Dyson Sphere Program is a PC game about mining mines from a planetary system, and it turns out that plundering planets for their sweet, sweet minerals to make a power source for a supercomputer really makes real-world hours fly by.
You make a forced landing in a procedurally generated domestic world with some supplies and a robot to explore the planet, and then you start gathering resources. Opening hours are tedious, especially when you’re trying to find out what’s going on. The game is up to you to do almost anything, and the game tutorials are only slightly useful. Imagine being in charge of a space mission with manuals that just explain what you should be doing.
At first, you are stuck collecting resources manually with your mech, until you can climb the tech tree a bit and build factories to extract the supplies you need, then refineries to turn them into usable raw materials and storage facilities. to keep everything until you’re ready to use it. And you have to make sure that all of these buildings are connected, in the right order, so that there is a smooth path for the materials to be processed.
Efficiency is the whole point of the game, actually. It’s not your job to do everything by hand or do the heavy lifting yourself, even if that’s how you start. It’s your job to set up a system that handles all of these things for you, automating the act of mining, refining and distributing each resource, while keeping everything running. This dedication to automation and only automation, is part of the reason Dyson Sphere Program it looks so satisfying: the only limit on how smoothly your operation can be performed is your own ability to plan, iterate and improve.
The first 10 hours didn’t get me very far, because as soon as I understood a new way to better organize my base, I wanted to start again with this strategy in mind and see what else I could invent once I had an understanding of the fundamentals . The game does not make it easy for you, because opening hours, again, is a drag. There is a replicator that you can use to turn raw materials into ingredients and building materials, that you can use to create new structures and research new technologies, but each step is a drag.
How it starts …
You can’t just select and build a building, even if you have all the supplies. You need to go to the replicator first, select the building, give it time to create the building and then go back to the building menu, select the building and place it. If something could be broken down into smaller stages at the beginning of the game, it was to the point of seeming excessive and almost punitive. You still have to continually feed your mechanical wood and plant matter to keep it going, and it consumes energy like you wouldn’t believe. Making sure you are setting up processes that work on their own is the only way to get out of the heavy lifting that starts each round.
The first few hours were filled with complicated moments as I tried to figure out how exactly to connect a conveyor belt to a building so that I could pull supplies. My initial problem was that I had forgotten to put a result so refined materials had a place to go. Dyson Sphere Program it is a game that requires a little more thought and study than other resource management simulators that I have played in the past; it helps to watch some tutorial videos when you start, as the game itself doesn’t help much.
I am torn between thinking that the first steps in configuring your base are too much and respecting the developer for making the opening so laborious, as this is the main motivation for configuring your automation as soon as possible. Dyson Sphere Program is also in early access at the moment, and currently only costs $ 19.99, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the developer Youthcat Studio eventually adjusted the number of things you have to deal with during the first few hours of where you are now.
How it starts to get …
But once you have a few supply lines set up and watch the supplies being mined, placed on a conveyor belt, transformed into something else, used to create something additional and then stored until you need them to build something again … it’s mesmerizing. At some point, your projects, processes and loops simply start clicking and clicking without you having to do much, and watching your creation come to life in this way is extremely satisfying. And it’s just the beginning of the skills you’ll need to learn and the optimizations you’ll need to work on.
Such as: How do you do the same thing with another planet, which may have very different conditions from your initial world? How do you make sure that supplies are being shipped from one world to another in the most efficient way possible, as your empire grows and builds more machines to extract more supplies and generate more energy to continue to grow and grow? Expansion is the goal, because you need an absurd amount of energy to meet the needs of Earth’s newest supercomputer, so, by God, you need to suck everything you can from every planet you find to make this happen.
I haven’t come close to what’s going on here yet, but I’ll try!
A goal as cold and industrial as Dyson Sphere Program gives you, the act of improving your lines and bases is always satisfactory. The cycle of trial, error, restarting and perfecting a design or strategy goes through time like you would not believe it, and now, as we are stuck during the cold winter months, this is not exactly a terrible outcome. It is no wonder that this game is currently near the top of the Steam sales charts with so many positive reviews.
Dyson Sphere Program is based on the ideas behind games like Factor and other efficiency simulators, as I started to call them, to create something with your own tone and sense of calm while you use the mechanism to reshape the galaxy to suit your own literal energy needs. There are some flaws here that I hope will be resolved as the team receives feedback – the text is tiny on the screen, for example, and there is still no option to customize keyboard shortcuts – but the game itself is in a healthy place o enough that I have no problem recommending it to anyone who thinks that this kind of high-level organization and continuous improvement seems like a good way to spend an afternoon.
It’s a little strange to be launched through space just to be put in charge of an open pit mining operation, but Dyson Sphere Program it is much more calming, cerebral and fun to watch than the premise seems at first. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens as I continue to climb the tech tree, but I’m sure that everything I learn will probably kick me in on the decisions I’ve made before and push me back to the beginning, so I can start clean, knowing that I improved at least a little bit in my virtual work.