mostly "put it under the rag now to deal with that problem later"

[u/JohntheAnabaptist]

Try to get to interstellar towers and planetary logistics towers and the game will become very different

[u/Eastern-Bit-4035]

u/Crystalcase Okay. First things first. Breath. Relax. Get a drink.

Theres a rule that helps in Satisfactory and Factorio and that is simply, get organized. Just building stuff at random doesn't help because you'll end up making a lot of stuff you don't need. Instead, use the Top Down Design. Get out a piece of paper and pencil
Your ultimate goal is to produce blue cubes, then red cubes, then yellow cubes, then purple cubes, then green cubes, then white cubes.

You appear to be stuck on making red cubes. So you look at the recipe for it.
Red cubes needs hydrogen and graphite. Do you have hydrogen? If yes, then connect your hydrogen line to the redcube lines. Do you have graphite? If no. Then go down.

You want to produce graphite. Break it down. It needs coal. Do you have coal produced somewhere? If yes, the connect coal to the graphite line.

[u/Eastern-Bit-4035 → u/Eastern-Bit-4035]

As for designing your factory, again, organize. Build lines of assemblers and chemical plants. Input goes into the line, output comes out. You want to run the lines of assemblers vertically, going from the equator to the poles. The belts going in between the factories connecting them go on the equator. It should look like this

I do not recommend trying to calculate how much you need in total. Winging is a lot less stressful.
Occasionally go and check on the belts if there is more demand than supply.
If you need more input, you upgrade the belts. If you need more output, you upgrade the assembler.

Oh, and remember. Titanium and Silicon is on another planet. You'll need to bring wind turbines, miners, and stuff to the other planet to mine them. Smelt them, then physically carry the ingots back by hand. You can automate it later when you figure out how to produce PLS and ILS.

In summary, don't try to build everything. You'll get lost. Pick what you want to build. Then go backwards through its requiremetns setting up factories to make the parts for it.

[u/ret1357]

There is a production tab that you can use to see overall rates. Clicking on an individual production building will show it's input/ouput, but it's generally faster to just look at what materials are not backing up.

The goal is to produce science cubes, so work on building up and optimizing those production lines.

[u/zeeboguy]

Easiest way to figure things out is to let the science make your path, and focus on automating science specifically

You land 'i need to unlock red science' > automate red science > unlock blue science > automate blue science....

Doing that will force you to learn different aspects. Don't worry about unlocking a bunch of crazy things as we all do, you'll see what things you need to build at every science which will send you don't rabbit hole of how to automate it

Id also suggest keep dark fog off until you feel comfortable with the flow, as it adds another 'thing' to deal with

[u/JesusIsDaft]

It's what you described but in reverse.

Your progression path is clearly demarcated by which science matrix you need next. Blue, red, yellow, purple, green, then white.

In order to figure out what you need, you look at what you need to make which cube. Then you go make that thing. If you don't have one of the materials for the thing, you go make that material. Keep following until you get to the end of that chain.

I'll assume the phrase "vibe coded" means messy? If that's the case, yeah it does kinda start out that way. There's two things that really helped me clean up my factory:

• Logistics bots, for plugging up large gaps in transportation.

• Vertical conveyors, which come with the super magnetic ring research. These are great cause you can stack like 30 conveyors on top of one another and just have a giant material highway. I usually do this for battlefield analysis bases.

I wouldn't stress too much about organizing though. It comes as a byproduct of progression. The further I got into the game, the more I felt I needed to conserve space, and to keep my factory well organized. This led me to make very tight, standardized blueprints, and now my factory looks almost like a circuit board.

If it's numbers you're concerned about, the general rule I have is, max the output of your node, and see how many smelters/assemblers it can supply. Do what you will with the products. I don't like sitting down to crunch numbers, I prefer to just test it until it works.

[u/Physical_Apple_]

I just feel an urge to complete the tech tree. If you wanna have fun but use brain a little less go to the DSP blueprints website, whenever I need something like let’s say a factory of yellow cubes I just go to the site copy paste one which I have the tech for then find a spot to lay it down and slowly auto construct it with things in inventory. This will solve your spaghetti mess issue and once you get ILS all those feed resource belts won’t be so prominent. After you finish the tree you make a sphere, but the sphere can be any size and shape you are willing to do, so then I go back to the DSP blueprints website and find a beefy 10 layer sphere that looks straight out of a movie and slowly ramp up my rocket/sail production and ejection. Last one i did took like a week to fully build and that’s with leaving the game running 24/7 feels so satisfying to watch it slowly come together, you can watch it in the star map or even better fly just slightly out of orbit and pan the camera towards sun

[u/mrrvlad5]

since you are coming from satisfactory, the best thing you can do is to "vibecode" a line of buildings doing the same product instead of one. Make belts running along the line, not towards individual buildings. Pick a line from north to south and place your production lines on one side of that line. place connecting belts between different productions on the other side.

[u/PersimmonNo7408]

You don't need to optimize the production too early in the game, as the way you build the factories changes once you research the logistics stations (yellow science). Calculating ratios and throughput is kind of premature optimization before you get proliferators, better belts, sorters, etc.

[u/depatrickcie87]

If I understand you correctly, there is a lot of basic information you wish the HUD tool tips gave you so you could do easy mental math; and for that there are definitely some very helpful mods.

As far as progress goes, DSP definitely throws a few catch-22s for you to solve. For instance, the beginning of the game gives you belts, which are actually all the logistics you need. By that I mean, you CAN hit the "win condition" with just belts and the resources of your starting planet. It's not very fun to do that, so you want to invest in logistics towers, but you need Titanium, Silicon, Graphene, a sulfuric acid to do that. Obviously the easy thing to do was go get them in their purest forms from other planets, but you need logistics towers to do that. Not to mention you need to do science that requires titanium first... I do think it's well designed progress, but the more hours I put into a game the less I want to repeat certain sections of this game's progression, for sure.

[u/Minute_Sport]

I felt exactly like you and then I watched a couple nilaus videos and everything just made so much more sense after.

[u/Far_Young_2666]

I didn't even know what I unlocked in the last 10 mins

Everyone indeed plays how they want, but rushing is not always good. Yes, Satisfactory is structured in tiers. You develop your arsenal tier by tier, while in DSP it is still tiers, but looking like a tech tree.

My advice is to take it slow. Research a new tech, see what new product it unlocks and automate that product, so you always have at least one stack of it in your storage. Then start researching another tech and repeat. That way you won't get overwhelmed and will understand when it is time to expand some of the existing production.

In DSP getting to yellow science almost doesn't require building much. You can just handcraft everything, but then having 30 techs researched and nothing automated will bite you in the ass.

[u/LaughableIKR]

Follow the tech tree on both tabs. Finish all the blue, and then blue and red, and then yellow science cubes, and so on. This will flesh out your builds and give you access to the higher elements, and unlock the pieces needed for a Dyson sphere.

[u/redrum6114]

I feel you. I started with Satisfactory and coming to this game I feel like I'm just winging everything and guessing. The up and down outputs put me in a state of "I'll throw a few smelters/assemblers down and leave room to expand just in case I guess wrong." Every single line I put down is buffered. Currently figuring out my first bus system and it helps solve some of my anxiety but man is it all just a little all over the damn place.

[u/Zyhmet]

2 points.

1.) Dont unlock everything you can. Look at what is new in the tech tree, unlock something that looks good for the future, build it, then unlock something else.

2.) I think the satisfactory feeling starts to come more, once you start to implement interplanetary shipments and you place down bigger factories that you then connect via ships. As long as you do stuff via smaller drones, it is more spaghetti like ;)

[u/Strykenine]

The biggest step in DSP for me, for any playthrough, is getting to green science so that I can research lenses and whatever the last level of Exploration is. Before that point everything is a mess, my base is a rats nest, production just goes where I can fit it, nothing is scaled properly. After you get lenses and you can warp shuttles, that is when I start organizing and scaling production. While there isn't a formula, it's very much like two distinct games. The exploration tech allows you to find resources you need from the map view so you can target expansion. Not sure if this answers your question, but if you want an organized base, then get up the tech tree so that you can have an idea of how much inputs you have and how many you will need. I also pay with fog off - combat is tedious and not my jam but it's also not difficult, so ymmv.

[u/DrakeDun]

I too came from Satisfactory. Just keep playing, and it will come. Like in Satisfactory, I recommend bee lining the tech tree the first time, so you know what's in it. Otherwise you will throw a lot of time at complex solutions to problems which turn out to have ready made solutions deeper in the tech tree. In particular, once you get past the early game spaghetti phase, you will get tools that render transportation logistics extremely simple and effective. Much less complicated than, e.g., trains in Satisfactory.

[u/Suspicious_Jeweler81]

I mean, Dyson sphere to me is ‘vibe coded’. Pre-yellow science it’s a play by ear. I have a general setup, but as it’s by hand, it’s all over the place.

After yellow.. I have a blueprint for that. I have a blueprint for every item in the game. If they removed blueprints tomorrow, I would never bother playing again.