The thing I like the most about DSP is the scale of it all. Visually seeing a planet turn into a factory is absolutely amazing every single time. Scaling at that level is, for 90% of the game, a cut and paste affair with little math required. Sure, the start is relatively linear as you have power and throughput challenges, but once you lay down the first interstellar transport, you’ll have 60+ smelters in a chain in no time.

The cracks do start to show once you hit that point though. Resource mining becomes a bottleneck that becomes harder to manage, opening the door for smelting planets. A fully upgraded set of smelters and belts will need pilers to stack items effectively and quadruple throughput. Adding proliferators to the chain is a choice, one with a not insignificant cost.

Mathing it Out

Put plainly, DSP has too many items that have multiple purposes. There are only 3 that come to mind that have a singular purpose and therefore fit into a production line. A production planet will have 50 odd production lines for various items in need in other lines. Add another 30 or so for the PvE portion.

The net effect of this diversity is that late game production chains will break earlier production chains and there are limited options to manage this ahead of time. Quantum Chips are a shining example, where they have a lot of late game usage, require about 120 raw material, and close to a dozen sub-steps. It’s not really practical to design a single factory to create Quantum Chips, as you’d never be able to effectively scale it, so you’re instead going to leverage existing production lines and pull from them.

Generally, it’s easier to add a dozen more smelters to a iron plate line than to rebuild an entire quantum chip factory. The exception to this is sub-factory planets.

Massive Scale

I’ve talked a bit about the starting phase (Titanium), the middle phase (moving planets), and the end phase (building the Dyson Sphere). Late game is about SPM, or science per minute, specifically white science (Universe Matrix) for the infinite research. Building one of these requires 1 of each other type of science block + 1 antimatter (requiring a Dyson Sphere).

Given that each science block requires a set of materials that are the sum of all previous ones, this acts as a sort of cascade of material. Each white science takes about 250 raw material to make, but involves almost every production step in the game (weapons, buildings, and sphere related items are not required). It is exceptionally easy to make blue science (1 per 3s), it is inversely difficult to make green science (1 per 24s). You can saturate these ratios, but then at larger scales that serves little purpose than to block storage and waste material. The production rate is set at 1 per 15s for white, so we get interesting ratios from it.

1W : 1.6G : 0.6P: 0.53Y : 0.4R : 0.2B

These numbers don’t really line up well…making it better to over supply to some degree – notably Green (wide effect of being used for Warpers too). To that end, I prefer a 1: 2 : 0.75 : 0.75 : 0.5 : 0.25 ratio that can withstand scaling needs and math. 100 SPM can be done somewhat simply by the time you have the resources generated from a completed Dyson Sphere. That’s 25 buildings making white science.

1000 SPM… that is not something that can easily be done. 250 buildings for white = 500 for green, and each of those requires around 500 raw material per minute of items…so 250,000 material processed for a single step. At that point, you’re better off building dedicated planets to meet your demands – and specifically invest in vein utilization research in order to extract more items for longer durations, having already researched increase transport to max level (and a similar level of transport speed).

Interstellar Transport

By the late game you’ll have access to a couple hundred solar systems, each with different materials. At first you’ll just ship back the rarer material to simplify production lines from a half dozen. Eventually, you’ll need to build smelting planets for specific components. A solar system that has a high iron count likely will have a central planet that receives all iron and creates ingots from it in bulk. There is no transport efficiency here, but there is space efficiency as a planet that’s dedicated to building 1 thing can build tens of thousands of them quickly. Now, you won’t need a planet for Quantum Computers, but you will need a planet whose sole purpose is generating blue + green science, one for yellow + purple, and finally one for green.

While power won’t be an issue at this point, what will be is the specific fuel used to warp ships about. Travel in a system is just regular power, charged at a station. Travel between systems requires warpers, 2 per round trip. At 2000 items of storage, this starts going sideways when you reach massive scales and create some bottlenecks that are hard to diagnose. Since warpers can be constructed from green science, that’s one reason for overproducing above.

Overall Math

I really like DSP’s gradual shift towards exponential growth. There is a big difference between when you put down your first smelter and when you complete an actual Dyson Sphere. From the small corner of a planet to an empire that controls multiple star systems. This is quite a bit different than Factorio’s linear scale but increased logical complexity. I really appreciate that in both games, if you want to go all the way, that the games give you the tools to do so. You may get a ‘Game Won’ message, but if you want, there’s still enough there to sink 10x the time in and build massive production empires.

And all of it though logical mathematical design. Ooh that scratches an itch!

This is more of a set of thoughts regarding production logistics, where I can lay out some ideas that help drive some design choices. Key to this is a simple design concept that works at all scales.

The actual implementation of the concept varies to a degree, in particular the middle storage piece where it is often an option. Large scale factories apply the concept so that any one component can grown to meet production need. Example: Ore to Bars in Factorio.

1. Miners generate ore
2. Belts move ore
3. Ore is put into storage
4. Belts move ore
5. Foundries create bars.

You can increase the capacity of any production step, or the process as a whole. Want more bars? Create more foundries. Running out of ore? Create more miners. Miners are backed up? Create more belts. This adds a ton of flexibility, at the cost of design space. There’s a limit to how many miners you can place, and if you build too tightly, you won’t be able to add more foundries.

Which brings me to the design principles of Saturation & Just in Time (JiT).

Saturation

Saturation is where all steps past Step 1 create a backlog. This is most evident when looking at production chain, where the transport layer is backed up (e.g. belts are full). This mode of production allows you the flexibility to add more steps down the production chain without the need to completely redesign.

As complexity increases, saturation becomes more difficult to achieve. Saturating ore or bars is relatively simple. Saturating rockets, less so. In that regard, saturating raw and basic materials is a best practice.

Just in Time (JiT)

JiT is when you produce only what’s required for the next step. Useful when items have an expiry date or are complex to product. These designs are notoriously fragile as they rely on precise mathematical relationships where the ratios between any two steps must be maintained.

A very simple example of ore to bars. The math says it takes 2 ore to make 1 bar. A miner extracts at 1 per second, a foundry produces a bar every 2 seconds. JiT means you need 1 miner per foundry. Let’s say you upgrade the foundry to be 10% faster, so 1 bar every 1.8 seconds. You miner is no longer sufficient to meet that need, and adding another one means you are saturating the production chain.

A complex example would be building a rocket though a half dozen raw products and steps. Anyone of those steps changes, even a little bit, and you will break the production chain. The earlier the step, the more impactful. Your choice then is to either upgrade everything, or redesign.

The core advantage of JiT is that it is more compact and less wasteful. You won’t fill a belt with expensive material, which saves costs in multiple areas. You can optimize to a crazy degree here, which limits resource utilization and often allows a more rapid production.

Saturation & JiT

In my mind, the best examples are when both principles are applied together and where bus architecture truly shines. To achieve this you have three key pieces

• The main bus has basic material that is created in a single step from raw.
• No intermediary products are put on the bus. Intermediary in the sense that the sole purpose of the item is to create another item.
• Final stage items are created with JiT designs from the raw materials in dedicated production chains.

Satisfactory example now. Let’s say you want to build a computer. That requires Circuit Boards and an AI Limiter. Those require Copper, Plastic, and Caterium. Rather than put the Boards and Limiter on the bus and pull them to your production chain, you would create what you need from Copper, Plastic and Caterium in order to build the Computers. Note: Satisfactory is the best/worst example as you actually need Circuit Boards + AI Limiters as final products.

Dyson Sphere Program does not have any cases where JiT actually makes sense as the transport steps have near-infinite capacity and scaling is a major requirement.

Factorio lives in this space, where there are dozens of intermediary steps that need optimization, with often limited resources and transport methods. You will inadvertently saturate belts, but the main goal is to do it just the right amount to build what you need of that final product.

Constraints

In all designs you limits as to what can and cannot work. Even games that have unlimited scaling will eventually suffer from CPU/GPU limits (DSP can grind to a halt at galaxy scale production rates). The overall goal of ‘the factory must grow’ is a neat idea, and it will require some thinking to achieve.

• Space: You will eventually run out of real estate to grow. This could be at the micro level where a building is taking up too much space to fill in the blanks and you either rebuilt from scratch (Satisfactory) or you build another factory somewhere else. In most games, raw materials are limited in extraction rates or simply the amount available – in those cases you need to find another area with raw materials to extract.
• Power: Most production games have power limitations, where you need to generate ever increasing amounts to grow the factory. In some games this is easy, in some it is very complex. In all games, there reaches a point where power gains are exponential and extremely manageable. (DSP has you harness the power of stars).
• Rates: This is on a per step basis, where a building has a maximum input/output rate, and belts have a maximum throughput rate. You can often upgrade these, but you’ll still find spots where you have too much output and not enough input. While it’s often easy to build another building, expanding transport layers can be very difficult. Moving more items between planets in Factorio often means needing more ships, which are not cheap to build.
• Enemies: While I personally dislike having this in my games, quite a few have enemies that will react to your expansionary behavior and attack vulnerable portions of your production. You need to build adequate defensive structures that are furnished with production items. These often overlap with Space restrictions, where you need to take over territory in order to expand your factory.

Putting It Together

Factorio has the best mix of models, and circuit production is a highlight. The image above is an example of saturation. Copper, Green Circuits, and Plastic enter on full belts. The various production buildings select from the full belts and then put their end products which merge back into another saturated belt. At the right is a box that acts as a storage buffer for bots.

Since I use a main bus with that includes processed raw materials, it’s somewhat simple to pull into a factory. The wire is the middle building, which supplied the 4 outer circuit plants. The beacon is added to boost speed, and finally the belts are added to supply the material.

The wide majority of saturation builds in Factorio follow the same design principles. Place buildings so that material can be moved with inserters, place beacons, feed materials from the inside, exit materials from the middle.

Most other games follow an expanded main bus due to significant intermediary steps. DSP is like this, were there are 15+ items on the bus needed to make 90% of all buildings. This is also a saturation model, and vertical splitters allow this construction. The bus is on level 2, and it feeds each building on level 1, which then stores material in a container.

Satisfactory is the same model, but slightly worse. You need a mod to manage storage limits (no one need 48 stacks of Computers), buildings are exceptionally large preventing effective blueprints/design, and you need to move things vertically at multiple points. The bus and factory floor are on the same level (2+) but the belt weaving is done underground. The end result is a thing of beauty, but more comparable to cable management in PCs. Hide all the junk in the back.

It has been a long time since a decent LotR game came out, way back in the early aughts. (Shadow of Mordor is a bad story, but the Nemesis system is amazing). I understand why this is a challenge, the wide majority of fantasy archetypes are founded in LotR – people have flushed out from this for decades. There are few corners left to explore.

Tales of the Shire is a niche take on a very specific setting. Thematically, a cozy game set in the coziest part of Middle Earth makes a lot of sense. When you think of hobbits, you think of slooooowing down and enjoying the scenery. This game has pieces of that all over the place. However, it also has piece that conflict with this measure.

Main Activities

The totality of the game revolves around cooking meals. You collect materials, grow gardens, collect fish, and then leverage an obtuse mini game to craft a meal. Sharing said meals with the villagers increases your friendship levels, unlocking more stuff. As with other cozy games, there are seasons, cross-benefits between skills, items to acquire, and areas to unlock.

The menus behind all of this are more complex than I would think reasonable, if only because the actual mechanics of everything is more complex than need be. I am nitpicking here, as the data is certainly present, just not obvious to access.

Money

Is the root of all evil, and a major hurdle to overcome. Everything costs money, and money is challenging to acquire in amounts that are deemed ‘cozy’. A set of seeds may cost $50, work once, and the product sells for marginally more than the seeds. You cannot sell a final meal, which is very weird. Expanding the ability to garden also requires money, about 1000 a shot.

You will start by scrounging the landscape for things on the ground and sell them for minor amounts and a lot of time invested. Fishing is the best option, but only becomes so after you’ve reached level 2+ as the fish start to sell for 100 each instead of 20.

While I can appreciate the pressures of money (Tom Nook scars remain), its a weird thing to put in front of a hobbit just trying to relax. Money issues also don’t scale as in other games. I’m literally a multi-millionaire in Stardew Valley, when I hit 10k here I thought I was Scrooge McDuck.

Cooking

This here is both very interesting and complex. Ingredients matter. They have quality levels and flavor profiles (salt only comes from seasoning). Better quality = more friendship points when served.

You gain additional recipes over time, and more cooking stations as you improve your cooking skill. These stations allow you to alter the composition of a meal, making it more crispy, tender, crunchy or smooth. Get the right balance for some added benefit. You can only crisp/tenderize specific items, so ingredient choice matters.

Villagers also have tastes – sweet, bitter, salty, and sour. Recipes change their flavour profile based on ingredients. Some ingredients can be seasoned to change their profile, which may or may not change the profile of the meal (I have yet to figure this part out fully). If you combine two specific flavor profiles, you get a quality boost as well.

Serving food is the main point of the game, and you want to serve 4 people per day their preferred dishes. Higher quality boosts the relationship meter faster. Each relationship level gives something, usually a new recipe, which helps meet more villager taste preferences.

The Cadence

Aside from the main story – which is arguably a long tutorial – you generally follow the same daily pattern.

• Wake up
• Tend to the garden
• Read the mailbox
• Create meals for guests
• Serve guests
• ???
• Make money
• Invite guests for tomorrow
• Go to bed

I think that is a valid and simple daily routine that aligns with my idea of a hobbit. There are other things you can do, such as trade, collect more ingredients, complete daily tasks to improve a skill. Each of them has some merit. My only true gripe here is that progression provides nothing more than the ability to spend more money through an expanded garden and house. Fishing in a new location is a cool idea, but you need to lose a chunk of the day to run to the vendors, when you could just fish in town.

I’d argue that this game is a niche of a niche game. You really need to like cozy games and also need to like Hobbits to truly appreciate what’s here. In that space, your mileage may vary.

I took a trip out west recently, out to the mountains. Nice to just disconnect and enjoy nature. I live in a heavily urbanized setting, and there’s a particular highway that is notorious for 18 wheelers, where it feels like there’s more of them than personal vehicles. The why of it is fairly clear, logistics. Getting things to urban centers relies almost exclusively on trucks. Out west though, trains are the major logistical method – perfect for grains, oil, and other basic materials. There aren’t any trains of bluetooth headsets, but there are trains that are 200 wagons long of canola. As I’ve often been fascinating with logistics, it made me think more about optimizing deliveries.

Moving a few tons of items has interesting factors to evaluate. Is it the same stuff? Can the stuff mix? Does timing matter? Does it all go to one location? Do I have the infrastructure in place? If I need to move a bunch of different things that don’t stack, and need to do it quickly, then large volume logistics is unlikely to work. If it’s bulk raw material, then it’s likely best to ship it all in one big package.

From start to end product, the logistics of distribution change on scale. All of this is macro logistics, getting things to factories. Once they are in the building, we have micro logistics.

1. Basic materials are extracted and put in buffer storage while waiting for transport. Miners, Pumps, Harvesters.
2. Materials are transported in bulk (often a train) to a refining process that normally has a train station built in – think a large scale foundry. Ore to bricks, crude oil to refined.
3. The refined items are also transported in bulk (again, trains) to major distribution hubs. It’s possible some locations actually have train stations built-in, but this is less and less common.
4. From the hubs, the materials are shipped by trucks to production plants and set in storage.
5. Inside those production plants are forklifts/loaders to move items between production floors.
6. Products are put into final storage and distributed by truck for saleé
7. Steps 4-6 can repeat numerous times for complex production chains. Car manufacturing is a great example, where dozens of production steps are required to reach final assembly.

Side note, even a basic toaster has complicated steps in production. This TED talk covers the high level parts.

When we ‘gamify’ logistics, the same concepts are applied to things that follow a progressive pattern of complexity. You’ll mine iron, make bars, make plates, make gears, make engines, make rockets, each step requiring more complex pieces and more raw items. Where an iron bar may take 2 ore, a rocket may need the equivalent of 1000 ore.

Where games truly differ is that they apply macro and micro logistics to the same interface and generally at the same scale. In that sense, I mean that a train generally takes a similar amount of space as a belt.

Micro Challenges

In the real world there are infrastructure challenges that impact the micro. You factory has a limited physical size, so you need to optimize the footprint to get the most amount of items produced safely. If you run out of space, you need to find another factory. If you want to build a train station close to the factory, you need to buy land, get permits, remove buildings, get permits, build buildings and connect to the existing rail system.

In a game, you can just build more. If you need to connect to a rail, select what’s in the way, press delete, build and connect. Rarely, very very rarely, are you ever space limited. You will however be rate limited, where the belts have a max amount they can transport. The answer? MOAR BELTS!

The Bus

I like the idea of a bus. It’s been part of software/hardware architecture for a long time and to key principles boil down to standards.

You have a bus at home, and you use it every day when you plug something in for power. You don’t care (or maybe don’t know) how the power gets to the outlet, you just care that is works with your standard plug. The power company cares. Construction companies care. Insurance cares. Maybe power is solar, or nuclear. Maybe it’s produced and converted on-site, or distributed across the country. Maybe the connection to your house is above ground or below. You likely don’t care at all, as long as the lights turn on.

If you live in North America, odds are you have used Amazon. That’s another great example of a complex bus that gets you that special pencil delivered to your door tomorrow. Sure, it’s slave labour to create it, and vastly underpaid ’employees’ all the way to your door, but does it matter when you don’t have to leave your couch?

Game buses work the same way. You collect material whatever way you want, and deposit it into the bus. You can then extract from the bus using a template (or blueprint!), do what you need, and either expand the bus or store the item for use. The game will dictate is you have a simple bus (say, a dozen or so raw items used for nearly everything) or a master bus (one that continually expands as you create more complex things). In some games, you don’t need material past a certain point and can stop that flow to be replaced by something else. In others, you need base material all the way to the end.

The main advantage of a game bus is that it’s nearly infinitely expandable. There are always going to be optimized distribution methods, and they often rely on the dual sided complexity/simplicity of the mechanics.

• Factorio used to be focused almost exclusively on belts through a main bus, with trains supplying raw materials. Space Age added terrain challenges, and significant improvements to bots and logistics containers, so that later planets really work a whole lot better without belts or trains. And that doesn’t include rocket logistics. There are tons of tools to optimize logistics.
• Satisfactory has very poor tools to build trains, and their throughput is exceptionally low given the complexity. Tier 7 belts are dirt cheap and with few exceptions much more efficient in transport. Rocket Fuel is super easy to make, and drones are ridiculously easy to set up, making them far superior to trains as well.
• Dyson Sphere Program is an exemplary use of both master bus and distributed logistics through vessels/shuttles. Well.. it was until the Dark Fog addition that added 30% more items to the bus and made things more complex without simple solutions. You can play without Dark Fog and ignore that part (highly recommended).
• Foundry is a very weird game. The master bus is the only option until you reach end game, where you effectively stop producing anything on planet and simply ship it in. The market interface becomes the bus, which is like ordering from Amazon. Not sure if that was the idea.
• Outworld Station doesn’t have a bus in the traditional sense, as you can only place factories. The station itself is the bus and each new building you add brings a new path for items to move.
• The Crust is a master bus, plain and simple. To point, it’s also the only way to get rid of slag and at that, extremely inefficiently.

There are other games in the genre. Captain of Industry, Timberborn, Microtopia and so on. With only a couple exceptions, most apply the concepts quite well but start to strain under higher volumes and complexity. Games that offer the option to set general priorities (high/regular/low) rather than logic gates (more than 100 ore) are almost guaranteed to see this issue.

Personally, I think DSP has the best logistics system for the widest crowd. It’s easy to set up, easy to expand upon, and rate limits only apply at the ultra end game. Factorio has the most complex, and acts as a huge hurdle in the space portion if you can’t figure out the logic gates. But those are the ones that work for me. Think it may be time for another pass through..

And all of this, because I was looking at trains in the mountains.

You know how a buffet has something for everyone but none of it is really great? That’s pretty much The Crust (Early Access).

Billed as an ‘immersive economic management sim’, The Crust has some interesting ideas. You’re on the moon, with access to the surface and below ground. With automation, you can set up what is sort of like a factory, and spend time exploring the larger surface for ‘quests’. The pieces sound good, and in most cases it works out.

The exploration part is bare bones. Send a vehicle to a location, trigger a step, send another vehicle to do stuff on that step, repeat. You’ll start with 1 of each vehicle, eventually able to buy/build more. You’ll eventually be able to mine the surface and build supply routes as a result.

The surface construction is basically power generation + logistics support with very large buildings. Eventually you can the ability to put elevators between surface and below, so placing items will eventually have some bearing. More than ample room and straightforward.

The below portion is the meat of the game. Two main parts, mining regolith (moon rocks) which generate one of 1 outputs, with varying %. You process the results into various products, use those products for more and so on. The first 3 tiers are simple enough. Tiers 4 and 5 are clearly WIP, as they require 4 or 5 materials, things you often don’t want to pull across a base, and often replace previous recipes with marginally more efficient recipes. A main bus is all but required given the scaling item requirements. Belts only cost $, which is nice, but also prohibitively expensive early on. Storage is too limited to my tastes (256 or 512 per container, and some steps need 5,000+ items). You also need to build livable quarters, and hire staff to run buildings (such as research). Getting water/air to these places is simple, building them takes ages due as it takes about 60s per 1×1 square. I’d expect this to be changed at some point.

Quests (which move the story along and are highlighted in yellow) have varying requirements to complete. One particular step gives you a countdown to provide a substantial amount of an item, one that you are very unlikely to have on hand. My recommendation is that you create 4 or 5 saves and use them incrementally per stage of the quest.

Oh, forgot to mention you are limited by CPU power, which is a sort of building limit. You can increase this through construction of a building in a living quarter that requires a tier 3 material. I really dislike this mechanic, as it’s a huge punishment for the early game (when you can’t actually build tier 3). I haven’t mentioned the challenges with setting building priorities (never user low priority, it causes everything else to break).

All those words and nothing about economic simulator! Well, you get access to contracts which have reputation requirements and allow you to ship items for money/reputation/research. The game is currently ‘broken’ where mandatory quests take up all contract space unless you research a key piece. You can also just plain ol’ sell items on the market, which is where 90% of the $ in this game are acquired. This is how you address the ‘too much slag’ problem that pops up mid-way. Use slag to make bricks (sell those on the market) or sell the slag through contracts. Ahh forgot to mention that you are limited in shipping size based on the weight of the item, and the size of the ship… and you need to pay for transport. This means that for all the early game it makes zero sense to sell on the market, and later on, only certain items are worth the effort.

I have played many games in genres that The Crust borrows from. Automation, RPGs, economic simulators all have their own complexities. Building just one of those is hard, building something across all 3 is really hard. At no point is any of it truly totally broken. There are systems that add un-needed complexity (CPU), time sinks everywhere (only play on fast forward), and some rather decent balancing pieces to sort out (research requirements, crafting ratios, shipping, quest requirements).

Back to the buffet comparison. The Crust has something for pretty much everyone, and it’s all interconnected. There may not be any particular item that is a show stopper, but all of it is decent enough. I will say that it’s nice to have a more ‘mainstream’ take on the genres with a much lower barrier of entry.

My last run in Satisfactory was for 1.0, and it was with AGS. AGS is a set of options that remove friction points – things like a permanent jetpack, all research unlocked and so on. The jetpack is a huge quality of life item and cuts travel / exploration time by what feels like 90%. Alternative research being unlocked means not having to locate crash sites, have arbitrary material on hand to unlock said sites, and then waiting 10 minutes per (there are 100+) to unlock the research which is useless more often than not. So… yeah, saves a few dozen hours. The only downside is that you can’t get achievements with AGS enabled.

1.1 comes out on June 10. Saves have been cross-compatible for a while now, so I opted to get the rough stuff sorted out before the drop. For some reason, self-flagellation I suppose, I opted for a vanilla run without AGS. That means roughing it like a pleb. Let me tell you that the wrinkles really show when you play this way.

Important to understand is that Satisfactory is much different than other games in the genre when it comes to factory building. There is no grid alignment, everything is freeform placement. Buildings are also quite large, much bigger than you, so things take up space. A + B = a sprawling factory until you can optimize with blueprints after about dozen hours. You also can’t prebuild items and need the base material in your (limited) inventory to construct. That is a lot of back and forth between storage and the factory floor. A lot. Oh how I miss my jetpack. Finally, storage in Satisfactory has 24-48 slots. For nearly every material , this is a giant waste of space. You do not want 24 slots of Rotors, you will never need 24 slots of Rotors. Where Factorio, DSP, and Foundry all operate on the concept of full buffers/storage/belts, Satisfactory instead opts for ‘just in time’ delivery. You only build what you need to keep a factory running. Which is dumb, because of my point on not being able to prebuild material and your inventory needing to be full.

Thankfully 1.0 addressed nearly all of these quirks. Dimensional Storage has much lower stack limits (1 to start) and will automatically refill (30/m at first, which is molasses speed), which lets you leave your base and build more stuff with a virtual inventory. It allows a factory floor to be focused 100% on ‘just in time’, which can be complex math. The optimum way to play here is with a spreadsheet. If I need 15 rotors per minute I don’t want to store 1,200. I still like the idea of storage acting as a buffer in case something breaks down in the production chain, giving me time to sort it out. So I found a mod that lets me limit storage levels, and I am alllllll smiles.

I build large mega buses. It requires a fair chunk of material and the belts need to buffer, but in the end it’s the simplest and most efficient way I’ve found to build in factory games. Generally it goes material + production + product on the bus. It’s a tad more challenging to get this up and running early, as your belt throughputs are unlikely to be enough to sustain large scale efforts. Mk2 belts in particular are extremely expensive relative to all other things, so it’s best to run very long Mk1 belts and merge them for very short distances (e.g. coal for power plants). Mk3 belts are dirt cheap. Mk4 have limited use, Mk5 are by far the cheapest of them all. Mk6, well, by the time you get there only Mk3 miners and copper matters.

I am harping on belts here for a good reason. Building at scale requires blueprints. Blueprints don’t allow belts to link. They will in 1.1! Rails too!! The last time I built a rail around the map, with a jetpack mind you, it took over 4 hours. This will make a world of difference.

So, for now I’m building enough to unlock rails, but stopping before actually building any of it. It would take me longer to build than simply waiting for a patch, and blueprinting my way to glory. This one small thing, full hyperbole, will change the game from coal on out. For sure cut build time in half, if not more.

So for now, a starter base is up and running awaiting this massive QoL patch.

If the first post was a ‘you should go and buy this’ post, this one is a bit more in mechanical, and likely more niche as a result.

RPGs make or break on two core aspects. The story itself needs to be engaging and relatively well thought out. The details matter. Veilguard is a good example where this part didn’t work. The second is the mechanical portion, where you actively engage in the world. Mosf often through combat. This is where SW: Outlaws had serious challenges. Also hard to balance.

Clair Obscur hits both of these well out of the park. Note that I speak French, a huge plus to my enjoyment.

The story rather succinct and each zone is relatively unique and never overstays. It’s a game where grief is the villain, not a particular person, which is always an achievement in storytelling. It may have the best soundtrack in the past 10+ years – earworms a plenty. The end of act 2 is a fascinating act of setup and payoff. The end of act 3 is the only time I can recall actually stopping to think about the right choice to make – simply from a story perspective. There are no weird logical gaps, everything has purpose and meaning. It’s a very satisfying experience to be part of the unfolding story, and one where you as a person come out reflective for the broader meaning.

The combat portion is the balance of three distinct systems. The actual tactical portion of pressing buttons to avoid/retaliate to incoming damage requires a significant amount of attention (which can actually be exhausting) and so extra rewarding when you pull it off. The skill mixes and cadence between the player buffs/debuffs and skill systems is wild to me, a more simplistic version of BG3 where one character’s actions impact the next, allowing for some strategic elements. Finally the picto/lumina passive skill system feels straight out of FF7/9 in both the simplicity (equip it, win 4 fights, everyone has access) to the complexity (how to find synergies between passive boosts that fit a character’s playstyle). Going from 5k damage in one moment, to 5m the next is a crazy fun feat and why I love RPGs. Break the math.

I’ve now completed all the pieces where I feel a ‘need’ to complete. There are 2 other late game parts I can tackle (they are still red gates, indicating higher difficulty) that I’m partially through, and are distinctly in the ‘want’ category. The mechanical portion doesn’t interest me here, the story does, which I think speaks volumes to the remainder of the game.

It’s going to take a bit for my brain to adjust to normal games after this. What an amazing achievement.

Stack logistics are a super interesting problem to solve, very analogous to real world logistic issues. It boils down to how of much of a thing can be shipped in the same space between locations. Compression ratios are another way to look at this. Real world, it is easier to ship aluminum powder in bulk than it is to ship aluminum boxes, due the stack size of the objects. Stack sizes in game relate to how much of an item can be stored in 1 inventory location, or on a given belt, are are up to the designer to decide. Maybe you can stack 100 of an item, maybe only 1. The why of it is interesting.

Knowing what the limit is of a stack impacts a lot of decisions, in particular in the amount of items required in it’s production path.

• Iron Ingots require 1 Iron Ore. They each stack to 100. No difference.
• Energetic Graphite requires 2 coal. Each stacks to 100. It is 100% more efficient to ship the graphite than the coal. Coal is used for other things unfortunately, so you will still need to ship it.
• Carbon Nanotubes require 6 stalagmites. Nanotubes stack to 100, stalagmites to 50. That is 12x more efficient. Stalagmites are not used for anything else, therefore you never want to ship stalagmites.

Understanding these bottlenecks can also determine if you want to create a mini-factory or ship to a planet factory. Something like Blue Science stacks to 200, which has a 10x+ efficiency rating for shipping.

In the simplest of phases, you only ever need to ship raw material (except stalagmites, titanium ore and silicon ore which should be refined first), and then distribute to a main factory. You can reach rather stable throughputs in a somewhat straightforward 1:1 ratio of interplanetary logistics station between planets.

If you want to complete a Dyson Sphere in less than 12 hours though… you’re going to need a different model where you have multiple raw-material dedicated input stations that then distribute material out to the factory. This will require about a dozen planetary mining operations to sustain. I’ve done this before and after Dark Fog. I can attest that is sucks big time with Dark Fog on.

Stack Inserters + Pilers

DSP (and Factorio) enable stacking material, which adds a base compression ratio. 4 stacks of items in DSP is a big deal, in particular when dealing with bulk base materials like ore + plates. In a large scale factory, upgrading a producing building (e.g. a smelter) to higher production rates means more items out per minute, which will likely oversaturate a belt, causing a slew of production issues. Choice #1, build more belts – unlikely as you are limited in the inputs at the destination. Choice #2, don’t upgrade and simply build a new production chain – this is actually super valid and as long as you have space to build, way more efficient. Choice #3, use pilers to create stacks which quadruple the amount possible on a belt – the best option when you are space constrained, which is likely the case by the time this problem presents itself.

Side note: this particular concept is an interesting result of the math not mathing. Factorio vanilla didn’t need this as it was dirt cheap to simply build a new belt lane with infinite build space and rather low througput. Space Age though… legendary buildings + mods on Vulcanus change your throughput rates by a factor of 5-10. More belts won’t fix that and stack inserters become mandatory. Satisfactory should have this, it would save massive builds with 70 odd belts of the same material going everywhere. And don’t get me started on fluids… that system is infuriating.

Rate Limits on Transport

If you consider real world implications, a courier, a truck, a train, and a ship have different throughput rates. A courier is the fastest but can only carry a very small amount. A truck will be faster and more precise, but can only carry 1 load to a destination. A train can carry more, but takes longer and is less accurate (it needs a train station after all), but can carry 100+ loads. A ship takes weeks to complete a shipment, can only distribute to ports, but can transport thousands of loads in a single run. And that assumes there’s a truck/train/ship available when you need it.

DSP has 4 modes of transport as well. Drones, belts, intra and inter planetary ships, which follow a similar construct as the real world. Factorio goes bots, belts, trains, ships. Satisfactory is dimensional depots, drones, belts, trains.

If you only need a few items at a time, the lower rate / higher speed options are fine. Sometimes it’s so complicated that while math says belts may be best, having a saturation of drones is actually easier as the complexity of the network is too much to overcome. Gleba in Factorio comes to mind, with spoilage coming from dozens of locations.

Interesting note for DSP is that hub distribution limits do exist. Interplanetary hubs can hold 100 intra and 10 inter planetary ships. Intra ships can move 200 items each (so 20,000 items total) and inter ships can move 2,000 (also 20,000 items total). The distance each of these ships travels is key, one stays on the planet and one goes between them…so in nearly all cases they are emptied faster than they are filled. To offset this limit, you need to build multiple hubs for the same material, then group them. A full factory planet that is optimized will likely have 5 or more hubs dedicated entirely to iron ore, and the intra ships can pick from any of them to fulfill their needs.

DSP also has a fair amount of customization in terms of grouping + prioritization, which helps dramatically with optimization. The totality of the game space (meaning all system + planets) have more tools here to effectively distribute items that Factorio does (primarily due to rocket limitations in Space Age). It’s also looks friggin’ amazing to have a planet factory running.

DSP has a special place in my brain. It’s hard to properly describe how friggin’ cool it is to build an actual Dyson Sphere! All factory games make numbers go up, but the actual end goal is a relatively downer. Factorio gives a ‘game complete’ screen when you fly to a planet, something you’ve done 5 times before – even in the vanilla days it was about sending a rocket. An actual meaningful goal that isn’t found elsewhere is impressive.

The end goal is amazing, but is the journey there still fun? That’s the question.

A bit more than a year ago, Dark Fog launched, which brought PvE combat to the game. The planet-based combat is decent enough, though I still question the amount of ‘trash loot’ that results from it all. The inability to destroy things in game is still an annoyance to me. Space PvE combat is still quite bad, and long-term space-faring objectives suffer from it. I opted to start over without Dark Fog, and that means that around 1/4 of the research in the game is useless. It also removes a lot of the early game friction.

The lack of PvE and amount of game experience means that the game itself has some rather serious pacing issues. It takes about an hour to build a main bus, with the main gap related to getting foundations to fill in water holes. Once you have that running, it’s a very small step to move into red/yellow research using oil. That opens up around 80% of all research in game, nearly up to the point of actually building the Dyson Sphere proper. You’re effectively rate limited on research based on oil extraction math, and then rate limited based on green engines which open up interplanetary logistics.

What’s interesting about DSP is that each planet is the same size, and the layouts differ based on latitude (less room on the poles). You’re never placed into a position where space is a challenge (building vertically is damn cool), only throughput. Where Factorio allows you to effectively brute force base material production to fill a bus, DSP’s bus is actually made of intermediary materials which can be much more complicated to make en-masse. Making something in bulk in Factorio usually isn’t terribly painful, as you can make a dedicated factory for it. DSP not so much, if you need end-item bulk items, it has thousands of base material requirements which is much more like a pyramid of production than distinct chains. A late game factory planet will have 200 iron plate factories – that never exists in Factorio.

By not having Dark Fog at all, I will not be able to unlock the Mk4 Assembler (100% boost on Mk3) or Mk3 Foundry (50% boost on Mk2). I have completed this game nearly 10 times now, and not once was this ever an issue. Throughput and power are. It is a much more difficult thing getting enough iron to a factory planet than it is to have enough machines to smelt it. It is possible, and honestly a terrible idea for 99% of the game, to terraform an entire planet and dedicate it to only base foundries (iron, copper, glass, stone, coal). More on that in a future post.

Which brings me to blueprints and more specifically, force builds. Blueprints are all but needed in Factorio as the small factories can be terribly complex. DSP is more about scale, repeating the same pattern dozens and dozens of times. Factorio implemented ‘force build’, which means that it will remove whatever is there and place the new blueprint. DSP does not have this – if there’s a conflict, the blueprint won’t work. That means that DSP blueprints are either very small (1 building and connectors) or very large (a full factory on a blank canvas that has been paved), and you’ll need to make connections to the rest of the plant. Reminds me a bit of Satisfactory’s blueprint limitations – where scaling is in the middle of DSP + Factorio.

Side note: Satisfactory’s main bus is ridiculously large because you can’t pre-fab buildings. Factorio’s main bus is extra long to support multiple mini factories. DSP’s main bus has about 15 things on it because you can in fact pre-fab buildings, but on the other hand, there are nearly 60 buildings you can construct and need to store. With Dark Fog, the main bus can wrap half of a planet.

A reminder that DSP follows some rather straightforward phases:

• Initial Landing + automation
• Main bus + blue science
• Red science (oil)
• Yellow science (titanium + silicone)
• Planet factory + logistics
• Purple + Green science
• Dyson Sphere construction
• Photons + end game

Right now, I’ve completed the yellow science phase. I’ve got research queued for a while, and trying to set up my Deuterium ring on the lava planet. Next up is a battery charging station on the lava planet, which will allow the ice planet to slowly transform into the main production hub. Power is always a challenge on that ice planet… there is a massive gap between the later phases and therefore essential to scale growth over time. It will be interesting to see how I can make blueprints work in my favor this pass.

The more I play, the more the EA gremlins pop up. Pacing & unlocks are not yet balanced, so I find myself in spaces where I’m told I need to do something, but don’t have the tools to do so. Example, the second zone is flora based and you need to collect Nitrate. The only way to do this is through manual means with an Atomizer, even though you can see mining stations. You also are required to use Uranium to unlock chests, and will not unlock the ability to craft that for at least 3 more zones (hours later). Weird.

The concepts however are really interesting, and the mechanics of them are rather impressive. The game effectively asks, why do you need belts? And honestly after a few hours, I am left wondering why they exist at all other than a resource sink. I’ve made tons of posts related to main bus architecture and logistic distribution models… and while the concepts remain, the implementation is so different here. Except fluid/gas, and that implementation sucks here but is standard in other games.

As you progress in the game, you unlock different buildings that produce more complicated things. It’s more or less voxel based construction, and allows 2 levels of construction. The game will automatically route items between buildings, if you set the path. At first this is simple enough, but later on gets extremely complicated. Not being able to measure throughputs adds to complexity.

I don’t mind complexity, and I don’t mind brute force methods. The math however doesn’t always math. Upgraded miners are good, as are the docking stations. You need to upgrade storage to hit 360 items a minute transfer rate. Smelters are the first production level. You either create 39 or 52 items per minute – so 9.2 or 6.9 buildings. That will saturate a production chain. If you need more than 360 items a minute, you need to build another entire production chain. No belt upgrading here. You won’t know you need more than that until your storage empties.

One important note on logistics is compression ratios. If an item is refined to a lower rate (or larger stack) it is often best to refine it before shipping. Like 2 iron ore to 1 iron plate, you are 100% more efficient on shipping. So far, the only material that benefits from this is superalloy, an item you won’t see for a very long time.

First Zone

This will be your ship production zone, and 100% of everything you produce is meant to construct ships. It will look horrible and you will suffer from less than ideal design decisions if you don’t plan properly. 90% of it can be tweaked some with one exception – your ship building facilities must be close to your fueling station and close to open space. This is the only way the tug will be able to move ships for fueling and then park them in the open space. 25 ships is easy. 250 ships take up a TON of room.

Second Zone

This is a weird one. You collect Nitrate, which has no use at all other than a construction milestone. You can collect Hydrogen, which is used to power Fusion Plants for power (more on that later), and you can build what are effectively windmills for 3x the price of solar panels for a 50% more power. Not really worth it there.

Third Zone

This is your 2nd asteroid belt and should be treated near identical to the first zone, with one exception. This is your base material factory that will allow you to expand every other base. It will be powered through the 2nd zone’s hydrogen and scaled to give you as many construction materials as needed – up to computers. Massive QoL game changer when you get this running!

Fourth Zone

There’s nothing here of use at this time, other than 5 talent points to quickly harvest. You likely won’t have completed harvesting the points in the 2nd zone by the time you end this one. The quest you unlock here is likely to be your quit wall, as the volume of the builds will choke all production for a few hours. That’s honestly fine by my account, as what’s done up til this point is more than impressive.

Power

Mining stations, when upgraded and with defensive bits, need 3 solar panels to function. Set it and forget it. Absolutely dirt cheap to set up.

Production bases should be Fusion based. Hydrogen is extremely easy to find and infinite in supply. You can build power links between mining stations and your main base, but the material costs are more than 3 solar panels and a power outage impacting an entire zone sucks… so why bother? Power storage is a thing, but I’ve honestly never seen a use for it.

Moving On

As an EA game, I’ve had my fill for a while. The main quests up til about level 8 are a good exploration of all the meaningful mechanics. After that point, scaling of logistics becomes simply too painful to manage. To reach the next step, I’d need to fill in zone 2 with Hydrogen Farms to build an infinite power supply field for every other zone, with 1 warp station per product type, which would then make a mega station.

More to the point, the inter-zone logistics is a major hurdle and my major design issue with the game. It is absolutely possible to scale everything with a warp per product. I am not interested in that complexity for now.

That said, for an EA game, it may be the best experience I’ve ever had in terms of quality. Holy cow. Quite curious how this game will go long term, certainly the strongest start I’ve seen in a long time.