Beginning to Play Dyson Sphere Program

Getting Started

Reddit Says...

u/The_Quackening:

Set up assemblers that will build: belts, power poles, assemblers, and sorters.

do this ASAP. You are going to need a lot of them, and hand crafting is WAY too slow.

All you really need is a single assembler for each, in the time it takes you to build stuff, another stack will be done.

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u/kumakun731 adds:

Don't look up guides or especially blueprints. I wish I could replay this game for the first time again, Don't rob yourself of that.

If youre on 1.0 resources, you have more resources than you know. It might feel like youre running out, but youre not and theres avenues of expansion.

Dont be afaraid to scrap or abandon things. Don't be married to your first designs.

You can automate making buildings. Automate everything. The replicator js a crutch that feels like it saves time, but it super does not.

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u/Site-Specialist replied with:

I'd like to add to this have storages filled with stuff as well this way when you unlocked a new recipe for buildings or materials then you already got what you need instead of needing to adjust your resources output whenever I'd go to a new planet I usually had 50 solar panels ready to set down to cover any power needs

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The important takeaway here is that it's important to set up assemblers to build some of the buildings such as conveyors to reduce the time spent replicating them in your mech. Stockpiling them in storage is important, too and you need to devise a methodology for finding and retrieving them in the early game before logistics bots are available.

u/sumquy writes:

don't look back. the more you focus on "fixing" your old factories, the less progress you make on your new ones. they are all going to be obsolete by the time you reach endgame anyway, so just keep going.

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When starting out, you don't realize how many planets you will be colonizing and it becomes easy to obsess over the mistakes you make early on. That is fine if your goal is perfection, but if your goal is to complete the game then it's going to hurt you in the long run by eating up time that is better spent expanding.

u/Steven-ape has a lot of advice for new players:

Oh, I've got tips! Here you go :)

Tips for noobs:

  • If you don't know what to do, figure out how to make the next colour of science.
  • Look what items are needed to produce the most common buildings. Make a mall: an area where you manufacture all buildings you can easily make. You'll probably need: gears, magnetic coils, circuit boards, iron ingots and stone bricks.
  • Make some energetic graphite to use as a fuel for Icarus. You will thank me.
  • Make a ring of solar panels around the equator for some easy power and easy access to your power grid. You can also make rings of solar panels around the tropic lines (the lines where the build grid shifts). It provides a lot of structure to your world and helps quite a bit with power in the early game.
  • You don't need to use X-ray cracking to make red science. It's easier and better to just use regular plasma refining to do it. Store all the refined oil in lots of liquid storage tanks; you'll use it later on.
  • Once you're on yellow science, get advanced logistics options to work for you. Once you have interstellar logistics stations operational, you can start replacing your spaghetti. Really think through how you want to organise the space on your planet. Tip: don't build across tropic lines. Build in the east-west direction to make it easier to avoid those.
  • When you're manually transporting titanium from another planet, you can actually hold an arbitrary amount of titanium on your cursor. This trick can save a lot of trips.
  • Instead of trying to leech from a factory you built before, make a new one elsewhere.
  • Delay making proliferator until you have logistics unlocked at least. Delay making a Dyson swarm until you're on green science at least.
  • A mk1 belt moves 6 items per second. Two miners that both cover 6 veins mine 6 items per second. So use two miners to fill a belt. Most smelting recipes consume 1 ore per second. So to consume a full belt of ore, you need 6 smelters. (Magnets are the exception.)
  • Mk1 assemblers operate at 75% of the nominal speed. So if you calculate how many assemblers you need based on the recipe you want to use, don't forget to multiply by 4/3.
  • If you want to use thermal power plants, use coal as a fuel. Put three thermal power plants on each miner.
  • For power in the early game, rely on wind, solar, coal, and geothermal power. Accumulators can be useful but they are hard to use effectively. If you want the easiest path through, move directly from those early game power sources to deuteron fuel cells. Then once you have a Dyson sphere, make one last switch to antimatter fuel cells.
  • If you need more hydrogen, make orbital collectors.
  • Use the advanced recipe to make graphene as soon as you can obtain fire ice.
  • There are some items in the game that you will never produce enough of. These items are: iron ingots, electromagnetic turbines, processors, graphene, and plane filters. Don't hesitate to make more of those than you think you'll need.
  • Use fractionators to make deuterium, not miniature particle colliders. To make fractionators effective, make a loop of about 14 of them. Use the fastest belts you have, and use pilers to stack the hydrogen high on the belt.
  • On mining planets, you don't have to stock your interstellar logistics stations with warpers and vessels.

Tips for routing conveyors:

  • Run the conveyorbelt alongside the facility, not directly at it.
  • Sorters can access conveyor belts 1, 2 or 3 spaces away from the building. However the further away the slower they are. Especially for Mk1 sorters you may need to use multiple sorters to get the desired transference speed.
  • Once you have logistics towers, you have belts with input materials running from the tower, and output products back into the tower. Look at the ratios in which items are transported: the highest throughput item determines how many assemblers or smelters you can put along the belt. Belts carrying lower throughput items can often be joined together. For example, to smelt titanium, you can have two columns of smelters, with titanium ore running along the two outsides, and a single belt of titanium ingots running back through the middle.
  • If you're producing a single item using a logistics tower, you can usually put four columns of production facilities side by side. This starts to get cramped for products that have three input materials, like super-magnetic rings. Consider making just two columns for those kinds of items if you want to keep your builds simple.

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u/legomann97 offers good advice about energy:

Embrace the spaghetti early on. Things will clean up when you get logistics, but until then expect to have to organically build your factory rather than systematically.

Always have a very healthy backup supply of fuel for your factory. In the event of a brownout or blackout, you want to make sure you have enough emergency fuel on hand, at least half an hour's worth, so you can diagnose and fix the problem. If you don't, a brownout will slow down fuel production, meaning less power, meaning slower production, resulting in a blackout. Now you have no fuel and no power to make any more fuel and are SOL.

Swarms can be a noob trap. If you start relying on one for power and let the sail production die, it's REALLY REALLY hard to pull out of that downward spiral.

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u/spinyfur and u/Taikunman weighed in with some advice on belts:

spinyfur:

Noob advice: use bus construction.

Setup one of more belts that feed in materials and place smelters or assemblers along the length of it, feeding their products out through a belt on the opposite side.

Taikunman:

I did my first playthrough with a bus just because I was used to doing that in Factorio.

It's good to learn the components and crafting requirements in the game but you'll eventually hit a throughput wall with belts, even using pilers. Still a viable strategy for a new player but logistics is much more scalable.

spinyfur:

You still want to construct the factory on busses that are plugged into an ILS. Otherwise you’re basically limited to one assembler per belt.

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