I dislike saying something isn’t working when there’s no comparative. If you haven’t played Factorio, then it’s important to state that this is the gold standard for the factory genre (admittedly niche).

Dyson Sphere Project (DSP) is a lot like Factorio in almost all respects. The change to 3D brings a verticality to building and then some geometry since you’re building on large spheres. And the whole large scale logistical bit (trains) are replaced with shuttles since you’re moving between planets (side effect of not having the need for train tracks). This last bit is a major simplification from Factorio.

The starter experiences are extremely similar. You:

• Manually mine 1 resource
• Create a mining factory & power it
• Create a smelting factory & power it
• Connect the mining to the factory through a belt
• Mine a second resource and repeat
• Use the dual smelters to assemble something more complex

Once you’ve assembled one thing, the rest of the game is the same concept. Mine/harvest/extract some resource, refine it, and merge it with something else. The complexity comes from multiple layers of crafting items, at different rates of production, and getting them all to the right locations. The earlier you are organized into ‘hubs’ the easier life becomes.

ABC

Corny, fine, but Always Be Crafting. These games are about falling forward, so when you have solved one logistical challenge, a new one shows up. You think that you’ll never need more Iron Plates but then you realize that you need to produce 50x the same amount.

The actual Dyson Sphere requires somewhere close to 120,000 solar sails. Each sail takes 25 raw materials, across 6 different types. There are 12 crating stages involved, which has its own logistical challenges. So 3 million in pure raw materials, plus close to 2 million more in the logistical buildings to automate it all.

And you start the game mining 1 item per second.

Satisfactory

I feel the need to compare here as the concepts are the same (more like Factorio as it’s not a sphere and also has trains). The execution is more finicky because it’s next to impossible to select multiple things, draw things out, or do simple group alignment. Videos really do justice to explaining this, so for comparison’s sake here is the same streamer explaining the starter experience in both Satisfactory and DSP (he also has some Factorio stuff). Both videos are similar in length, but the ease of interface is the key bit. (I am avoiding the random MAM research results that would require rebuilding a factory line… that’s its own rant.)