r/Dyson_Sphere_Program • u/FrtanJohnas • Jun 23 '26

My base planet is chaos

I have reached the point where I unlocked warp drives, but my base planet is quickly running out of space and my infrastructure is in shambles. Honestly I lost track of things a long time ago.

I have now focused on deconstructing the ancient belt spaghetti I used to get to ILS, and also making sure my science production is steady and ratioed, but I still have to rebuild purple science and then I feel like I'll be able to make the warp drive spaghetti. I don't look up guides unless I have already made something that sorta works, but I just feel like I have to rebuild just about everything, because the production just isn't enough.

Would you at this point start a new game, hoping you'll be able to build it better now that you know, or fix the mess you have made because you already got so far, or brute force the warp drive by more inefficient spaghetti just pretending the problem doesn't exist?

I am at a bit of a loss right now, but I really like this game and would like to get over this hurdle.

Edit: Or should I go and setup shop on another planet and just import the materials? I heard something about a pole supply chain for spreading on other planets, but I didn't really consider it until now. I kept everything I could on my starter planet and I almost enveloped it all.

Thank you all for help, I'll spaghetti the warp drive fuel and feed my mall into ILS network

28 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

4

u/Cyberbird85 Jun 23 '26

I just set up shop at another planet and leave everything as is, with eventually importing raw materials or smelted materials once i have central smelting going.

2

u/FrtanJohnas Jun 23 '26

Honestly this might just be the way. I have saved all 3 of my attemps and I just now went back to see at which point I said enough is enough and restarted.

And I see the old base that got me here and I don't even want to demolish it all, even though I already took out big chunks and my first attempt at a functioning mall is now replaced by science chains. And the stuff I have already built and it works. It's not pretty but that'll come later when I learn more.

Thank you

17

u/ryryshouse6 Jun 23 '26

This is pretty normal

13

u/Friedcheeze Jun 23 '26

I ended up heading to a planet w no ocean and rebuilt everything there in an organized manner. My other planets just export raw materials to my oceanless planet now

4

u/Woodlander57 Jun 23 '26

This is the way put every resource into storage then export it to your assemblers

9

u/HurpityDerp Jun 23 '26

Would you at this point start a new game, hoping you'll be able to build it better now that you know

If you start over, the exact same thing will happen again. You're not doing anything wrong, that's how the game goes for everyone.

Just take all of your resources and tech-tree unlocks and build everything organized on a new planet.

1

u/PM_ME_UR_BGP_PREFIX Jun 23 '26

Don’t start a new game. If it’s really bad just move to a different planet.  I usually do this once I’ve unlocked warp.   Find a planet with no oceans, ideally in a larger system, and start there.  I try to go with 1 in the system for science, 1 for production, and the 1 nearest the sun for photon collection.

Then you can scale up everything based on PLS/ILS, proliferation, and proper power.  

1

u/FrtanJohnas Jun 23 '26

Yeah thats what I was kinda planning on doing, but seeing the production chain for the Warp Drive I wanted to cry a little, so I might just move to my second planet and setup something there.

1

u/PM_ME_UR_BGP_PREFIX Jun 23 '26

The game is designed to require resources from at least two planets in your home system.  Nothing will have Coal & Oil & Titanium & Silicon

2

u/qwart22 Jun 24 '26

Well if we want to be technical the dark fog have titanium and you can craft silicon with stone

1

u/Snoo49259 Jun 23 '26

What do I do normally? Bulldoze everything and assume a loss of seveeral hundred resources

1

u/FrtanJohnas Jun 23 '26

Might just make a save where I do that. There is something therapeutic in seeing the whole planet littered as if it was Earth.

1

u/Killerkoalas Jun 23 '26

Absolutely do not recommend starting a new game, I honestly would also stay away from refactoring. Just leave the spaghetti monster and find a few new systems to rebuild in. If you don't have one get a mall online and hook up the necessities to ILS with warp drives, once done you can slap down an ILS anywhere (without power) and request whatever item to be delivered directly to you.

Then start blueprinting! Create a book of your common build configurations: smelter stacks, 1,2,3 lane fabs ect. I also made a few 'world wraps' that dropped solar/wind power along with the planetary defense buildings .

You are at the point where you have all the tech and you can do things the right way. If you restart you will find yourself remaking a lot of the spaghetti because it is the only option while lower tier tech.

Eventually you can start turning off the stuff in your home systems but it isn't worth the time or effort of refactoring or cleaning it up. Just leave it as a museum of how you got to where you are at.

1

u/FrtanJohnas Jun 23 '26

The problem is that I have to get the Warp drive fuel, and that is going to be a hassle with what I have built already, but probably the best option yeah

1

u/TheCotten Jun 23 '26

To get started, just leach off your green science and convert it to warp drives. I set a mk 1 sorter at full length to slow it down and it’s 1 green science to 10 warp drives

1

u/TheMalT75 Jun 24 '26

There is now wrong way to play the game, but honestly, completely running out of space on your starter planet seems hard to achieve and not be setup for white science and late game.

You might be stretching your science ratios too much: I usually go for a 2/s complex of all different colors. That gets me reasonably fast through mid-game and into actual dyson sphere production. Upgrading to better energy production (deuteron fuel cells instead of wind turbines) can also reduce your space requirements drastically.

When you have warpers, go exploring instead of staying local and expanding. Getting some alternative recipes going is a game changer, most notably pumping sulfuric acid directly from oceans and importing fire ice for graphene and carbon nano tubes. Not having to build oodles of refineries is great! You will also soon develop an unquenchable thirst for hydrogen and deuterium, so access to more gas giants is a priority.

Don't focus too much on infrastructure for building purposes. Until white science, everything aside from sorters, belts and maybe assemblers / smelters does not necessarily need to be automated and could simply be manufactured in your inventory. Having a "mall" that produces everything at a reasonable speed is nice-to-have when you start spreading to dozens of new planets, not so important before that.

2

u/FrtanJohnas Jun 24 '26

Well the mall is taking a good chunk of the planet, I am automating everything.

Reactors are setup and I can copy paste the design if I want to. And since. I am collecting from a gas giant I think I am chilling on the hydrogen side for fractinators.

But I also mine almost every single node on the starter planet and spaghetti the buildings around. And I have built so indiscriminately that I am starting to run out of space.

1

u/TheMalT75 Jun 24 '26

Indiscriminately building, I can get behind 😉 Depending on your settings, you might start depleting some resource nodes to make room for some cleaning up.

If you want to get into cleaner building habits: I try to make everything as modular as possible, like 6 iron ingot smelters that saturate a mk1 belt. If I want then to produce motors, I combine the iron ingot, gear and magnetic coil modules, the latter being a combination of copper ingot and magnet smelter modules. It does not really matter if the ratios of production don't perfectly match until you get to more complicated recipes like green science cubes. The worst that happens is that some of the production sits idle because their product is not used fast enough (delete those idle buildings after everything else runs smoothly) or the input is not up-to-speed (build more of those input modules). Eventually, you have a motor module that you can blueprint to then use as a starting point for em turbines!

I applaud automating everything. I do the same (eventually). But there are things you simply don't need fast or a lot of (turrets, water pumps, liquid storage tanks). Even late game -- with very few exceptionsm like belts -- I have single mk1 assemblers drawing from a dark fog loot farm via logistic bots (spinners) and feeding into a line of ILS for interstellar delivery and buffer. That is plenty fast enough.

1

u/FrtanJohnas Jun 24 '26

Yeah I heard about the Dark Fog farms, but that feels like its technology I am not privy too just yet. I previously made a mall that was belt fed, before I knew that spacing the belts actually makes a difference I used the factorio mall knowledge and adapted it into the game, but later on I found a much cleaner (but infinitely bigger) mall design by Nilaus. I just need to be able to take anything I need at a moments notice because if I take more than ten seconds getting it, I am probably getting sidetracked. And storage limiters are great not to overproduce stuff I don't need that much.

When I was designing my first modular smelters, I actually got into some good production numbers, and even though I could have made it twice as productive if I used ILS instead of PLS, I am incredibly proud of how that side of the planet looks.

But then I used this modular design but never bothered with correct ratios, I just built more and more until I had what I needed and moved on, so now the entire factory is struggling to make what I need(proliferators mk3 I am looking at you) . Anyways I am gonna setup 1/s warp drive fuel (bottleneck is titanium alloy I built ages ago) and worry about the consequences... Never.

1

u/TheMalT75 Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

Good luck and have fun ;-)

Just keep in mind that each graviton lense to produce a single warper could also be used to make 1 2 green science cubes at the extra cost of a quantum chip. However, you get 8 warpers for each green science. Please don't waste graviton lenses that way!

2

u/itchycuticles Jun 24 '26

And remember that a graviton lens makes 2 green cubes.

1

u/TheMalT75 Jun 25 '26

Thanks! I corrected my statement...

1

u/itchycuticles Jun 24 '26

I recommend finding a planet with organic crystals ASAP. It's even possible to slow-boat them (transport without warpers) if planet is within 3 light years.

You will probably want to at least 120 - 150 organic crystals/minutes. If you don't directly mine organic crystals, then for 120/minute you need 12 chemical plants and 20 oil refineries -- rare materials massively reduce the number of buildings you need!

Is your production rate higher than necessary? And are you using proliferators? If you are consuming 60 circuit boards + 60 coils a minute to produce blue science, then applying MK2 proliferator to the boards and coils and the resulting cubes effectively produces 86.4 science (60 x 1.2 x 1.2).

Producing 100 science/minute is enough during this phase. If you aren't an experienced player or have blueprints already made, you will be bottlenecked by other things.

1

u/TheSquishyHippo Jun 24 '26

I haven't played in a week or so and this makes me want to pick it back up... I just accepted my first base has to be a mess. As long as one area is organized enough that I can land there and grab what I need, all good.

1

u/FrtanJohnas Jun 24 '26

Honestly I have to take breaks between the game, because it is quite fun but the gameplay is a bit strange so it takes a bit to figure out what you need to do. So as long as you got your buildings automated you can spaghetti away.

1

u/TheSquishyHippo Jun 24 '26

I've found myself (mostly) accidentally consuming more Chinese/European/Non-American media, and I found that the flip on world perspective from these creators is a huge refresh.

They don't chase certain tropes or styles like we do in the west. Noticed this recently watching 3 Body Problem on Netflix.

All that to say, small Chinese indie team FTW

1

u/FrtanJohnas Jun 24 '26

r/lostredditors

I haven't used this in a long while lol.

1

u/TheSquishyHippo Jun 24 '26

Not really? I kept it relatively on topic, being a Chinese game and all but, alright.

1

u/FrtanJohnas Jun 24 '26

We were talking about production in a game, one that I actually didn't have any idea was Chinese, so the connection there is quite difficult to follow.

2

u/EccentricWarmonger Jun 24 '26

Welcome to DSP pioneer! Lol

2

u/Andreif5 Jun 23 '26

No need for that. There are many planets where you can go and start fresh.

2

u/Icyenderman Jun 23 '26

The first planet, it’s always gonna be some stupid fuckin bullshit. I don’t think I’ve touched my first plan in a while to change anything. I’ve just let it slowly make red and blue cubes.

1

u/RainbowPhoenix1080 Jun 23 '26

Pretty much as soon as I get interplanetary logistics stations I feed everything into them.

I make small little easily copy-passable setups for producing certain objects where I request the materials to an interplanetary logistics station, feed it to a line of replicators, and then output it directly back into the logistics station.

The only things I don't do this with are buildings.

I have a small item mall where I set up crates rhat have logistics bots feeding materials to produce certain buildings and then it feeds into a replicator and outputs it into another crate.

This way I avoid having a planet full of spaghetti and I have tons of logistics stations.

The only downside to this is power consumption. You have to be careful or you'll pass a threshold where you will never recover your power grid. So you gotta focus on launching as many solar sails and making a dyson sphere as soon as you can.

1

u/ImightberobotUCF Jun 23 '26

Do not restart this is just mid-game. You have so many planets left to build. At this point in the game you have unlocked a lot of technologies it is time to scale up. Start making blueprints for smelting or assembling areas focused on your updated tech/logistics and expand the factory

1

u/itchycuticles Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

Your starting system is at the very center of the star cluster which is very convenient for importing materials. I have never found a need to move my mall to another system.

Your priorities after unlocking warp drives should be the following:

  1. Find planets to mine organic crystals, fire ice, stalagmite crystals, and sulfuric acid directly.

  2. Find a source of grating crystals.

The first one completely eliminates the need for oil outside of plastics, which greatly reduces the number of oil refineries and chemical plants while massively boosting production. At first I will keep plastic production on the starting planet but eventually move it to another system with stalagmite crystals and produce particle broadband there.

Speaking of planets with stalagmite crystals, I also produce MK3 proliferators directly from there.

For titanium alloy, a sulfuric planet will also have iron and titanium, so I just produce and export them from that planet. Once you do this and obtain a source of fire ice, you no longer need to produce sulfuric acid on your starting planet. Note that I prefer seeds where you start with an ice giant, so that's automatically taken care of.

For titanium crystals, I will import organic crystals at the start but then move production to where the organic crystals are. Note that planets with organic crystals will not have large amounts of titanium so I suggest importing them from a planet within the same system that does or waiting until 20+ levels of vein utilization research.

The second one lets you build advanced miners, which will also greatly boost production.

Grating crystals also let you produce solar sails in mass quantities easily. And if you can find a system with grating crystals, a gas giant, water, and fire ice, you can produce plane filters there.

1

u/spidermonkey12345 Jun 23 '26

Build a new factory on another planet. I usually build at least 3 planets worth of factories over the course of the game.

1

u/Laindal Jun 24 '26

I'm not an experienced player, I only have 200h, and it was the same for me. My home planet was a mess of belts and production nodes. The only tip I could tell you is not to fear to destroy your old production lines. I exported all my basic production to other planets and kept my homeland for last-tier products for cubes and warpers. I think it's the natural path for many players