HomeGames & Tech'Dyson Sphere Program' Guide #1: What You Should Be Doing In Your...

‘Dyson Sphere Program’ Guide #1: What You Should Be Doing In Your First Hour

Dyson Sphere Program is a very big, very complicated game and if you’re new to the genre you could be finding yourself overwhelmed. This short guide is designed to get you started and give you some goals for your first hours or so of gameplay. I won’t be going deep into any maths or ratios so things won’t be overly complicated.

Your first milestone will the setting up of the blue science blocks and once you’ve got into the swing of things you should be able to accomplish this within your first hour or so of playing. Before we get to blue science, however, there is plenty you need to do. If you prefer to watch rather than read then check out the embedded video which will guide you through the same steps.

Choose your starting location.

When the game starts you are dumped at a random location on the globe. Don’t simply assume that this is the best place to start off, there could be better locations. Recycle your landing pod by right-clicking on it to harvest some valuable resources and then head out. You are looking for an area that has coal, rock, iron and copper all within close proximity. If you can find an area with these plus oil or multiple veins of the minerals even better.

Start off your research.

When you press T you will bring up the tech tree. Start off by researching all of the techs that can be unlocked with handcrafted items. All of these techs will gradually unlock your first steps towards automation and give you some free items as you unlock each one.

Set up mining and smelting.

As soon as you’re able to you’ll want to set up miners on the various resources. You want to be aiming for at least one miner for coal and stone plus at least two for copper and iron. Try to ensure that your miners cover at least six mineral nodes to get better efficiency out of them, get them powered up and leave them mining for now. You’ll have to visit them fairly frequently to start with to empty them of ore. This not only keeps them producing but you will need the ore for handcrafting lots of items.

Pretty soon (if you’ve kept up with the research) you’ll unlock belts and smelting, you can now set up your first automated production lines. As a rule, each mineral node will supply one smelter so count up how many nodes you are working with and place down the same number of smelters for both copper and iron. You want to be running a belt from the miner down the middle of your smelters so build them on either side of the belt, this will be your input belt that feeds the smelters.

Dyson Sphere Program
Credit Youthcat

Place output belts on the outside of your smelters to collect the ingots you have made in your smelters, join the belts together and set up a storage box to collect the finished product. Check out the picture below to see this in-game. Don’t forget to give the smelters the recipe they are making and set up your sorters.

Set up production of green chips, magnets and electro magnets.

As before ensure you keep crafting the items you need to manually research new techs. Don’t worry though as soon the time of manual researching will be over. Blue science needs green chips and electromagnets and this is what you should be setting up next.

To make the magnets you need a belt of iron ore feeding several smelters. The output belt from these smelters should lead to and feed a bank of assemblers. You will also need a belt of copper ingots. feeding these assemblers as electromagnets need both copper ingots and magnets.

Dyson Sphere Program
Credit Youthcat

Gren chips need both iron and copper ingots and are made in assemblers. If you plan your belts well the copper belt from above can continue to feed the chip production, then it’s just a case of putting in a belt to feed in the iron ingots. Remember that sorters can reach as far as three belts so it’s easy to have the two ingot belts running on one side of the assemblers and the output belt on the other.

Now, this is set up you should have a steady stream of electromagnets and green chips which are the ingredients for blue science.

Set up your science labs.

Science labs have two modes, one for making the science cubes themselves and one for using the cubes to generate research. It sounds obvious but make sure you pay attention to the work modes you assign or you’ll find them doing nothing! It’s also worth pointing out that the labs can be stacked on top of each other (the height increases as you unlock more techs).

You’ll need one group of labs dedicated to making the cubes and another dedicated to consuming them. I would recommend six labs in each group to start with and expand this as you progress. For the production group, you want the belts of chips and electromagnets from before leading to one side of the labs so they can be grabbed by sorters. Run an output belt on the other side which then runs onto the labs that are consuming the cubes.

Dyson Sphere Program
Credit Youthcat

Que up more research.

The only thing to do now you’ve set up the above is que up more stuff to research. I would recommend starting with the mech upgrades as these offer some significant quality of life improvements. Once you’ve unlocked these the choice is yours but we’ll go into more detail when we publish part two of this guide.

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Barry Stevens

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