This guide attempts to describe the steps to take to get a quick start in Dyson Sphere Program.
Currently, all new games will start you on a Mediterranean Planet, which are fairly "Earth-like" and have a good range of resources that can get you all the way up to mid-game without ever leaving the planet. This guide should work for all new game starts, unless and until they make it possible to change your starting system.
If you wish to follow along more precisely, this guide and its accompanying screenshots were written with the following World Generation settings:
- Seed: 00000000
- Systems: 64
- Resource Multiplier: Infinite
With these settings, you should start at a G-Type star named "Iota Sagittae"
Before We Start
Before we start, we'll go over a few tips.
Conserving Energy
In the early game, your mecha has very little in the way of energy storage and power generation. You also don't have access to the some of the better fuel sources that increase the power regeneration rate. For these reasons it is important to conserve energy as much as possible. In a fresh game, these things consume energy for your mecha:
- Movement -- 600 kW while moving. Alleviate by planning your path in advance to minimize distance
- Hovering -- variable, but in the 1-1.2 MW range while hovering over water. Alleviate by walking around water and being sure not to "idle" while hovering above any.
- Drones -- Each drone consumes 288 kW from your mecha while flying to/from a construction. Starting the game with 3 drones, this can get as high as 864 kW. Alleviate by minimizing the distance drones have to fly, and only building one thing at a time.
- Gathering -- when mining a vein manually, it consumes 640 kW. Alleviate by automating mining. This guide's approach requires no hand-gathering aside from 60 Logs for an Upgrade.
- Replicator -- Hand-crafting items, as well as smelting ingots by hand, consume 240 kW. Alleviate by automating everything you can, as early as possible.
- Researching -- Researching technologies using materials from your mecha's inventory means your mecha is doing the research and using 360 kW. Alleviate by setting Matrix Labs to do the research.
Without any fuel source at all, your mecha only generates 80 kW of power to recharge itself. Fuel sources change this amount by varying amounts. In this guide, we will aim to keep mecha energy consumption at a minimum, but if you find yourself getting low, you can either just hang back and let the 80kW recharge itself over time, or find some fuel. You will have 5 Hydrogen Fuel Rods at the start of the game, but using them this early is a bit of a waste. This guide recommends that you use nearby natural fuel sources in the early game, such as trees and plants, organic crystal, or Coal Ore if you are lucky enough to have some nearby.
Trees, Rocks, and Soil Pile
You have probably heard the adage "waste not, want not" -- or, do not let things go to waste simply because you do not want them. In DSP, every resource has a use, although you may not know the uses until you research a particular technology. Trees and Rocks that are scattered around are no exception to this rule.
When placing a Building, if a tree or rock is in the way when the drone places the building, then that tree or rock is simply deleted, and you do not get the resources from it. For this reason, it is advised that before placing any buildings, you should first manually remove any trees or stones that are near that location. This can grant you many different materials, most of which have early-game uses such as for a fuel source.
Of the resources that you can get in this manner, it's OK to use these for fuel, for now:
- Log - come from trees, usually 8-12 for each tree cut down. Decent early-game fuel source, but Be sure to keep 60 on hand until told otherwise
- Plant Fuel - come from trees, as well as small bush-like plants.
- Coal - can sometimes come from rocks.
Try not to use Organic Crystal for fuel. They provide almost nothing for fuel, and you will find yourself wanting some later, since they are very tedious to make via recipe. If you feel that you must burn some, try to keep 120 of them set aside.
Order of Operations
There is no "one right way" to play a sandbox game like Dyson Sphere Program. The order of operations for getting started that is laid out by this guide is intended to follow the following precepts:
- Briefly introduce core game concepts in a logical order
- Minimize mecha power consumption by:
- Minimizing movement
- Minimizing Drone distances traveled
- Automate things as early as possible, especially mining and research.
- Show the benefits of setting up automation early
- Show that it's ok to tear down and rebuild an assembly line when needed.
The order things are introduced are not set in stone, and can easily be done out of sequence if the player wishes to do so.
Alright, let's get started!
Prologue
You may choose to listen to and follow along with the Prologue if you wish, or you can skip it by hitting Esc and selecting "Skip Prologue"
After Landing
- Upon landing, immediately dismantle the landing pod using Mouse Right Click. This grants you 5x Hydrogen Fuel Rod, 10x Iron Ingot, 10x Magnet and 10x Copper Ingot
- Note: There should be no need to use the hydrogen fuel rods just yet. We can find plenty of other fuel around us, and this guide will teach you how to conserve energy.
- Check your start location to determine if there are a Copper and Iron vein near each other. See the image for an example.
- Mouse over veins to see what they are made of. Copper has a orange tint, Iron has a blue-gray color.
- If you are using Seed 00000000 as this guide is, then your starting position is perfect.
- If you cannot find Copper and Iron veins near each other, then it is worth spending some time looking around the planet for the best such location. If you find yourself running low on energy while hunting for a good spot, go ahead and use the Hydrogen Fuel Rods.
- Open your Crafting menu with F and select the Magnetic Coil Recipe (Components tab, 2nd row, 2nd item).
- Change the quantity to be produced to 5, by clicking the + arrow in the bottom right corner 4 times.
- This sets the number of times to run the recipe. For some recipes (including this one), each time you run the recipe, you make 2 items, so running this recipe 5 times results in 10 Magnetic Coils.
- Click the Hammer icon to start production.
- Once you have the 10 Magnetic Coils, press T to open your Technology Tree. On the left, find and click on Electromagnetism, and then the Activate button for that technology.
- You can also open the Technology tree by clicking the large Science Beaker icon in the bottom right corner of the main view.
- Research begins as soon as you click on Activate. Once Electromagnetism is complete, you will be given some free items:
- 1x Wind Turbine
- 1x Tesla Tower
- 1x Mining Machine
Automating Mining
Congratulations on your first technology! We'll quickly put those free items to use:
- Move over toward the Iron deposit. You can pick up any Trees or Stones along the way, but try to keep your mecha's power above 50%.
- Open the Gathering items panel (2) at the bottom of the screen, and select the Miner. Use {{|kbd|R}} to rotate the miner so that its output end points at the Copper deposit.
- Holding Shift, move the miner into position so that it covers 6 of the Iron nodes.
- We will frequently use 6 as the target number of nodes, as it's easy to use for belt math.
- Open the Power items panel (1) at the bottom of the screen, and select the Wind Turbine (F4).
- Power the Miner by placing the free Wind Turbine, but for our purposes, the placement is somewhat important:
- The blue circle must overlap the very center of the miner, where the "no power" icon is.
- Place it on the output end, as far towards the copper deposit as you can while maintaining the above requirement.
- Also keep it 2-3 grid lines to one side of the output. This will prevent it from blocking the output port when we get access to belts.
- These "rules" will allow us to connect this miner and the Copper miner (we're getting there!) power grids with a minimum of extra components.
- See the photo for a visualization of the ideal placement.
- After placing the Wind Turbine, if the "No Power" icon did not go away on the Iron Miner, use the Deconstruct icon (large X, right above mecha power, or on keyboard: X) to deconstruct it, and try to place it closer.
- The Iron Miner should now be gathering Iron Ore. Because we have not yet researched belts, it cannot put them anywhere. It can hold a maximum of 50 before it stops working. Note, too, that it uses more energy than the single Wind Turbine can provide. We will correct this soon.
- Click on the Iron Miner, and wait until it has 50 Iron Ore gathered in the output circle on the top left of the window.
- Click on the 50 Iron Ore to collect it.
- Press F to open your Crafting screen and switch to the Buildings tab.
- Click to start crafting 1x Miner and 1x Wind Turbine.
- While these are crafting, walk over to the Copper deposit, and clear the trees and stones from around it.
- Place the Miner on 6 nodes, like we did with the Iron miner. Orient it so that its Output end is facing towards the Iron deposit.
- Place the Wind Turbine in the same manner we did with the Iron miner - behind and to one side of the Copper miner, as close to the Iron deposit as possible.
- Click the Copper miner to open it and wait until it has gathered 50 Copper Ore.
- Collect the 50 Copper Ore from the Copper miner and close its window.
That may have been fairly wordy, but you've now learned how to place buildings, how to power them, and how to interact with them. You've also Automated mining of both Iron and Copper ore! You'll have a Dyson Sphere in no time!
Automating Smelting
We're still using our mecha for too many things, eating up precious power. Almost everything we want to make will require the ore that we're gathering to be Smelted into Ingots, Magnets, etc first. So let's get ready to automate smelting!
Note: For the rest of this guide, we will stop telling you when to gather ore from the miners. If you find that you do not have enough in your inventory to accomplish something, head to the appropriate miner and collect more ore from it. Try to refrain from gathering a whole bunch at once - your inventory is still quite small and you can't build any storage chests just yet!
- We can't automate smelting until we've learned how! So open your Crafting menu, go to Components, and start 5 runs of Circuit Board (10 Circuit Boards total) and 4 runs of Magnetic Coil (10 Magnetic Coils total).
- Once those are made, open up the Technology tree (T), and find and research Automated Metallurgy. Don't forget to click Activate!
- While this is researching, you should still have a Tesla Tower in your inventory from our last Technology.
- Place the Tesla Tower approximately halfway between the two Wind Turbines that we have already placed. While moving it into position, you should see a dashed line connecting it to the nearest Wind Turbine. Move it around until you see a dashed line to BOTH Wind Turbines, and then click to place it. This will join the two power grids together, and help alleviate the power-shortage problems for the Miners.
- Try to center it as best you can - overlapping power supply circles on one side may leave an area unsupplied on the other. See the screenshot for an example.
- Open your Crafting menu, and craft 2x more Wind Turbines. You will probably need to grab some more Copper and/or Iron Ore.
- Place these Wind Turbines near the outer skirts of your power network - such as near one or both of the miners. Be mindful that you cannot place a Wind Turbine too close to another one, and it is beneficial to cover as much 'new' area with the wind turbine's supply circle as possible.
- Be sure to place it where it can connect with the existing network! it will show a dashed line to the nearest power network connection if it can connect where you have it positioned.