DSP is, at a given point, a zen experience. Up until Dark Fog was introduced, there were very large stretches of simply waiting and enjoying the world around you. Especially when it came to the construction of the eponymous Dyson Sphere.

Dark Fog is an attempt at the PvE element found in Factorio. It adds a persistent threat that is relatively easy to defend on a planet’s surface and only supports brute force in space. There’s a passive research reward for participating, so you kind of want to set up a farm for it, which is surprisingly difficult to do. It also adds about 30% more ‘stuff’ with poor logistical intersections. I played it a few times, loved the early parts of it, and really didn’t enjoy the mid- to late- portions. There’s still no ETA on when the space portion will be complete, which would effectively make it 1.0 launch. Until then, Dark Fog is disabled in all my playthroughs.

Which is a weird thing, as it actually reverts the gameplay back a significant amount. From late blue science to early yellow, you’re just sitting and waiting as the research itself takes a while to complete. You can certainly add more research buildings, and fill your planet with wind turbines to offset the power requirements. There’s no real elegant option for power until after yellow. Thankfully this period isn’t complex.

I will note that there are some fascinating design decisions here that differ from Factorio, while trying to adhere to the spirit of it all.

• You pre-fab buildings. If you ignore the combat buildings, generally the types of buildings correspond to the work they do. Very similar to Factorio here. Wildly different than Satisfactory. I much perfer this model.
• Belts are everywhere. You need inserters. You can stack on belts (eventually). You can’t reliably add two items to a belt, but you can ‘pull/push’ from 3 belts away. Has some minor design implications later.
• The game is 3D and belts can go up and down. This works really well in theory and in practice. Gone are the Satisfactory clipping issues.
• A main bus is still the simplest way to build pretty much anything up until mid-game, and even then it’s worth keeping. The bus takes a decent chunk of space given the intermediary items you need to pass through. Some items are used once, but in high volumes. More on mega bases in a bit. This is the model I use for all logistics games, and it works relatively well here.
• The world itself is grid based, each on a sphere. You can only place items on the grid, and depending on which part of the sphere you’re on, things may or may not fit. This is a cool math problem, but it also means that blueprints are a pain as they only fit in specific locations. A Factorio or Satisfactory ‘grid’ blueprint doesn’t apply here. This is actually a great distinguishing feature for DSP.
• There are no pipes or fluid mechanics of note. No pressure. No head lift. Glorious!
• Research has an intermediary step, associated to colors and technology levels. The net benefit here is that you can easily see where research bottlenecks are present, can dedicate areas to their construction, and focus productivity benefits. I personally prefer Factorio’s modular builds for research, though this is certainly an option for late game SPM.

Automated Logistics

This deserves its own section, as there are some nuances here that are really not obvious. It’s a weird system.

There are 4 types of automated logistics

• Local: These operate as a sort of bot system from Factorio, where you apply a piece on a storage unit, then put in some bots, and connect it to a local network. The throughput is ‘ok’, and primarily meant to keep your inventory up to date, as well as move infrequently-used items around a planet in small volumes. These are exceptionally useful, though also quite simplistic. Also, you need to research 5 levels of distance to cover the entire planet.
• Planetary: This has shuttles that transport stuff across your planet. 50 drones, 4 types of things. Can connect to other Planetary stations. Has space limitations so that they don’t overlap. I cannot for the life of me find any use for this. This would only be useful if it could contain more types of things.
• Interstellar. This has shuttles that transport stuff across all planets. 10 shuttles, 100 drones, 5 types of things. Connects to all other stations. Has space limitations so that they don’t overlap. Can set groups, priorities, queues, volumes. These are the lifeblood of any mid/late factory.
• Gas. These harvest gas from, well, gas giants. Connects to Interplanetary stations, can put 20 per gas giant. You want these.

So the Local portion is primarily used on a main bus, so that you can get all the pre-fab buildings going. No real use outside of that as they can’t manage volume.

Interstellar… eventually you get rate limited, as the storage limits are too low. You are presented with 2 options here. Create sub factories on other planets and only ship end products (core of mega basing), or you create a hub/spoke model where you have 3 or 4 stations collecting across the galaxy that are pulled down for local distribution (the step before mega bases). Creating groups of stations allows for targeted distribution models, so you can (and should) have a dozen stations holding Titanium bars in order to support a massive factory.

Mega Basing

The definition here varies, but generally you’re looking at over 500 SPM to be considered in this space. Just getting here requires a decent throughput of Artifical Stars in order to power the whole thing. You reach a point where a single planet can no longer fully support the construction requirements to build research items. Instead, you’ll have factory planets that focus on a single type of research, with dedicated construction channels on a single output. That’s likely 5 planets, and a final one where you have your Dyson Sphere (as you need material generated from it).

Interestingly, nearly all the updates over the past 2 years have focused on mega base optimization. Multi-threading, CPU and GPU optimization, pilers, throughput monitoring, and a slew of other bits. Prior to these items, getting 1000 SPM meant frame rates under 10. Now, you can build multiple Dyson Spheres and ridiculously large factories across multiple solar systems.

Moving Forward

There are still no dates for the next content update, which will include vehicles and space combat. Game optimization is pretty much at the max right now, at least in ways appreciated by the wide majority of players. It is without question a better game today than it was a year or two ago. Factorio remains the gold standard, but DSP is the next in line under the concept of ‘the factory must grow’. Fingers crossed we can get a date for the next big thing…