Scaling in any logistics game is based on three factors. Space, Resources, and Power. You need the real estate to lay down tracks and a factory (time to deliver is a big deal). You need resources to process. And you need Power to run all the machines. In DSP, these concepts are present, though the implementation is a bit different.

Space

As with nearly all games like this, you’re on a grid to place items. DSP uses planets (spheres), which provide an upper boundary on size. There are a few hundred planets, but getting beyond the first 3 requires ships to warp between them. Honestly, by that point this post is somewhat irrelevant. The individual planets though, they are organized in bands, meaning you can place more items in the equator band than the polar bands. Very large factories tend to avoid anything outside the equator bands as a result, using Ray Receivers or research there instead. If you truly want to mega-base, it will be across multiple planets and multiple systems… impressive logistics in that actually.

Resources

With a singular exception, there are near infinite resource to collect. You can improve your mining ability to both speed up collection (+10%) and reduce resource drain (-6% compounding), making some veins near infinite. It’s generally best to concentrate mining on a given set of nodes rather than spreading out. Unipolar Magnets are the exception to all this, there’s usually only 1 million that spawn on any given game, and you need a crap ton of research to make that pile effectively infinite.

I will say that while resources are near infinite, the ability to process them is not infinite, with an upper limit based on the buildings you are using and distribution speed. Here I am thinking about something like Factorio with legendary buildings and speed modules pumping out hundreds of items per second. That’s a whole other topic…

Power

Put plainly, I dislike power management in this game. There are too many potential sources, nearly all of them suck (or create major problems), as compared to the final Sphere/Artificial Star option. Let’s cover them.

• Wind Towers. The best starter option, they provide a decent amount of power for small builds. Takes about a half dozen per mining field, which need to be spread out. Some planets have little wind, so less good there. They do not scale, consider them purely temporary. They can be placed on water (this was a major QoL change).
• Solar Panels. They take a lot of resources to build, only work when the sun’s out, and on a per-grid deployment are only marginally better than Wind Towers. The ‘best’ option is to have a 5 wide band run across the equator, that is if you don’t have a tidally locked planet.
• Fuel Burner. Coal, Graphite and other items can burn here. These provide very little power for the time invested, and should be treated as hydrogen sinks only.
• Fusion Plants. These burn advanced fuels, of which only Deuterium Rods are a viable option. You need a planet-full of those rods to build a sphere.
• Thermal Plants. Only works on lava, which means the 2nd planet in your starter system. They pump out less power than an equivalent footprint of Wind Towers. Their only real use is when Dark Fog digs holes – put these to block them.
• Ray Receivers. Assuming you have any part of a sphere running, receivers can capture rays and transform it to power. Or, you can use them to create photons, required for end-game research and artificial stars. You’ll end up with both, at least one deployment per pole. It takes a while to charge up mind you, and provides power relative to the construction state of your sphere.
• Batteries. Let’s say you have too much power on one planet and want to move it to another. Charge some batteries and discharge them on the other side. 90% chance this is actually the only viable option in a starter system. It works, it’s not terribly hard to scale, and has a decent transfer rate. But it’s not power itself, it’s a mechanism to move it between planets. A quarter planet of solar panels + batteries = ‘free’ power anywhere. There should be an infinite research that increases the maximum charge of a battery.
• Artificial Star. Assuming a sphere is running and assuming you have ray receivers making electrons, you can make this. In nearly all cases, it doesn’t make sense to use these in any system with a Dyson Sphere, as Ray Receivers are better options. But they are absolutely essential for mega-base foundries in other systems, as the material is much simpler to ship around. Each is 72MW, which seems like a lot, but a fully running factory planet will be 1-2GW of drain.

From this, there are really 4 phases of power management

1. Early game, up until you unlock yellow science. 100% wind powered.
2. Mid game, up until you start a Dyson Sphere. A power planet, using solar panels, charging + shipping hundreds of batteries a minute. A destination planet consuming said batteries.
3. Late game, Dyson Sphere under construction. Ray Receivers, lots of them.
4. End game, aiming for 120+spm for white science. Ray Receivers in the Dyson Sphere system, Artificial Stars in others.

The good news is that consumable power is rated based on draw, so you never burn more than you need. Also in the good news, as long as you’re above 40%, stuff will work, just slowly. Building your fist planet-sized factory, you will have this happen all the time. In the great news, the major power draws will come from logistics centers, and you can set how much they draw at any given time. You also only need to power only 1 end of a logistics chain, not the whole thing, very helpful when mining on a different planet as you only need to power mining, not shipping.

The bad news is that it’s very hard to build dedicated power channels, and very difficult to manage them. If a planet you’re not on loses power, tough cookies. If you want to change the settings on a group, I’m not aware how. Finding the source of a problem is also difficult. For example, improving storage on logistics towers causes them all to try to fill up the new space… effectively adding a 1GW surcharge until they fill up – ain’t no way you’re going to avoid that.

I think my main gripe here is that only the renewable power is self-contained, and even then needs an absolutely massive area to work effectively. Any consumable power is going to encounter throughput issues… either your nodes dry up, the material is needed elsewhere, or it will fail and getting it running again is a miracle and a half. More to the point, I think I’m somewhat spoiled on the ease of power generation in Factorio, or even a Rocket Fuel factory in Satisfactory. Understanding that ‘ease’ here is certainly relative.

It boils down to one key conceptual issue. The entire reason a Dyson Sphere exists is to capture all the output of a sun. The game currently doesn’t reflect that, and power issues are going to be your limiting factor throughout your playthrough. Which, I guess in hindsight, is more accurate to real life than not. Hah!