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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.
