I touched on this one, but didn’t get the chance to fully appreciate it at the time. Dimension Depots (DD) are a sort of virtual storage that is available to anyone on a map, from anywhere. I had some minor use for it early, but found it impractical. And then I actually thought about it.

DD are unlocked through the MAM research trees. They need Mercer Spheres and refined SAM Ore for each phase. It costs around 100 Mercer Spheres to unlock all the research, and 1 Sphere per constructed box. There are around 300 Spheres, so ample room here… if you explore enough to find them. Jetpacks + explosives are required, as these aren’t all lying on the ground.

The research tree has 2 arms. Upload speed (4 ranks, caps at 240/minute) and stack size (4 ranks, caps at 5 stacks). Stack size is irrelevant until mid-game if you can get your upload speed to be higher than your usage speed. When you take a few minutes to think about it, the only things you’re going to use in mass volume at a high rate are Iron Plates + Concrete. You may at some point lay down extra long belts, but it’s really the floor of a factory/train that takes all the material at speed. You can add multiple boxes on a single item chain (I have 4 DD attached to my concrete production), which means upload speeds are well beyond my ability to spend. For all other material used for construction, I have 1 box.

The implicit downside to this is that for slow producing items (e.g. super computers) you are cutting your production rate by putting it in virtual storage, which may impact downstream production. Low stack sizes reduce impacts to production lines, but conversely reduce your ability to build large factories as you wait for boxes to fill.

What’s the practical use though?

I built 2 lane railway around the entire map, with no interruptions based on my DD storage. “But Asmiroth”, you ask, “is that really a huge benefit?” And to that I say, the math to build a railway that size would have required all my inventory space be dedicated to crafting materials + 4 trips to refill. Trying to build a Nuclear plant at the north, missing 1 damn rotor, and losing 30 minutes going to and from drove me nuts. I also built an entire Diluted Fuel plant (5 Water Extractors, 10 Refineries, 8 Blenders, 40 Generators) without any inventory issues. Wild.

It is absolutely game changing, and removes the need for central storage systems that were core of mid/late game builds. And it’s such a major change, that it completely changes my perspective as to how other factory games are built. It’s right up there with survival games that let you craft from items in nearby containers.