Dyson Sphere Program is a computer game about the exploitation of a planetary system, and it seems that plans to plunder their sweet, sweet minerals to make a power source for a supercomputer are really making the real hours fly by.
You land on a procedure-generated home world with some supplies and a robot to explore the planet, and then you start collecting resources. The opening hours are tedious, especially if you are trying to figure out what’s going on. The game depends on you to do just about everything, and the tutorials in the game are only slightly useful. Imagine that you are sending a space mission with manuals that only explain what you need to do.
Initially, you are stuck with the collection of resources manually with your mech, until you can climb the technology tree a bit and build factories to exploit the necessities, and then refineries to turn it into usable raw materials, and storage facilities to preserve everything . until you are ready to use it. And you need to make sure that all the buildings are connected to each other in the right order so that the material is processed.
Efficiency is the whole point of the game, in fact. It is not your job to do everything by hand, or to do the grunting yourself, even if you start like that. It’s your job to set up a system that handles all of these things for you, to automate mining, to refine and distribute every resource while driving the whole thing. The commitment to automation, and only automation is part of the reason Dyson Sphere Program feel so satisfying: the only limitation on how smoothly your surgery can go is your own ability to plan, repeat, and improve.
The first ten hours did not take me very far, because once I understood a new way to better lay out my base, I wanted to start over with the strategy in mind and see what I could think of one more time. I understood the basics. The game does not make it easy for you, because the opening hours are again a hassle. There is a replicator that you can use to convert raw materials into ingredients and building supplies, which you can then use to create new structures and research new technologies, but each step is difficult.
How it starts …
You can not just choose and build a building, even if you have all the necessities. You must first go to the replicator, select the building, give the time to create the building and then go back to the build menu, select the building and place it. If anything could be broken up into smaller steps in the early game, it was to the point that it felt excessive and almost punitive. You even have to constantly feed your mech wood and plant material to keep it going, and it consumes power like you would not believe. Making sure you set up processes that work on their own is the only way out for the grunt that starts each round.
The first few hours were filled with troublesome moments when I tried to figure out exactly how to connect a conveyor belt to a building so that it could get into stock. My first problem was that I forgot to include a output the refined materials thus had a place to go. Dyson Sphere Program is a game that requires a little more thought and study than other resource management sims I’ve played in the past; it helps to watch some tutorial videos when you start, as the game itself does not help you much.
I do not want to think that the first few steps in setting up your base are too many, and that I respect the developer for making the opening so easy, because it is an important motivation to automate your business as quickly as possible to set up. Dyson Sphere Program currently also has early access, and it’s currently only $ 19.99, so it would not surprise me if developer Youthcat Studio will eventually adjust the number of things you have to deal with during the first hour from where it is now.
What it’s starting to look like …
But once you set up some supply lines, and you see supplies being mined, put on a conveyor belt, converted into something else, used to create something further, and then stored until you need to build something new. .. it is hypnotized. At some point, your designs and processes and loops just start to click and clap without you having to do much, and it’s very satisfying to see your creation come to life. And this is just the beginning of the skills you need to learn and the optimizations you need to work on.
Like: How do you do the same thing to another planet, one that may have very different conditions than those of your starting world? How do you ensure that supplies are shipped as efficiently as possible from world to world as you grow rich and build more machinery to exploit more inventory and generate more energy to keep growing? Expansion is the goal, because you need a ridiculous amount of energy to meet the needs of the latest supercomputer on earth, so you’ll have to slurp everything you can from every planet you find to make it happen.
I have not yet come close to what is going on here, but I am going to try!
As cold and industrial a purpose as Dyson Sphere Program give you, improving your lines and bases is always satisfying. The lust of experimentation, mistakes, to start over and perfect a design or a strategy, chews through time like you would not believe, and at the moment, while we are stuck inside the cold winter months, is not exactly a terrible outcome. It’s no wonder that this game is currently sitting at the top of the Steam sales charts with so many positive reviews.
Dyson Sphere Program builds on the ideas behind games like Factorio and other efficiency simulators, as I have already begun to call it, to create something with its own tone and sense of calm, while using the mechanism to shape the galaxy so that it can meet your own needs for literal power. There are some bugs I hope will work out if the team gets feedback – for example the text is small on the screen and there is still no option to adjust key bindings – but the game itself is in a healthy place that I have no problem recommending it to anyone who thinks this kind of high-level organization and steady improvement is a great way to spend an afternoon.
It feels a little strange to be tossed through space, just to be in control of a strip mining operation, but Dyson Sphere Program is much more calming, cerebral and fun to watch than the premise sounds at first. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens if I continue to climb the tech boom, but I’m sure everything I learn will probably kick me in for decisions I made earlier, and push me to return to the beginning so I can start clean, knowing that I have at least gotten a little better with my virtual work.