Fuel Analysis For Your Mech

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Dyson Sphere

Dyson Sphere Program has a lot of possible fuel items, so I put together a table and analyzed the results.

I have not found any attempts to figure out the best Mech fuel yet so instead I set up my own. The only time I’m really concerned about mech fuel is when flying from planet to planet, or warping to other systems. It’s no fun to run out of power and be faced with reloading a save. So just what should I be burning ?

The two important factors to balance are the energy you can extract from the fuel (Total Power), and the Efficiency (How fast each item turns from inventory to power). Ease of collection is also a factor.

Fuel Efficiency Chart	Power	Efficiency	Stack	Total Power	Energy Efficiency
Carbon Nanotube	.084 MJ	-80%	100	8.4	.0168
Graphene	.096 MJ	-70%	100	9.6	.0288
Crude Oil	4 MJ	+20%	20	80	4.8
Fuel Oil	4.4 MJ	+30%	20	88	5.72
Diamond	.9 MJ	-50%	100	90	.45
Wood	1.50 MJ	-10%	100	150	1.35
Hydrogen	8 MJ	+100%	20	160	16
Deuterium	8 MJ	+100%	20	160	16
Organic Crystal	1.8 MJ	-20%	100	180	1.44
Fire Ice	4.80 MJ	+40%	50	240	6.72
Plants	.5 MJ	-30%	500	250	.35
Coal	2.70 MJ	0%	100	270	2.7
Energized Graphite	6.30 MJ	+60%	100	630	10.08
Hydrogen Rod	40 MJ	+200%	20	800	120
Deuterium Rod	600 MJ	+300%	20	12000	2400
Antimatter Rod	7.50 GJ	+500	20	150000	45000

As expected the critical recipe components are horrid for power (Graphene, Carbon Nanotube).

For super early game energy plants, wood, and coal are pretty good. Gather easily and burn in the mech. You might want to save your wood and plants to make organic crystals, however. Early game they are hard to come by. Later game, the crystals will probably do in a pinch for short journeys if you have a planet to mine them directly from.

The various normal fuels (Oil and gases) are pretty bad, mostly owing to tiny stack sizes, so don’t burn these. I am hoping for a stacking rebalance – it’s nuts that one stack of hydrogen is 20, but your liquid storage tank holds 10,000.

The clear early-mid game fuel winner is Energized Graphite. Set up some smelters next to a coal field and store it, now you have mech fuel to get you anywhere within 5 light years. You can get a teeny bit extra power out of your Hydrogen Fuel Rods, but you have to set up a small production line to make them, so why bother. The extra efficiency isn’t worth it. Want to travel 20 light years ? Get several warpers and stack some extra graphite in your inventory.

Late game, while you’re building a Sphere, the Deuterium Rods start to look attractive. They are a component of the rockets so you’re going to be building them as you launch pieces of your Dyson Sphere. They’re expensive – you need to use the Super Blue Electromagnets to create them, but just wait until you’re building a lot of this stuff and start using these.

The Antimatter Rods are similar, power needs get really high at the End Game, and you’ll be making a lot of antimatter to deal with the white cubes.

Speculating About Lord Of The Rings (And LOTRO)

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Dyson Sphere, Lotro

Taking a break from Dyson Sphere Program (Literally, I play this every spare minute), I decided to look up some old school gaming information and came across something I had not heard about previously.

Lord of The Rings is getting an epicly long television series on Amazon at some point. I like the idea – the family has transitioned to adult television so I don’t watch many shows with the kids anymore; watching this with them would be awesome. The gaming angle is that Amazon Game Studios is going to develop some kind of an MMO for Lord of the Rings.

Now – there is an existing Lord of the Rings Online game, fantastic for its time (2007), but which I find interminable today. Is its license about to be cancelled or revoked ? Or is it simply going to compete directly with whatever shadowy project Amazon may release someday ?

Amazon Game Studios hasn’t exactly captured the PC / Mobile game market, their offering Crucible came out and then was immediately pulled from the market – not a move that inspires confidence for me. I do not want to invest money or mindshare in games that disappear like that. Bloomberg throws up a report about them that was apparently so bad, Amazon felt the need to respond to them.

One thing that interests me is how little we’ve heard from John Smedley lately, ex-CEO of SOE and apparently one of the big mucky-mucks at Amazon Game Studios. I’ve tried to keep track of him since this dude is in my generation and touching on the same nerd-points I always seem to. He is reputed to be working on a secretive project, so putting all this information together……

Would we end up with a John Smedley – led team developing Lord of the Rings Amazon at this point ? A new MMO take on LOTR would be something that would interest me greatly.

My best source for LOTRO hasn’t covered this one so I’ve no idea how accurate my speculation is or if there’s more to the story.

Dyson Sphere – Part 1 – Starting Out

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Dyson Sphere

Currently, my Steam Playtime for Dyson Sphere Program is over 100 hours, but I have not yet completed the game. I think my current game will eventually result in a win, but in the meantime I wanted to start a playthrough and post it up.

Flying to your system

The game begins with the storyline and you flying into your starter world/system. I picked a 100% random seed which became Vega system, with infinite resources and 64 worlds. Every starter system consists of two planets and a gas giant (or variant gas giant). Isn’t it amazing how good the graphics are ?

First Planet. First steps. What to do now ?

The game consists of researching and acquiring resources, as well as setting up production lines to make resources. The first few recipes are shown, this is all I know how to make at start.

There’s only one early lesson I need to apply here : Save the wood and plant fibers. My first game I burned it all as fuel for the mech, then it was harder to start up making yellow cubes.

Iron and copper are nearby so I immediately grab some ore and make some iron and copper ingots. And then I start my first research :

The Tech Tree

The Tree is divided up into pure research (Technology) and upgrades for various systems. I’ll do the mecha core first since it only requires iron and copper ingots.

It’s a slightly odd window

The way you know your research is going is based on the little window. Manual research means using items from your inventory – the first number. The second is the number of items remaining to be hashed.

Now my mech can store a little more energy before being depleted.

I’m going to need coal so I zoomed out the window, theres a lot of stone nearby but the coal is a bit of a walk away. I gather a bunch to power the mech.

Stick Coal in the mech for the moment to keep it powered.

With that out of the way, the first thing I really want is logistics boxes – these store items for you. So now to technology items on the tree. The first step requires 10 magnetic coils and I have enough materials to research it, so I do. Now, Logistics is unlocked on the tech tree.

I need only some iron and copper to complete this so I gather some and Voila, I can make boxes. All I need is stone which I gather up.

I made a box

Now I can store more items. Your inventory is really limited so you need to take advantage of these boxes. And now I can clear some area for future building.

You get a variety of useful items from clearing the flora. Wood and Plants will make Organic Crystals someday. Titanium and Silicon Ore in small quantities will be useful to get started acquiring more of it. Stone is used for boxes and many other items, and Coal will make Energized Graphite, the best fuel available in the game.

Lots of queued actions. Right Click and Shift queues them.

I keep clearing while I manually build more items and wait for technology to finish, and in rapid order Smelting, and Basic Assembly, are completed. The most important next one is Electromagnetic Matrix which allows me to build blue cubes.

Need more coal.

All the gathering and making has depleted the mech’s energy, so I gather more coal. Your stored energy is in the yellow bar on the bottom of the screen; and the chamber are items that will/are being converted into energy. This is going to take a while, so I decide to build something. I place the mining machine along with a wind turbine. You need a power grid, to power all of your machines, and that starts here.

It takes a while, but taking the coal out of the mining machine and letting the mech harvest it, I eventually end up full of coal.

The Power Grid – Not Enough Power

When the mining machine is running, I don’t have enough power with the little wind turbine. I’ll need to build more of those things to get started. I leave it running and dumping coal into the storage box.

Next up is Mech Flight, which just requires coal and magnets.

Dyson Learning Experience

Tags

Dyson Sphere, Factorio

This Dyson Sphere Program is just amazing. I am 100% addicted.

On my fourth playthrough now, since several things are not obvious as you begin to go through the game. There’s no manual – you have to figure it all out from the displayed information in the game. It looks like the goal of the game is :

#1 – Research & Build a Factory on your planet.

#2 – Expand to other planets for different resources.

#3 – Expand to other stars.

#4 – Construct Dyson Sphere(s)

I’ve managed to get to step 2. There are a bunch of roadblocks that have made me start over, so I’m documenting these things here.

First – getting off your planet. You will research Flying Upgrade 2 and then be able to fly off-planet. You want to have some fuel in your inventory and in your mech, Graphite and Hydrogen are two obvious primitive ones or you can make fuel rods with a lot of power.

To get off planet, double tap the spacebar and your mech is atmospherically flying. Now hold the space bar and hold down the W key, you will transition to space mode. Don’t accelerate yet ! Figure out where your destination planet is – I have a hard time every time I do this – then point your mech at it with the W key.

Once you’re flying straight at your destination, press SHIFT. This accelerates you from 100 m/s up to 1000. I never go faster than 600 and usually 300, because if you miss the planet, turning around is very hard. Fly straight at the planet and crash into it by using ALT. Slow down by pressing S.

The research is done factorio-style where you have to construct colored cubes, which get burned in the process. Blue cubes are pretty easy – set up factories to make magnets and circuit boards, send those to a research lab for cube construction, then send them to storage or another research lab to conduct research.

Red cubes are a step up. You need Graphite, easily made from coal, but you also need hydrogen. Strangely enough, getting RID OF resources is the bottleneck you will have to solve. Hydrogen comes from oil refining, or X-Ray cracking, and you need tons of the stuff to make enough red cubes. The refined oil is much easier, you can send it to a liquid storage tank and store tons of it in these. You’ll want it later.

Next, come yellow cubes. These required diamonds, easily made (!?) from Graphite. They also require crystals which are created from two rare resources, 1 Organic Crystal, and 3 Titanium Bars.

The titanium has to be imported from another planet. The game is set up so every game will have little titanium on the starter planet, but at least one other planet with a bunch of it. Set up some factory resources and mine titanium, then smelt it into titanium bars and store it. Take a bunch with you back to your starter planet.

The starter planet titanium is hidden among all the trees and rocks scattered all over. Your mech can harvest all of this stuff, so you might as well, while you wait for some research to be completed. I get around 2-3 hundred titanium ore from this process and stuff for the miserable Organic Crystals

The REALLY hard part is creating the stupid Organic Crystals. These don’t sound hard – flying to another planet does – but they require a long complex supply chain. Get your Refined Oil, plus Graphite, to make plastic. Then take plastic, plus refined oil, and water, to create Organic Crystals.

Remember making those red cubes ? I keep ending up with a ton of excess hydrogen and a hard time keeping the refineries going to make refined oil. So you have to find some way to solve this, like make additional oil extractors over other oil seeps and feed that to a refinery farm doing nothing but extracting the fuel.

You can also make small quantities of Organic Crystals with the wood and plants on your planet. So I gather as much of that stuff as I can, store it, and once the recipe unlocks I make as much as I can.

That’s as far as I have gotten. I restarted the first time because it was all confusing. Second restart was due to choking on oil and hydrogen in a huge mess. Third restart due to Organic Crystal madness. But I’m starting to see a pattern here and am producing resources for the next cube. The easy one is a crystal made from silicon, and these are under construction already. The hard one will be on my research path sometime soon.

Also, set up a plant to make sulfuric acid. This requires – you guessed it – refined fuel, water, and stones. The recipe for graphene requires it, and this stuff is for solar sails and your interplanetary, or planetary, drone system.

And remember to take in all the sights. The visuals are just breathtaking.

What I would really like to understand is just HOW you construct the Dyson Sphere, but it appears the tools don’t work until you have finished the tech tree.

More Than Conquering The Galaxy ?

Tags

Dyson Sphere, Factorio, ROTP

ROTP is definitely an awesome game as it approaches release – go take a look. The end goal, of course, is to conquer the galaxy, meaning every system which has a maximum of one planet in it. Each planet is simplified as well, to permit the task to be completed.

I hadn’t really thought people might be able to design a better game, with a BIGGER GOAL than that, and incorporating more detail than simplified sliders, but it appears Youthcat games – a Chinese group of designers – have managed it with the Dyson Sphere Program. The universe is empty, so we’re not talking about conquest……….. although that might come in the future of this early access game. You apparently pick a system, and set to work creating a Dyson Sphere, a set of constructions around the star to harvest absolutely all of that stellar energy.

The game immediately brings to mind Factorio. Probably Satisfactory as well, although a “3D Factorio” was not enough to convince me to try it. The visuals are all really pretty, and I’m very clearly playing a Factorio clone. Mine iron. Mine copper. Start researching – which costs things you build with Iron and Copper. Manufacture stuff in a massive factory to reach the end goal.

You are a mech (In effect – the text is more subtle), and you build and sculpt your initial planet until you can begin to move from planet to planet; and presumably from star to star. The end goal is pretty far off for me, but I’m getting the hang of it and it is incredibly polished and bug free for an Early Access steam game.

Definitely something to consider buying, and this week, it’s on sale for a mere $18. $20 full price. It’s release week, and will be on sale for 41 hours as I write this.

I’ve owned the game for about four days, and ……… there have been four micro patches in that time. The developer appears serious about being committed to the game and finishing it all up. True, these are seriously micro patches (Like one new feature and 3-4 issues dealt with) but the attention is important.

If you REALLY want to find something to complain about, I’m sure you can – the translation isn’t perfect, maybe all the phrasing makes sense in Chinese – Or the minimal documentation – but it looks like a worthy successor to Factorio which can capture hundreds of hours from you.