So Dyson Sphere Program (DSP for short) is a video game I’ve put way too much time into, and I decided to write down some random thoughts I had on it

I now know why Factorio was helped by having biters: they give you something to do and work on.  I spend a lot of time in DSP just waiting for the next research to finish. I had nothing to lose but time, and no idea of what to do next. Biters in Factorio at least gave you a goal and a thing to work on whenever you were stuck. “I don’t know what to do, well the biters to the west are giving me trouble, I’ll reinforce the defenses or destroy the nests, maybe both.”

It feels like there’s too much research and also it’s a mistake to let you queue it all immediately.  I end up researching a lot of things that I don’t know what they do or why they help. I just queue up everything I can currently research and I end up wondering what the hell any of it did because I wasn’t really thinking about my decisions. The research queue is a QOL feature, but its absence does at least force the player to kind of go back to the tech tree and glance over the techs every few minutes instead of every few hours.

Also I think the research tree could use some UI help.  There are certain techs that require other techs… but those techs don’t directly precede them.  If I MUST research Tech A before Tech B, then Tech A should be linked to Tech B and immediately precede it.  OR AT LEAST if I click on Tech B because I want to research it, then Tech A should get queued automatically before Tech B.  As it stands I found myself wanting to research certain techs and having to hunt around the tech tree to find the required pre-reqs (logistics/interplanetary logistics were where I had the most trouble)

Other times I research a tech only to find that although I can craft New Item B, that item relies on Other Item A which I do NOT have the tech for.  So again I have to hunt through the tech tree to find Other Item A so I can finally craft New Item B like I wanted to.  Again, if B requires A then A should immediately precede B and I shouldn’t be allowed to research B until I have A.

I feel like this game doesn’t really ramp up in scope and scale as much as Factorio did, and because of this I found myself not really needing or caring to expand all that much.  After making an initial spaghetti base I moved on the starting planet to two new spots to set up research lines, and that basically carried me through half or more of the tech tree.  My starting resources never/barely ran out and I didn’t need to go to new planets for more iron or copper, just for the titanium and silicon that didn’t spawn on my starting planet.  Having certain resources only spawn on specific planets is certainly one way to incentivize moving off-world, but I’d also like it more if higher levels of science required massively increased amounts of resources, forcing you to colonize more and more planets to meet the resource requirements much like how Factorio forces you to expand further and further outwards to meet the higher requirements for Blue/Purple/Yellow science.

Blueprints were the opposite of intuitive.  I understood Factorio blueprints pretty quickly, but I could not possibly figure out how to create a blueprint here without going online.

I really like the multiple levels for transport belts, really makes the spaghetti come alive and does at least mitigate my disappointment in not having double sided belts like Factorio. Double sided belts were where you could create a T-intersection with belts with say Iron Gears from the left and Green Circuits from the right, and the result would be a belt with Gears on its left half and Circuits on its right half. DSP doesn’t have that, but at least with multiple layers of belts all on top of each other it isn’t *too* much trouble to get everything where I want it, possibly even easier.

Having liquids exist as little cubes on belts took some getting used to, but since pipes in Factorio were always a little opaque and had strange fail conditions, I really like this system

Why does every single planet have coal?  Is it just to give a player something to mine for energy when they first land on a planet, to make sure they can always get the energy to get back home?  Because coal being dead plant matter on earth makes it seem like ALL these planets were once life-bearing.