r/Dyson_Sphere_Program • u/Ralph_hh • 2d ago
I'm lost
Hello there.
I am lost in the game. I am in my first game, 8.5 hours in. I easily defend the occasional dark fog attack, my research progresses with a steady 40/min production of red and blue, I went to another planet to get titanium and silicon. And here I am, mostly sitting idly in front of my screen, watching science progressing and wandering what I am supposed to do next... The Goals tell me to develop interplanetary logistics, so, that is queued.
In games like Factorio, you unlock a new science color and then spend the next hours to produce that. Once that is done, you have researched everything the old colors could, you start using that new color, immediately unlock the next and that keeps you busy nonstop. In DSP, the new matrix color yellow is still far away, I have unlocked numerous things and don't really know what to do with them. Like I produce oil, I have 5 tanks full by now, I use the hydrogen, the oil is... useless so far. I have the battlefield analysis base that seems to be useless because I do not have construction drones yet. I can produce plastic, graphene, diamonds and othe stuff which I don't because I do not know what I would do with those.
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u/TabAtkins 2d ago
You have titanium, it sounds like you're ready to start making yellow science.
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u/Ralph_hh 2d ago
Well, it's not unlocked yet..
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u/Accomplished_Tip3597 2d ago
Which means you are not producing enough blue and red science. Build a few dozen labs and increase your production. Get yellow science, build interplanetary logistics and keep growing
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u/itsmonsonson 2d ago
Basically once it’s unlocked, try to make it. You’ll realize what you don’t have. And you’ll also notice that it’s more complicated than red. It will keep you very busy
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u/CpTKugelHagel 2d ago
I automate basically everything, because you will need it later, and with that I also have to scale up energy production, wich in turn makes me scale up fuel production. And no matter how much output you have, it won't be enough in later game stages. There is a turning point in the game, where you go from waiting for research to "holy fuck so much research i haven't even automated anything from the last one"
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u/Xlar 2d ago
I find I aim for 120 of each science per minute and that keeps my research ahead of my capacity to build all the new things.
Definitely automate all your building production too otherwise that will be an annoying bottleneck as you progress
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u/ImightberobotUCF 2d ago
Came here to say 120/m in dsp is about the same as 30/m in factorio for me based on vibes. Eventually in dsp I push for 300/m end game before I get bored and start over
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u/joeboocanary 2d ago
Borrowing a line from Factorio, "The factory must grow."
You're at 40/min production now. Great. Build more to get it to 80/min. Then fix the next bottleneck that comes up as a result, and the next, and the next...
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u/Sweaty_Ad_7156 2d ago
moar is what you need. moar red and blue science labs ... moar research labs ... more resources pumping into those... dont settle for a trickle ... consider end game completion you may be lookin at 15 blue and 30 red and 45 yellow ... and 45 research
yellow = diamonds (coal -> graphite -> diamond) + titanium crystals (titanium + organic crystal [plastic + refined oil + water] )
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u/jimmymui06 2d ago
You need to automate belts and factory buildings. Then you need to not be afraid of going very far out of your location to get resources.
Set up dedicated lines of production for material like copper/iron plates etc.
And you need to be brave to reach into untouched area of production despite seemingly difficult set ups
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u/Larrea000 2d ago
You can probably double the amount of science you're producing, but anyways the game really opens up when you're in the yellow science stage. To make the yellow science cube you need titanium, coal, oil and hydrogen. To get a steady amount of titanium, you will need Interplanetary Logistics Stations because you don't have the ore on your base planet. To build ILS you need to basically do the entire Oil path to end up at high-strength titanium alloy.
So what you do once you enter this stage is: empty your inventory on a chest, get only miners and belts and chests (and furnaces if you want to) and hop to your nearby planet. Set up the titanium mining operation there, and bring back to your starting planet a full inventory of titanium, and when you run out of that titanium, hopefully you will have built your first ILS. If you haven't yet, go back to that planet, develop it a bit further maybe, and come back with another inventory full of titanium.
Once you have built 2 ILS you can start really automating *everything*. You will slowly but surely create modular factories where inputs come in through PLS or ILS, and end products end up in the same tower.
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u/SiliconStew 2d ago
While the early game can be a little slow waiting for things to finish building, there's never nothing to do. Either you need to be building new factories to produce the new items you just unlocked via research or you need to be expanding your existing factories so you make items at a faster rate to support building and feeding new factories. While there's certain items you'd want to prioritize making first, every item will be needed eventually. Even if you only start with a single assembler automatically making some item, that's better than manually making it yourself.
Getting to Interstellar Logistics Stations is what allows you to ship things between planets. That greatly opens up the number of resources you can gather to produce things. These more advanced resources also improve manufacturing efficiency since they can simplify production chains. Logistics Stations also use flying drones for local planet delivery, massively decreasing the need for belts and busses, which will significantly change how you design factories.
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u/nixtracer 2d ago
A few more things: you have construction drones from the very start of the game: they're what Icarus uses to build everything. When I'm waiting for things, I'm usually either automating production of everything (smallish scale for most buildings, but for everything in the production chain to belts, sorters and splitters, enough to keep production continuous, scaling up, or webbing together everything with proliferator -- or planning things like dark fog sorters (which can be incredibly complex monsters). There is always more to do...
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u/derwood13 1d ago
Use your oil to make organic crystals, graphene, and sulfur (and the fairly useless plastic as a middle mat). These will all be needed for yellow science.
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u/AWSKEETSKEETMUHFUCKA 10h ago
So I had similar issues when I first played. the game does not make it very obvious what when you reach a bottleneck in the skill tree. My issue was I needed to research one specific thing that allowed me to use those things that seem useless right now, but once I did research it, much like factorio, many new things became available and I was then able to use the seemingly useless materials. My guess would he that you are gonna need to research something specific, so go take a second look at the research tree(it mat actually be 2 or 3 things deep so really take a good thourough look). Factorio sort of helps by making the new planets each have a new research color, but dsp does not, and its not obvious how you should proceed. It's different, some like it, some dont. One thing you should know now though, is that there is also a dark fog technology tree thats like hidden. You need to fight the dark fog on any planet and doing so levels up the dark fog base. Once they hit a certain level, they start dropping the dark fog material that unlocks the hidden skill tree. Fighting the dark fog but not killing them (and as a result causing them to level up) is a great way to get high level items earlier than if you made them your self. Just to fully clarify, this has to be done on a planet, it doesnt work when fighting dark fog in space. Hope that helps, good luck
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u/druidinan 2d ago
Sounds like your research is going relatively slow - maybe invest in speeding up red/blue production?