I’m torn between thinking the first few steps in setting up your base are too much, and respecting the developer for making the opening such a slog, since that’s a major motivation to get your automation set up as quickly as possible. 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 a few tutorial videos when you get started, since the game itself doesn’t help you much. My initial issue was that I had forgotten to also put in an output so the refined materials had someplace to go.
The first few hours were filled with fiddly moments as I tried to figure out how exactly to connect a conveyor belt to a building so that it could pull supplies in. Making sure you’re setting up processes that run by themselves is the only way out of the grunt work that begins each round. You even have to continually feed your mech wood and plant matter to keep it running, and it consumes power like you wouldn’t believe. If something could be broken down into smaller steps in the early game, it has been, to the point that it feels excessive and almost punitive. You need to first go to the replicator, select the building, give it time to create the building, and then move back to the build menu, select the building, and place it.
You can’t just select and build a building, even if you have all the supplies. There is a replicator you can use to turn raw materials into ingredients and building supplies, which you can then use to create new structures and research new technology, but every step is a drag. The game does not make this easy on you, because the opening hours, again, are a grind. The opening 10 hours didn’t get me very far, because as soon as I understood a new way to lay out my base better, I wanted to start over again with that strategy in mind, and see what else I could come up with once I had a grasp of the fundamentals. That dedication to automation, and just automation, is part of the reason Dyson Sphere Program feels so satisfying: The only limit to how smoothly your operation can run is your own ability to plan, iterate, and improve. It’s your job to set up a system that handles all these things for you, automating the act of mining, refining, and distributing each resource, while keeping the whole thing powered. It’s not your job to do everything by hand, or to do the grunt work yourself, even if that’s how you begin. And you have to make sure all of those buildings are connected, in the right order, so there is one smooth path for the materials to be processed.Įfficiency is the entire point of the game, in fact.
#Space simulator games steam manuals
Imagine being in charge of a space mission with manuals that only kinda explain what you have to do.Īt first, you’re stuck collecting resources manually with your mech, until you can climb the tech tree a little bit and build factories to mine 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. The game relies on you to do just about everything, and the in-game tutorials are only slightly helpful. The opening hours are tedious, especially when you’re trying to figure out what’s going on. You crash-land on a procedurally generated home world with a few supplies and a robot to explore the planet, and then you begin to gather resources.
#Space simulator games steam Pc
Dyson Sphere Program is a PC game about strip-mining a planetary system, and it turns out that ransacking planets for their sweet, sweet minerals in order to make a power source for a supercomputer really makes the real-world hours fly by.