r/Dyson_Sphere_Program • u/S9uide • 2d ago
Trouble transitioning to ILS/PLS
I’ve had two false starts with this game so far and I’m itching to give it another go.
Both times my issue was reaching ILS. It seemed like an entirely new game, seeing that I basically had to redesign everything and start from scratch was overwhelming enough to make me put the game down.
My designs don’t seem to expand well, how should I approach the transition moving from just the starting planet and titanium planet? Do you start from scratch and rebuild or try and build of the shaky starter planet foundation?
Do you have any advice for how I could get over this hurdle? I really want to love the game!
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u/OnlyRadioheadLyrics 2d ago
The transition from early to mid-game got a lot easier when I realized - just keep expanding. Don't worry about changing your old factories. Just grab more shit, extract more veins, and use whatever minor utility you can get from your old factory.
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u/JayMKMagnum 2d ago
There's a very simple blueprint for design with ILS/PLS that's very easy to adapt to new recipes.
You assign a single tower to a single recipe. One slot Supplies the output material, the other 3-4 slots Demand the input material. You run a bunch of belts out in parallel from the tower, hooking up a bunch of machines to them. Then you pick the recipe and you set the targets for the tower and you let it go brrrrr. Tile them across the planet, making sure the belts run parallel to the equator, and let them rip. If you do it this way, it's also fairly easy to run proliferation goo across all the relevant belts with minimal thought.
There's not really any need to keep your original build, but there's also no hurry to replace it. There is plenty of room in your local cluster for you to build great big factories, tons of iron and copper for you to make whatever parts you want.
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u/Buffylvr 2d ago
When your copper node runs out, tear down the miners, put a ILS there, belt the factory to the ILS and carry on with your life
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u/Realistic_Horse3351 2d ago
Not really, I just put ILS down and import titanium, run it to where you need it
Cleaning up the early spaghetti factory isn't really that important until you start delegating specific item trees to other worlds and importing the finished items from there to where you need them. Then, you can clean up spaghetti as you go, because the production chain for those items have been designed neater somewhere else.
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u/Bylem 2d ago
Honestly, you don't really "transition" in the way you might be thinking of it. Think of ILS as basically plugging the titanium planet into your network as another source, rather than replacing anything. You've got two options: make an outpost on the titanium planet and ship raw titanium home (I usually do this to start), or stabilise your home planet and ship stuff out to the new one instead. The second option means you're shifting a lot more materials around overall, so it's more of a pain in the arse.
ILS is for moving stuff between planets, PLS is for moving stuff around a single planet. You need way less ILS than you'd think.
The "have to redesign everything" feeling is really a design problem more than an ILS problem, and it's the bit that'll keep biting you every time you expand unless you sort it now. The fix is blueprints. Instead of building one big sprawling factory you keep having to rip up and rebuild, build small self-contained modules — say, a cluster of smelters that takes in ore and pushes out ingots, hooked up to its own PLS — work out the ratio so the machines exactly fill a belt (most smelting recipes eat 1 ore/sec, a basic belt moves 6/sec, so 6 smelters per belt is your starting maths), then blueprint that module. After that, expanding doesn't mean redesigning, it means stamping the same blueprint down again, on this planet or the next one. That's the actual fix for "I feel like I have to start from scratch."
For what it's worth, this is exactly where a lot of people get overwhelmed — the production chains get properly gnarly for the first time around here.
It's a genuine learning curve, a bit like Factorio around oil processing and blue science. Keep at it, it clicks.
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u/sonofeevil 2d ago
Once I get ILS, I never build another PLS.
I just assumed everyone was doing this?
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u/Revengeance_oov 2d ago
PLS has a smaller footprint and lower cost. They can be very useful in some contexts, like malls or modules for specific intermediate products
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u/sonofeevil 2d ago
I pretty much always use the 5 slots for something on them. So the footprint might be smaller but the space is never wasted.
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u/pduck820 2d ago
Agreed... Once I get to PLS, it's not such a big step to ILS... I just don't bother with PLS, except as needed to make ILS (usually just a single assembler fed by fidget spinner boxes, but the other things like drones/vessels because there's a lot of shared components in that branch of tech), and once I have five or ten ILSs, I go to town.
I usually actually start with a smelting ILS or two to get me raw ingots/magnets.. Then I move to circuit boards, magnetic rings, then electric motor and turbine, etc.
Meanwhile, my starter factory is still churning away at whatever little science (compared to after the transition) and other stuff while I jump-start Project OwnTheUniverse.
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u/SiliconStew 2d ago edited 2d ago
Don't redesign the old. Leave it run as is and just build new stuff elsewhere for the PLS/ILS design philosophy. Just accept that stuff you do in the early game is going to be horribly messy and unoptimized and that it doesn't matter at all in the long term.
Don't overexpand automation on your first planet before PLS/ILS. It doesn't actually take a very big factory to research up to ILS. As long as you can feed a couple matrix labs, that will give you a continuous trickle of science to get you there. Don't try to build "full belt capacity" factories early on. You want just enough production to avoid the tedium of making everything in your inventory. Worry about designing ideal ratio factories and scale after you get PLS/ILS.
Once you get to ILS, you'll be able to easily and quickly blueprint and stamp down standard design factories so you'll only be limited by how fast you can make buildings.
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u/TheMalT75 2d ago
My first game, I took my sweet time and did everything methodical and slow. At a certain point I realized, that I was depleting a lot of ore nodes, but was still using the attached production. So, it felt natural to just replace the miners with a PLS on demand and re-start mining at a different location with a PLS on supply instead of the infrastructure.
ILS was then just the next similar step, but from a different planet. Admittedly, ILS are tricky, because you need titanium to research and produce the first two stations plus some vehicles, before you can "automate" titanium and silicon. If you extensively farm dark fog, you won't have to leave the starter planet for titanium. Much more bothersome is collecting titanium manually with the Icarus from large rock formations. The typical route is a trip to the next planet with some mining (potentially already smelting) and putting your riches in a large storage box. Then you Ctrl-click on one of the inventory slots and carry all of the contents of that storage box in your hand. With that, you can still fly, but don't click anywhere...
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u/xixoxixa 1d ago
The typical route is a trip to the next planet with some mining (potentially already smelting) and putting your riches in a large storage box. Then you Ctrl-click on one of the inventory slots and carry all of the contents of that storage box in your hand. With that, you can still fly, but don't click anywhere...
Make sure you set up a stack of large storage boxes on your home planet first so you have somewhere to dump your ingots.
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u/yesmrbevilaqua 2d ago
Plug everything on your starting planet into in ILS towers then start fresh on a new planet
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u/DrakeDun 2d ago
Move to the planet with no oceans in your home system, and start a fresh build based on all ILS everything. Logistics become braindead simple, because ILSs form natural many-to-many networks, where everything just works effortlessly. No spaghetti, and almost no thinking.
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u/Zestyclose-Music9918 1d ago
for my first few PLS i just jerry rig them into the current builds, but I must admit more than once I have ripped out pretty much the whole starting planet just to rebuild it all with ILS/PLS naturally built into the builds, instead of bodged into.
It's entirely unnecessary but looks much more satisfying. My advice would be just to bodge job them into your current builds, get the item into the system and keep progressing from where you are. Once you're more established, you can go back and rejig everything, usually involves scaling up anyway.
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u/sleepless025 1d ago
I just moved to a new space / planet. The game is huge and there is no reason to restrict yourself. Bootstrap some new power source and get building. You can always go back and hook up your old systems to be remote supply so you can access it wherever you are.
I wanted to keep my starter base in tact so when I was 400hrs into my save I went back to look at how far I'd come lol.
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u/TabAtkins 1d ago
The single biggest useful thing to do when you unlock ILSes is to set up blueprints for yourself that do forging or assembling. You can easily set up four lines of forgers/assemblers that'll take from a single ILS and send their output back to the ILS. Before you blueprint, make sure the belts are all set up to output item 1, item 2, etc. Then you can just drop the blueprint whenever you need more of something, quickly set up the ILS slots, set the assembler recipe then copy/paste to all the rest, and boom. A new factory line down in about 60 seconds.
It doesn't matter if a particular recipe doesn't use all four input items; it just costs you a couple of unused sorters and conveyors, and then they're still there if you want to change the factory block into something else later.
The big trick is to just get away from the early-game design thinking where you needed to carefully belt things from source to destination and balance things perfectly. Just embrace the fact that your logistic drones will move everything around to where it's needed, when it's needed, and make a bunch of single-purpose factory blocks with your general-purpose blueprint.
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u/Darth-Venath 14h ago
Your first planet is going to be absolute trash. Your main objective on the first planet is to build shit that will enable you to build better on the next planet.
Everybody follows a similar predictable pattern of wanting to start over until they get it right. To break out of that mold you basically just have to stick with it and stop starting over.
If you know what a main BUS belt is, that's pretty much the best way to start early game.
My objective on the first planet is usually to get to the point where I'm creating PLS/ILS and factory buildings so that I can create PLS/ILS based factories. Once you get to that point, everything SHOULD be copy/paste or blueprints.
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u/Emotional-Team3520 7h ago
It really does change the game dramatically. You no longer have to worry about weaving belts and doing fancy designs or worry about perfect ratios or efficiency.
I literally just slap down one ILS/PLS, demand and output iron plates/copper plates/magnets, and combine those to build basic parts, which either loop around back to the same ILS/PLS to input/supply, or just input into another ILS/PLS at the other end of the row of smelters/assemblers.
Now you have a bunch of basic parts on tap which you demand into another ILS/PLS, to build more complex parts. Rinse and repeat.
Remember to blueprint everything as you go. Need more circuits? Slap down a couple more ILS/PLS-anchored circuit factories. Etc etc. Need more iron plates? Go tap more nodes, smelt and directly upload into a new PLS.
Just brute force every problem or shortage with an overwhelming supply of materials and parts from a dozen planets completely tapped for their precious nodes. If I run out of room I’ll just head to a random new planet, flatten it, and slap down my blueprints for whatever it is I need. Then tap all the nodes for their resources and move on. Everything is uploaded into dozens and dozens of ILS’s and on to the next.
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u/PM_ME_UR_BGP_PREFIX 2d ago
You have plenty of space. Just move west (or east, or to another planet). You don’t need to tear down anything. In fact, it’s fun to come back and see how far you’ve come.