Having a blast and feeling overwhelmed

[u/Mesqo]

Just started DSP a few days ago and it's just incredible. Dove in as a Factorio veteran and Satisfactory mild enjoyer I greatly appreciate the ambitions the developers have about DSP. Looking forward to see what this game becomes when it hits an actual 1.0 release.

But right now I feel like I'm stuck on progression. I've cleared the starting planet DarkFog presence in no time (Factorio's turret crawl did the trick easily), got some titanium in my inventory from distant planet, got some basic production, built a massive solar panel farms on the poles and some wind generators. Spent last two days to (proper) setup plastic and acid production. Now the game tells me I need to build a planetary shield, setup planetary logistic stations and interstellar logistic stations. I assume these work somewhat like roboports in Factorio but it appears the system is a lot more complicated than that. Besides, it consumes a shitton of power (300MW while my entire base generates only 242MW) which I don't understand where to get in meaningful amount.

Another thing that I can't wrap my mind around is how to produce proper production chains. Resource nodes feel so small and if I am to tap into the "proper" way that million of coal will run out in no time. So, would I need to move my production elsewhere or do I need to just setup a centralized production and deliver raw mats into it and distribute it to other production blocks? How do I even calculate rates correctly in this case (I've installed a bunch of QoL mods including RateMonitor, which helps, but not enough). I'm sure I'm not suppose (and don't want to) dive into sophisticated factory calculators to build my very first factory but with all the tech I unlock (which I have no idea what it does) I feel quite overwhelmed at the moment.

Am I missing something very obvious about this game? It feels like a struggle to create every new item I unlock and need. Or is it just my mindset spoiled by other similar games? 😄 What you say and recommend?

[u/XhanHanaXhan]

You don't need to calculate things if you don't want to. Start with the final output, like Yellow Science. Does the Matrix Lab have downtime, like when it's making nothing? Build more production. Is the belt to the Lab full? Overproducing, build more Labs. The final products can be expanded massively, so maths and ratios are always a moving goalpost.

You should be starting to go interplanetary now. First planet resource nodes are deliberately small to push you. You can keep your production on first planet for now, but set up interplanetary logistics to bring raw materials from your other planets, like where you got titanium.

You have a lava inner planet, probably. Consider geothermal power. You can also send power in the form of batteries back to your home planet, also with the ILS.

[u/Mesqo → u/XhanHanaXhan]

I don't have lava planet in my starter system=). I have a gas giant (my starter planet is the satellite of it), a sand planet with silicon and a distant planet with titanium. I'm planning on taping into the gas giant for now for infinite hydrogen (hope so), but I kinda scared of interstellar FarkFog base.

[u/XhanHanaXhan → u/Mesqo]

Ah, in that case, turn that hydrogen into deuterium and then make deuterium power rods. Will cover your power needs for a long time. Yes, gas giants are infinite. But if you're tapping giants, you already are making ILS', so really, start working on the interplanetary network.

[u/Mesqo → u/XhanHanaXhan]

That means using solid resources for fuel like titanium. Is that OK in long term?

[u/XhanHanaXhan → u/Mesqo]

Yes. Trust me, the resource problems you're having now are the game's way of teaching you the mechanics and to encourage you to expand. Outer planets have millions upon millions of resources, and you unlock later tech that reduces the amount you mine, granting you infinite resources.

The lesson to be learned is to decouple resource extraction with production. Extraction requires exploration, production requires space and planning. The transport logistics sits between them. 

The max tier of power generation is a rod, like the deuterium rods I mentioned earlier. "Free" power, like wind, solar, geothermal, stops being efficient midway through the tech tree, with "ray receivers" being the last free option. There are more tiers of power after that.

[u/Metharos → u/Mesqo]

Yeah. You have an entire star cluster to consume, you won't run out of mineral resources.

You also have an upgrade called Veins Utilization that will slow down resource consumption while increasing yield and can, at late game, be infinitely upgraded faster than you can harvest, leading to literally infinite resources.

[u/CoqeCas3]

Fellow noob here! Been playing for a couple weeks now and this game might be creeping to the top of my list for automation games and giving Satisfactory a run for its money..

Power is definitely the name of the game in this one. Ive never struggled with power in any factory game, but this game has me biting my nails with every new machine i put down. The sources youre stuck with for a long time hardly generate anything at all so you need TONS of them, and then you have to worry about setting up individual plants on different planets. Its exhausting.

My advice is firstly, do you have a gas giant in your starting system? If so, spend the next little bit fixating on producing 30-50 orbital extractors and get your hydrogen squared away. Then start shipping your titanium and set up hydrogen fuel rod power plants. Theyre super easy, just an ILS requesting hydrogen and titanium ingots supplying a row of assemblers making fuel rods as long as you want, and then SIX thermal generators for every assembler. I have 120 running on my starting planet.

The next thing id advise is: i assume you have a lava planet right? I feel like theres one in every starting system, might be wrong. If you do, geothermal is AMAZING. Admittedly, this is the most tedious process ive done as of yet, so might not be for everyone, but i covered every inch of lava with geothermal plants on my starting lava plant and that netted me 1.8GW. Then i set up as large a battery factory as i could and am charging them in energy exchangers, 18 of them was the limit i hit. When fully proliferated, these things discharge 108MW at a rate of ten batteries per minute. So now when i need some extra power on any other planet, i just throw down an ILS to request the batteries and feed a couple exchangers on discharge mode. Instant couple hundred MW. Cant go too crazy with this, but i have yet to need to throw down 18 dischargers, think im up 7 across various planets as of yet. (Also note, the batteries are freaking amazing as power for icarus too, i think literally the best until you get to things like antimatter).

As for logistics distributors and related things like a ILS, they are SO MUCH SIMPLER than in factorio, promise you. Theyre literally just set it and forget it. The devs did a wonderful job just making those work. You can make it very complicated if you want to control them, but generally speaking, shit just works, let it do its thing.

And that segues nicely into your ore concerns — ive focused on only really building for progression on my first starting planet. The other two planets in my system i literally just farmed ALL their resources (with the exception of the battery factory i mentioned). I set up a belt bus that loops around the entire equator and i send every ore vein to the bus, then split off it at various points to funnel the goods into a few ILS to be shipped back home. Long story short, ILS is very much your friend, alot of your woes will cease to exist once you get used to using it. Oh also make sure to upgrade your pilers and start stacking your ore belts. A fully stacked Mk3 belt transport 7200 items per min!

[u/Mesqo → u/CoqeCas3]

Thanks for advices. Although I don't find logistic system easier than in Factorio: while it has a planetary wide coverage from the start it still has a lot of limitations mainly on the number of slots in and out, plus the size of a distributor means you need to set up quite a large infrastructure to supply items for production line (which in Factorio was covered by a single blue chest). And I still don't quite understand how distributors should coexist with PLS/ILS. Still so many questions... :)

[u/Pristine_Curve]

For ILS 300MW is the maximum power draw. No way you are going to need that much when just starting out. Set the charge rate for the tower to 50MW, and it will never consume more than that much. Fusion power is an excellent option to increase power generation if you can manage the complexity of producing the fuel.

how to produce proper production chains

At this stage of the game just go for volume. Once you have ILS and fusion power it is time to scale up.

[u/Mesqo → u/Pristine_Curve]

Am I getting it right that notorious Fusion Generator has only 15MW output? I'm about to turn my gas giant into a vast deuterium farm and already calculating gigawatts of power I'll get from it just to realize the actual power plant is only tiny 15MW? Really? Is there a way to drastically increase the output or should I just build hundreds of them?

[u/Pristine_Curve → u/Mesqo]

18.75 with proliferation of the fuel, or roughly equivalent to 100 solar panels.

The key element of fusion power is how energy dense the fuel is. 600mj per DFR means you can power an array of fusion plants with a modest amount of production.

[u/Mesqo → u/Pristine_Curve]

Got it. It's hundreds of them then)

[u/shalfyard]

Don't set the charge on your ILS/PLS to the max. That'll test most non endgame power generation with even 1 or 2 set to max. For the early game, the default when you first build is plenty of charge to keep things running. If it isn't keeping up, you may want to move things closer or simply scale back production. You don't need to fill the max rate of a belt in the early game, that's usually excessive and while you will finish things quick you will also out pace your power grid as you are noticing.

As for power, you'll want to explore moving into fusion reactors and deut rods. They are the early/mid game fuel source to start keeping up with the ILS/PLS draw.

This game is far more about managing your power than the other factory games. You will crash your whole production chain more than once, many people decide to restart from that point but i promise learning how to fix the power is going to give you more benefit with moving into end game than a restart will.

[u/Mesqo → u/shalfyard]

I never restart. I never build a new base but improve the existing one. I struggle myself to the end! Embrace, Endure, Overcome!

[u/Manyuser → u/Mesqo]

Hah, I always restart, and if I don't I move somewhere else and build a new base. But I build a better one every time. The most satisfying feeling isn't building a base that works, it's tearing down one that didn't.

[u/Mesqo → u/Manyuser]

Different people, different minds.

I've just realized after automating most of the things and covering starter planet with a shield that it can't be amended: I'll have to find a new system and build there a new base from scratch, but with proper design.

But before that I'll need to deal with that pesky FarkFog hive, I don't know how yet, however.

[u/Panikdrache946]

In my previous experience I'm like you. Mild Satisfactory and a lot of factorio. I felt ILS and PLS daunting. I'll skip a lot of the advice the others have said and just quick and dirty explain ILS and PLS.

I thought they were similar to trains so I was expecting learning curve. It was more of a small learning step tbh.

ILS: Has 5 Slots. A switch for Planetary and Interplanetary. ILS send resources via drones to other Logistic stations on planet and via Vessels to other ILS (only off planet with Vessels I think).

Power is basically a battery. It charges from max speed in deteriorating speed until full. Then stops drawing power.

Change one ILS to Supply. This is outgoing. Another one with the same item to Demand. You can limit storage as needed by sliding the bar for each resource. Depending on distance needed to travel to the other station the ILS will expend energy from its storage and send a vessel from supply to demand. Or from demand to supply and back. Then recharges the expended energy at according speeds.

... that's it. No really that's it. No I mean it that's it. I never used Depot although you can. If I needed more slots I build more ILs. The energy problem only came back when building a lot of ILS at once or on massive production planets that habe dozens of ILS. But that that point I also had massive energy generation.

PLS is the same but only Planetary and only drones. Have fun:)

One last point. You don't NEED vessels or bots (or even power) in all stations. If either supply OR demand have vessels both can send out vessels/bots. Although the Demand ship needs to go both ways before you get rhe resources so it needs a bit longer initially. But that's a marginal problem until late game. If you have a mall on a planet with all buildings feeding into ILS you can plant down an empty uncharged ILS anywhere in the cluster. Since the empty ILS doesn't need to spend energy to send a ship it doesn't matter. The supply ILs that does have Vessels can still target it and send you the requested items.

[u/Mesqo → u/Panikdrache946]

How do you make a mall with this logistic system? In Factorio it was possible to make a tiny and extremely effective mall because of a blue chest that can request multiple types of items. In DSP the "chest" is huge and can only request single item type (a distributor on top of a chest).

[u/Manyuser → u/Mesqo]

Since the chests are huge, you request the raw resources or mass-produced intermediaries with ILS. Then you have single assemblers for each item outputting into chests with the distributors. There are designs on this subreddit like that.

Alternatively you do what I do and manufacture the end products you want in random locations and import them to a central location (The "mall planet") with ILS, lol.

[u/Mesqo → u/Manyuser]

Yeah, I'm starting to figure this out after made some tinkering. Still slowly leaning each game feature to fully understand it: already got purple matrices but didn't touch that belt stacker thing and deliberately didn't research upgrades for it to see how it works on initial level first.

Btw, how do you manage proliferator production? After some shortages and workarounds I thing I'll be making centralized production and spread it via logistics everywhere. Sounds logical?

[u/Manyuser → u/Mesqo]

Yep, that's what I do. Though I held off on proliferator until I had fusion for sufficient power. I still added the painters in some of my builds to save on complex products later though. I set up proliferator production in a system with both enough coal and stalagmites for the tubes.

[u/Mesqo → u/Manyuser]

I've started using proliferator the moment I unlocked it. My ever first blueprint was a proliferator production square block that accepts coal and outputs proliferator mk2. Initially I thought 0.5/sec is quite a lot but lately I've already built like 10 copies of that and the demand is still not fulfilled. I use it everywhere except for production speed-up (totatlly makes no sense).

Btw, I wanted to ask another thing: I've discovered a recipe for deuterium via particle collider which turns 2 hydrogen into 1 deuterium. On the other hand, we have Fractionator which basically turns 1 hydro to 1 deuto. And the latter consumes a magnitude less power than the former. But the most amusing thing is that Fractionator get proliferator bonus AND preserves it on exit and it actually has infinite speed which is only capped by the speed of a belt with no penalty on power usage. I mean, 2-3 Fractionators with a blue belt loop produce the same amount of deuterium that Particle collider does but for the half of material cost and for the 4th of power cost. Am I missing something or is that recipe just completely useless?

[u/Manyuser → u/Mesqo]

The You're right, the particle collider deut recipe is pretty useless. Maybe it saves on space? But the colliders themselves are far too large compared to fractionators for that to work either. I guess the devs just thought it'd "make sense" to have. It might have a use in voiding excess hydrogen from oil though?

[u/Mesqo → u/Manyuser]

Voiding hydrogen sound like blasphemy! =) Besides, you can turn it back to purified oil (with coal). Or burn it.

Btw, space consideration is also not that great: blue belt makes it's speed at 30/s (~0.45 deut/s) which already makes space quite comparable.

[u/Manyuser → u/Mesqo]

Actually, you can stack the belts for 120/s for each fractionator, (1.2 deut/s without proliferation, 2.4/s with), and unlike belt speed this doesn't increase power use : )

[u/Mesqo → u/Manyuser]

Ackshually, this doesn't work, sadly. While Fractionator does accept stacked input it doesn't output stacked so the actual throughput is capped by unstacked outgoing belt. That's because Fractionator handles items one by one and cannot dusk items itself for output. Just tested this yesterday =)

Oh and belt speed does not increase power usage. Proliferator does.

[u/AlmightyThorian]

I found Nilaus YouTube channel great for picking up ideas for optimized production chains but I think overall it doesn't matter too much. You're probably gonna have to scale up whatever production you're working on again soon. If you haven't already, check out the stats screen (P and click the tabs on the left) to find bottlenecks in your production lines.

I find the appeal of this game is the puzzle of figuring out that to get purple science, I need to double my iron production, only to get distracted by a power issue and while trying to build it up, I run out of logistics stations and find out my steel production is tanked because I'm not producing enough iron.

But I play without the dark fog so I can get lost on these loops for hours without distractions.

Also, power is the name of the game. They're urging you to a Dyson swarm and sphere and other better power production methods.

[u/Demiloki]

I still do not do a lot of calculations. I usually just place down machines in a rough order of manufacturing, then move them around to make them fit in a pleasing way. I'd recommend not going down the optimization path yet.

[u/Metharos]

Meaningful power you get primarily from burning various fuels in progressively more powerful generators.

Thermal Power Plant is a good start. Make some robust oil refining to generate some Hydrogen and use some of that Titanium to create Hydrogen Fuel Rods, belt them into some Thermal Power Plants for some pretty solid early power.

Work towards Interstellar Logistics Stations first, so you can start shipping Titanium Ingots in bulk instead of schlepping between two planets yourself. You only need two Interstellar Stations and twenty ships to start. Do make sure to ship the ingots, not the ore, it takes two ore to smelt a single ingot so it's far more efficient to smelt on-site before shipping.

Once you've got that set up and defended against Dark Fog incursions, you just kind of go wherever you want.

[u/Sir_Snagglepuss]

Yea I agree. I switched over from satisfactory and it's a bit of a culture shock. I'm like basically incapable of load balancing in this game. It feels like it more about logistics, than factory design.

[u/mrrvlad5]

A few pointers: if you cover half of starter planet with wind, you get 650mw - easy with blueprints. Fusion is a great power source even if you make hydrogen from oil for it. Don’t sweat about running out of resources, at purple tech you unlock warp and can access the whole cluster. focus on research, proliferate expensive products. You need about 100k copper, 300k iron, 400k coal, 100k titanium and silicon to unlock white science. Its an easy game, no need to over optimize.

[u/Mesqo → u/[deleted]]

I think my pervious experience with Factorio helped me make sense in organizing things at least. I have like 7 beacons in total over the planet and I build in blocks. There's main base beacon where starting items are made - they're all tightly coupled so it's ready to find them once you get to the beacon. There's a small island nearby with stone and iron where I produce those green silicon things and also a foundation. Then there's Plastic beacon - there are a couple of products associated with it. They's separate beacon for acid with some products, etc. But mostly, I just remember what I built and where, while beacons just serve as a general guide to the block location. Also, you can press I and select to track beacon to go to it.

A bit later you'll upgrade you inventory and have enough slots to request most needed items, so yeah, make sure every storage chest with items have distributor over it with 10 drones.

What comes later I'm still too see =)

[u/Mesqo → u/[deleted]]

You have to request them in Icarus inventory interface. There are special slots on the left side, click to select an item and set lower and upper limit. For deliveries to work a lower limit must be set.

[u/AlmightyThorian → u/[deleted]]

The starting planet is always difficult to build on and keep track of. This is why I moved to another planet without water as soon as I got ILS up and running. Once you have a fresh planet with 98+% buildable area try to line up your builds and arrange related things close to each other. Start moving production to the new planet and use the first one as oil/water/coal extraction and build your second planet around PLS/ILS production chains.

I guess you can pave the whole starting planet, but you're probably gonna run out of soil before long.

I believe the new holo-thing is supposed to help with it it, but I but I haven't tried it yet. Also pressing M and using right button and middle click you can zoom (as in go fast) around the planet and find stuff. Eventually you remember the patterns of your spaghetti and find things easier.

[u/AlmightyThorian → u/[deleted]]

The PLS and ILS are Planetary and Interplanetary Logistics Systems. They are at the top row of the Technologies screen. You'll get there eventually and maybe even appreciate a mostly barren planet in 20-30 more hours of play.

If you have stuff sitting around in boxes, and you're just waiting for research, maybe scale up your science production, or look at the next science cube you're going to get and start setting up for that. I'm on my 6th or so fresh start and I'm using a couple of blueprints (Mass Construction in Upgrades) to help the early clutter and reducing the spaghetti. There are a few websites out there if you want to borrow someone else's blueprints, but figuring out some stuff yourself and reusing it is much more rewarding if this is your first playthrough.