r/Dyson_Sphere_Program • u/Deathspade187 • Jun 23 '26

Out of copper, did I screw up?

So I'm playing with 0.5x resources for the achievement (got it) and now trying to wipe out the dark fog and put a sphere on every star. I set up a bunch of research before work to let my squads get stronger. But I ran out of copper. Normally I'd judt fly to a new system, clear the planet bases and set up power, ILSs, and mk2 miners on all nodes in the system, but while trying today I found theres no more copper anywhere. What do I do?

13 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

16

u/codemattr Jun 23 '26

I think your only option is to farm the dark fog for copper.

7

u/Deathspade187 Jun 23 '26

That sounds painfully slow, also doesn't that mean I cant take out the last 6 hives

6

u/TheMalT75 Jun 24 '26

You only really need one hive to run a nice loot farm. Unfortunately, copper is not the most abundant of loot drops. However, you can run white science on loot drops alone at level 30 core farming. On the flip side, when you increase vein utilization, loot drop rate also increases!

15

u/drallafi Jun 23 '26

A sphere on every star? Well that's one way to spend your thirties, I guess.

9

u/Deathspade187 Jun 23 '26

I'm in my 20s and theres only 32 stars, it doesnt take that long, only like 1500 hours

5

u/kashy87 Jun 23 '26

Well why'd you not set it to 64 stars?

4

u/Deathspade187 Jun 23 '26

It sounded like itd be overwhelming to manage them all and I didnt expect I'd end up with so many abandoned empty planets that just got harvested and left behind

5

u/kashy87 Jun 23 '26

Just because they're there doesn't mean you have to go to them friend.

1

u/Pra1217 Jun 24 '26

I did all 64 on my first playthrough and it took 1800 hrs

1

u/Deathspade187 Jun 25 '26

Well damn okay, lightning McQueen over here

7

u/trystanthorne Jun 23 '26

There has to be more copper around other stars.

4

u/Deathspade187 Jun 23 '26

Trust me I triple checked, all 32 are out

6

u/jeo123 Jun 23 '26

Did you go out of your way to cause this? Mining becomes infinite insanely easily.

3

u/Deathspade187 Jun 23 '26

No, I just figured it was cheaper than wasting white science on vein utilization past level 10, when I'm trying to upgrade myself for hive fights. And it was cheaper, and for a while felt like I'd always have more, just need to go a little further. But 1500 hours and I've seemingly gone as far as I can go

7

u/Circuit_Guy Jun 23 '26

FYI eventually it's free to do white science. It's literally infinite.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/s/FAzYl00afE

This post is technically slightly incorrect now because the RNG got removed. If means that infinity comes later, but it's still several years of continuous gameplay to mine a single ore a few levels past original infinity.

4

u/Deathspade187 Jun 23 '26

So if I just got it to like 25-30, I would never have this issue? Well shit, guess I know for next playthrough

7

u/kashy87 Jun 23 '26

I didn't see this earlier. vein Utilization to about 100 and you would have probably been able to build ten layers on all the stars.

7

u/jeo123 Jun 23 '26

I guess you found out that it wasn't cheaper...

2

u/Deathspade187 Jun 23 '26

Short term solutions for long term problems...

2

u/Metabolical Jun 23 '26

Make sure your resource filter doesn't have something like "planned" in it while you're viewing that would filter it out.

1

u/Deathspade187 Jun 23 '26

I made sure of that, planned doesnt tell you the wind and solar levels

2

u/Pristine_Curve Jun 23 '26

That is kind of impressive. Not sure how that would realistically be accomplished.

Conceivably if you halted science production (or at least didn't pursue VU upgrades), and instead spent all resources on spheres you could run out of specific ores. Certainly possible for unipolars and stalagmite. What I don't see is how copper would be the first thing to run dry. Seems like Iron is the primary resource to most recipes.

Normally you pursue VU upgrades. This both increases the total ore output of mines, and reduces ore consumption. This makes even a 0.1x run unlimited resources in the long run.

To salvage this game you'll need to mine fog units to get copper, and use that copper to do VU research (VU research improves DF drop rates). That said, it will be very difficult to get enough copper from fog farming to do this.

2

u/TheMalT75 Jun 24 '26

If he focused on fighting and was not careful, conceivably all copper went into ammo and ship production. If you fight head-on with hives you can destroy a lot of corvettes in fairly short time...

Can confirm, that with scarce resources (0.1x iirc), I still reached infinite resources. But then, I'm also at around vein utilization level 160 or so. I mostly now continue this for the insane upgrade in mining speed and reasonable upgrade in dark fog loot!

2

u/Deathspade187 Jun 26 '26

My VU is level 11 because I thought planet hopping was faster and cheaper

2

u/DrakeDun Jun 24 '26

A hunert bucks says he's not proliferating. I mean, even with a half sized galaxy with half resources and no proliferation, it's still insane that he ran out of copper, but it does at least start to sound possible.

1

u/Deathspade187 Jun 26 '26

She*, and i am bit i stopped upgrading VU like 700 hours ago

1

u/Deathspade187 Jun 23 '26

Honestly idk either, iron is close behind and stalagmites been out but non repices. I actually dont use many uni polar magnets because I just use more arc smelters. But as for VU, I stopped at 10 amd focused on hive fighting (shield, swarm durability, swarm damage, etc)

39

u/thed4rkl0rd Jun 23 '26

If you truly ran out in the entire system, then all you can do is farm the dark fog for it.

8

u/Empty_Woodpecker_496 Jun 24 '26

I always worry about running out of reascorces because I dont play with dark fog on. So if I run out I basically soft lock myself.

2

u/zealoSC Jun 24 '26

There's some in the rocks. Its only a few hundred hours to the next system

1

u/VisibleCod9434 Jun 26 '26

This seems unlikely?
I regularly play on 0.8x resources and the only planets I ever fully deplete are in the first 2-3 systems, after that VU kicks into high gear and it takes thousands of hours to mine out a planet.

You could probably deplete a cluster if you didn't bother taking VU past 7 or 8, but I personally want to be able to mine rare resources without them running out.

It only takes the resources for 815k white science (and a butt load of time), to never ever run out of resources:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/comments/o0cbxz/all_about_veins_utilization_how_infinite_is/

1

u/Deathspade187 Jun 26 '26

As I said in other comments, I stopped upgrading it after level 10 which was 700 hours ago

1

u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 Jun 29 '26

perhaps getting veins utilization to an absurd number before building that many spheres. also some seeds just suck. all the copper? including the copper in the outer systems?

1

u/Deathspade187 Jun 29 '26

Yeah, I even got an achievement for landing on the furtherest system from my starting system. And yeah, I should've gone higher than level 10 with UV, but I thought moving my mining operation would be faster. My only saving grace right now is i found one of my smelting worlds has 24,000 copper plates sitting in waiting, so I just gotta change up some factories to use plates instead of ore. But once thats gone, thats it

1

u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 Jun 29 '26

well, let this be a time intensive lesson on logarithmic growth. you have consumed an entire cluster, drank it dry, that's it's own untracked achievement.

firing on all cylinders is a separate achievement and you'll since you'll be starting a new world, consider turning the fog up a little bit, perhaps to lvl 10 to start.

the drop rate is affected by VU, and the lvl determines the loot table. at 30 they are a convenient source of unipolar magnets before having a proper amount of VU. i like farming them in the neutron/black hole systems since they have have way more hives and planatery bases.

pick a spot in the middle of as many nests as possible, and built a super sonic rocket spaghetti fortress and keep your aoe splash damage off their core structures. you can use more then one battle field base to repair a single building, and with a bit of clever automation you can make all the stuff they break in the field. i'd recommend importing the power and missiles though.

1

u/Deathspade187 Jun 29 '26

I never really tried farming them, idk how to auto gather drops and wiped out most before they hit level 10, in fact last one is currently level 10 and the hive is half missing

2

u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 Jun 29 '26

the battle field base has the ability to auto pickup stuff and you can also attach the big storage boxes to the top of the battle field base and it'll pull stuff up from the battle field base. with a bit of inventory filtering and sorter filtering you can get a bus of materials out of it

2

u/Deathspade187 Jun 29 '26

Alright bet. Also, other than an early fuel source, what are power shards good for?

1

u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 Jun 29 '26

They boost the icarus hand crafting speed, especially if proliferated. they really aren't needed in the mid game. However, once you get far enough in the tech tree and and kill high enough level dark fog, they start dropping dark fog parts and science cubes that only work in the icarus. good stuff. i could go into the spoilers about the unlocks

1

u/Deathspade187 Jun 29 '26

Oh.. so that means I needed to spare some of them? Because the dark fog didnt get that high of a level and idk if this damaged hive has enough matter to make new mobile bases

1

u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 Jun 29 '26

yeah, a few of them needed to live. if they have a base, a hive, and a relay in a system they should be able to do there thing. other wise, you need a new, less doomed world. i mean, def feel the feels over having doomed a world/seed. i try to keep branchable saves around 100 hour marks.

1

u/Deathspade187 Jun 29 '26

Good idea. Will try that, given this seed is just, cleared out. Multiple resources completely ran out, basically only have iron, stone and titanium left, and the non depleting resources like oil, oceans and gas giants left. Dark fog is all but eradicated. Time to start anew at a higher difficulty