Factorio Forums

In factorio we have this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xynrNfzN7RM
In DSP, we can do that with belts:

other belt shenanigans:

disentius wrote: Tue Feb 02, 2021 1:27 pm other belt shenanigans:DSP belt stairs.gif

Is this a bug?

I would argue its a feature:)

Spoilers, maybe don't read if you haven't got to another star system yet.

The 2nd reply here sums my thoughts about it.

Factorio can run on a toaster.

Since I'm stuck at my gfs place for a while, I started a new map in factorio, which runs a smooth 2kspm on her steam powered PC.

DSP is a Dia show, without even first science automated.

It looks nice from what I've seen on YouTube, but if you don't have a semi decent PC at hand (mine is like 6 years now and can still run Satisfactory megabase), you better save the money for upgrading some hardware.

Deadlock989 wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 12:43 pm

GrumpyJoe wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 3:15 pm

My desire to play DSP is at -1 now.

Impatient wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 2:33 am

GrumpyJoe wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 3:15 pm

My desire to play DSP is at -1 now.

I could test it on my "semi-decent" PC over the weekend and it seemed ok
My gf´s PC might have an onboard gfx card, because i cant imagine it being so slow without anything automated happening. My guess is on the 3D world thats causing a dia show.

I forgot to look into my PC´s details, but it should be fine if its not a PC only for office apps
Guess it just shows that Factorio REALLY is able to run on literal toasters!

Deadlock´s report might still throw hardcore base builders off abit, but its ok for me, since with a family i dont have as much time as 3 years back, when i started Factorio

Thanks for the updated report GrumpyJoe. Maybe my desire to play DSP is at 0 now.

Just for the record: I finished building the sphere and all non-infinite research on an 8 year old toaster (GTX 650) and as long as i wasn't looking at the factory i got 60fps just fine :p.

What Deadlock wrote is a real turndown for me. (Having a swarm network, that just does everything by itself? Nah thanks.) I am very receptive to the opinion of people who showed some thoughtfulness and analytical skill regarding game mechanics (also yours, eradicator - I read your opinion on Factorio 3D with great interest). It is good to know though, that I also could play it on my wooden toaster.

Impatient wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 10:13 am (Having a swarm network, that just does everything by itself? Nah thanks.)

Welp, factorio also has bot based bases and not everyone likes them. That they're theoretically possible doesn't really imply anything. In DSP though you're building across a bunch of smallish planets, so you'll have to use at least some of it. DSP has two types: "drones" which are like bots and serve on one planet only, and interplanetary "logistic vessels" which are like LTN trains i guess. I only built a small-ish main-bus based main base with five-ish mining outposts which imho isn't really any different than building a train network with mining outposts in factorio. But if you wanted to build "mega" you'd have to split it up amongst several planets due to space-contraints. For normal bases i think the space constrains are a nice incentive to build a bit differently than in factorio - more smelting/processing at the outposts, less centralized. For building the sphere i did use the two remaining planets in my home system so my science-main-chaos-base-planet doesn't get too crowded.

I personally used a total of 3 drones across <10-ish planets i think - for the same reasons i don't use bots or LTN in factorio - they solve the logistic puzzle for you. So i only used them for "warpers" because i found those to be too expensive and rarely used to put thousands of em on a belt. Also i'm not so sure how much throughput drones can really get in the end. They do fly rather slow and there's a hard limit on how many you can use per station. From the very few YT videos i watched i haven't seen anyone using them for high-throughput.

Also btw using logisitc vessels at scale costs a lot of power. I calculated about 27MW constant drain for one full belt of 30i/s over 7LY distance. Personally i was constantly at the power limit on all my planets (quite different from factorio). Not sure where the people on YT get the spare power to waste on power-distribution-sattelites. I had about 1.2GW usage across my three main planets - mostly solar and fire ice (rare resource). There's 3 types of "fuel rod" you can burn for power but none of them seemed to be worth it:

1. Hydrogen rods: Burning hydrogen directly is cheaper.
2. Deuterium rods: I need all the deuterium i have to build the sphere.
3. Antimatter rods: Sphere-energy storage item not useful pre-sphere. Also costs too much iron.

As for the "shortcut recipes" i think Space Exploration (factorio mod) does some of that too? For bootstrapping you have to go the annoying route, and later you get easier recipes from limited rare resources. I'm not sure what kind of planet @Deadlock started, but for me the titanium+silicon (common resource) requirement for science pack 2 forced me to go off-planet. And so i had to get a logistic station to ship those over pretty fast and never wasted time on the "stone to silicon" recipe (i didn't even notice that was possible until after i had an off-planet silicon mine). I also had ample fire ice to make cheap graphene. So it all felt quite natural to me as i never had to set up the "expensive" production line for those. If you scale up to mega you might eventually run out of some of the ultra-rare stuff like "unipolar magnets" and be forced to use the expensive route anyway. Also btw using rare resources from other solar systems is only realistic after you get "warpers" at science 5, so it's almost-endgame. (Annecdote: I've had a bunch of logistic vessels accidentally depart at sub-warp-speed - they came back 5 hours later.)

Also don't forget that it's an early access game with less than a month since release. There *is* lots of stuff to improve and balance.

That all said, i didn't play DSP as a "factorio replacement". I was happy my toaster got me to the sphere and never considered building "mega". And as a linear experience it was a nice change from the usual factorio routine and tickled some parts of my brain that factorio can't.

"But if you expect it to be exactly like factorio then you're gonna be disappointed." (by Caption Obvious).

I think it's a great game. Worth trying unless you're really offput by it for some reason. It plays a bit differently, but obviously there are a lot of similarities to Factorio. To me it seems clear the creators were very inspired by Satisfactory - whether you see that as good or bad - but it sort of sits somewhere between the two games.

Of course it's in early access, so its hard to tell which all things are going to change, but it feels fairly complete. For example, even the tutorials are properly voice acted, despite the occasional strange English, and graphics feel close to final.

The game does play to its strengths in design, but, whether or not because its still in early access, I think Factorio has much better polish and in general better designed gameplay. It's like the game flow is simplified in many ways, some good, some bad. Just the fact that it's a 3D game makes it so much more complex to polish and design to a level similar to Factorio.

For example, while you get many of Factorio's power armor features for free at the start and can upgrade them in a fluent flow of progression as you go along, you don't ever seem to not have to place everything manually. Placing belts and inserters (called sorters) is clunky because the 3D targeting and collision boxes and even the building grid itself are often unpredictable, even after 40 hours of experience, which just causes the whole task to become much more tiresome than it needs to be, especially in a game that already tries to be simpler. This is further exacerbated by the fact that some combinations of buildings and belts work when built in one order but disallowed if built in a different order: Some overlapping collision boxes are clearly not accounted for properly in game logic (again this is a similar bug to what I've seen in Satisfactory). This is of course important, because the game allows you to layer half a dozen belts or more on top of each other in stacks, and the positioning of buildings follows the curvature of the planet - all things that affect each other. I personally really hope the 3D targeting is improved (considerably) before the final release.

There is less complexity in terms of managing belt and throughput capacities, higher tier belts and inserters are really fast, and splitters always adapt to belts perfectly but are bulky with annoyingly large collision boxes. Allowing to build belts higher also gives lots of options for managing belt lines, if also the potential for extra much chaos.

Power production seems a lot easier: wind is reliable and free and any other power sources are also very powerful. Refueling your mech is a necessity but there are ways to semi-automate it and as long as you didn't forget to carry extra fuel it's not a problem. My biggest problem is extra hydrogen which clogged production and I had to build lots of combustion generators to consume it despite not needing more power.

Movement is generally fine. Flight in both air and space is seamlessly adapted into normal movement, but is still a bit confusing despite their efforts to try to dumb it down. Hotkeys are widely used, all categories are controlled with the 1-9 number keys and each item within the category with the F-keys. It's also unfortunately easy to accidentally delete hundreds of blocks of belt with one single misclick, or another entity if the aforementioned hit detection doesn't line up. Copying recipes is a feature that exists but otherwise there aren't many special quality of life features.

I think the handling of multiple planets is pretty well done, but it is simplified, and for example comes nowhere near the complexity of managing a train network in Factorio, or even a logistics bot network. Large parts of it are just completely automated, scheduling, refueling, with lots of easy throughput and storage. Just put in logistics ships and decide what the station should supply and what items to request. Item loading is done automatically to and from belts, like the Factorio loader mods (or like Satisfactory's space elevator...)

The music is great but so far the soundtrack is a lot shorter and thus more repetitive than Factorio's. Reminds me a lot of Satisfactory, along with the graphical theming and the game's setting. Very upbeat and pretty. Some of the space tracks in particular are very charming to me.

The game is made in Unity and has fancy 3D graphics, and while it seems to have some decent optimizations so far, it won't be nearly as performant as Factorio and the game's graphics especially require a whole lot more (so far there are not many graphics settings either).

I dipped into 50 fps at worst on my 6 y.o. rig, but I'm not sure if this is a linear trend because it was still 50 fps at worst even 20 hours later. This is also not counting looking at a largely populated area which can drop me to as low as 30 fps due to all the entity graphics, but a poorly optimized game would definitely drop even further so there is some effort put into it. When not researching, my fps was 60 otherwise. Some tiny lag spikes occurred frequently I think due to Unity's overhead processing.

MEOWMI wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:19 pm For example, while you get many of Factorio's power armor features for free at the start and can upgrade them in a fluent flow of progression as you go along, you don't ever seem to not have to place everything manually.

The "construction bots" are imho one of the biggest design flaws (right after the miner placement minigame :p). In factorio you can either build manually (uses items) or place blueprints (free), but in DSP you can only place ghosts of one entity per click - and placing ghosts consumes items! Thus in DSP the bots do not solve any problem but serve only to make building more slow and annoying. I've spent far too much time waiting for the bots to construct what i just ordered and then wait again for them to return to me. On top of that the bot flight path is wasteful - for small entities (belts, inserters) they needlessly fly 5 meters upwards first, and the requirement to fly to the height-center of the ghost makes it very slow for tall buildings too (gas giant harvesters!). Imho until they introduce blueprints the whole system should've been replaced with instant construction. At least with all end-game upgrades it's not too bad anymore.

MEOWMI wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:19 pm Power production seems a lot easier: wind is reliable and free and any other power sources are also very powerful.

That is entirely not my experience (see post above). Would you care to give more details about how much power you use / produce from the different sources? My homeplanet was the only planet with 100% wind-efficency, and i think i saw one other planet with 140%. All others had <70% wind efficency, my secondary planet had 0%. And also wind uses huge amounts of space. With solar i had the low efficiency problem too - every other planet has <80% efficency (except for the rare "blue" sun systems where only half the planets are affected). But at least solar is small and can be spammed. The one time i tried using windpower i had to build all around the planet just to power a bunch of chemplants. Ofc solar also needs to be build all around, but uses less space per watt. With blueprints a combined wind/solar field might've been feasible. I think in the end-game you're supposed to ship anti-matter fuel to other planets, and was looking forward to that until i noticed the iron cost (it has to compete with free solar!). So in the end every planet made its own energy. Also with all the bashing i have to say that i quite liked having to consider orbital mechanics for solar (planet axis inclination, summer/winter cycle).

MEOWMI wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:19 pm Refueling your mech is a necessity but there are ways to semi-automate it and as long as you didn't forget to carry extra fuel it's not a problem.

How do you semi-automate? I just had a chest that was being filled. This was the only thing i used fuel rods for, and by end-game-stage the ridiculous capacity of anti-matter fuel allowed me to almost forget the whole system - a fitting reward considering the cost.

MEOWMI wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:19 pm My biggest problem is extra hydrogen which clogged production and I had to build lots of combustion generators to consume it despite not needing more power.

Ah yes, in mid-game i also had a phase with too much hydrogen. In end-game i didn't have that problem on my main base anymore (probably mostly converted to deuterium). And on the my secondary base planet i used the extra hydrogen from fire-ice-to-graphene to power half the base.

MEOWMI wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:19 pm I dipped into 50 fps at worst on my 6 y.o. rig, but I'm not sure if this is a linear trend because it was still 50 fps at worst even 20 hours later. This is also not counting looking at a largely populated area which can drop me to as low as 30 fps due to all the entity graphics, but a poorly optimized game would definitely drop even further so there is some effort put into it. When not researching, my fps was 60 otherwise. Some tiny lag spikes occurred frequently I think due to Unity's overhead processing.

I noticed half-way through that the rendering is completely suspended in map mode. Opening the map even in the middle of my end-game main base always brought me back to 60fps. I used this alot to speed up building. So it seems that at least the factory-simulation is well optimized - seperate planets should be easy to multi-thread. It worked so well that i suspected they might be using some sort of "average" output for planets that are out-of-view, but i never saw any evidence for that.

Koub wrote: Thu Jan 28, 2021 9:15 am

ptx0 wrote: Thu Jan 28, 2021 2:48 am

Koub wrote: Wed Jan 27, 2021 11:10 pm Wube created a new genre with Factorio

Sim Tower, Sim City, these are basically identical to Factorio.

I have played countless hours SimCity and Sim City 2000, and never playing Factorio gave me the "well ... that feels like Sim City" impression. Maybe subsequent Sium City sequels changed significantly enough to give that feeling, but
Factorio is immensely different from these games. Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program are a lot closer to the Factorio feel than Factorio can be to Sim City or Sim Tower.

How about Capitalism 2, or I guess it's Capitalism Lab now?

Well that was a good 60-70 hours playthrough to finish the primary goal. I stand by my original post, though I wanted to note that I may have been lucky with my spawns, I'm not sure.

To answer some questions:

eradicator wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 9:58 pm

MEOWMI wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:19 pm For example, while you get many of Factorio's power armor features for free at the start and can upgrade them in a fluent flow of progression as you go along, you don't ever seem to not have to place everything manually.

The "construction bots" are imho one of the biggest design flaws [...]

I agree, the bots can be quite annoying, much more so than Factorio's variant. They're okay and occasionally very nice, but with at least as many caveats as benefits.

I like being able to just run in Factorio and place belts. In DPS... nope, doesn't work, until much later into the game. Similar thing with power poles (and let's not go into the lack of click-and-hold mass placing).

eradicator wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 9:58 pm

MEOWMI wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:19 pm Power production seems a lot easier: wind is reliable and free and any other power sources are also very powerful.

That is entirely not my experience (see post above).

It occurs to me that I may have overgeneralized my experience.

First wind generators, they helped me a lot, I think they're quite strong.

I did make it a habit to always carry lots of wind generators with me, to use them as power poles whenever possible, to sprinkle them about whenever there was a bit of extra time and space, and to fit them between factory lines. I estimated I could recoup like 25% of the energy cost of a new facility with just some extra surrounding power generators, though this obviously doesn't apply to certain facilities down the tech tree, lol. I've also made it a point to give myself lots of room between builds in order to avoid problems with spaghetti, which game me obvious room to slap down extra wind power until later down the line.

Wind power is stable and still nothing to scoff at in terms of average power, and can act as sufficiently good power poles, which is why I think they're quite powerful. I preferred wind over solar solely because of its stable, constant nature, though I also didn't know what a power outage would cause (I was imagining the punishing manual restarts of Satisfactory which admittedly also pushed me to make sure to check I had power). I suppose it did help that I didn't mind the wind power placement minigame but I don't think I ever placed down unreasonable amounts of them, though I did take care to always surround my builds, including even straight power lines, with some extra wind generators.

In comparison, I was largely used to Factorio's Nullius mod, where wind generators have a huge distance between them and have very random power output, and even then, I massed them quite successfully, albeit just a little less so. Another noteworthy comparison is that Factorio's basic power, coal, demands attention and preparation and comes with stark drawbacks. I suppose it does make sense in DSP's design of simplifying things, but I rest my point. The ability to have fairly cheap, quick, place-and-forget, stable power is just so good. I debated whether it was OP but I concluded that it fits the game's design.

Nevertheless, despite any of that, there are several other factors which greatly contributed to some of my ease, and crucially, might have been just good RNG:

• My second planet was a tidally locked lava planet, with both ample resources of all types (except coal) and a slightly higher solar ratio on top of having permanent day, which meant lots of easy extra power with solar panels, plus the usual wind spam. Almost all my particle accelerators ended up here too.
• I had 10 or so oil patches on my starting planet, which meant good access to hydrogen. (Only a small boon though.)
• My starting planet was next to a gas giant with hydrogen and fire ice. Easy free resources. If wind were to be OP, orbital collectors would be even more so.
• All planets in my starting system had at the very least decent wind and solar ratios.

As a result of everything, I was often ahead of the power consumption curve by almost 50%.

I did burn excess hydrogen for power too but that was almost always just excess power and the combustion generators are weak and slow enough that it was a relatively large hassle to set them up and then divert resources appropriately (since I hadn't consolidated all my hydrogen sources into an easily tappable flow).

eradicator wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 9:58 pm

MEOWMI wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:19 pm Refueling your mech is a necessity but there are ways to semi-automate it and as long as you didn't forget to carry extra fuel it's not a problem.

How do you semi-automate? I just had a chest that was being filled.

Mostly just in reference to using wireless poles for automated charging, spread out liberally in areas where I would regularly visit (notably the mall). This falls off in effectiveness towards the end so I guess it's a case of having boxes of hydrogen fuel until you can get better stuff. Can't lie, it's still a matter of inventory management to some degree...



(Also if DSP ever gets space-faring enemies and they ever do something like orbital bombardment where you need shields, wind power is going to get a lot more risky very quickly. Though, actual apparent semi-sentient space enemies seem like too big of a push for a feature that hasn't even been introduced yet. I imagine it'll just be some wild beasts that you slay, like Satisfactory, again. Not that big of a deal since my wind power was only rarely out as actual wind farms... unlike Nullius' vast wind farms, again. )

MEOWMI wrote: Mon Feb 22, 2021 9:54 pm I like being able to just run in Factorio and place belts.

Aha, yea. I tried, but the freely rotatable camera in addition to the bending grids made it impossible :D.

MEOWMI wrote: Mon Feb 22, 2021 9:54 pm let's not go into the lack of click-and-hold mass placing

I have to confess after a few hundred solar cells I wrote an auto-clicker script - mostly to place solar arrays. But it never gets really fast because a) circular grids that I had to carefully "trace" with the mouse and b) the infamous Unity input lag that also ignores "too fast" clicks.

MEOWMI wrote: Mon Feb 22, 2021 9:54 pm I did make it a habit to always carry lots of wind generators with me, to use them as power poles whenever possible, to sprinkle them about whenever there was a bit of extra time and space, and to fit them between factory lines.

Ah yes, if you just fit them into "holes" in the factory I can see that being quite powerful. In retrospect I didn't even automate them until mid-game. After all the nearest neighbour planet had 0% wind so I was forced to go solar. Also I already found the normal power-pole range too small so using them as replacement wouldn't have been an option for my build style.

MEOWMI wrote: Mon Feb 22, 2021 9:54 pm I preferred wind over solar solely because of its stable, constant nature,

When I got space-travel the first thing I did was to fly to the neighbouring silicon planet and build a solar panel factory. Throughout the game whenever I needed solars I went to that planet and fetched a chest load of 600 panels. Even in end-game the chest was always full when I came there, even though I never upgraded the facility. I estimate that I placed a total of 3000~5000 panels over all planets. Most of the planets I colonized had 95%+ surface area luckily.

The nice thing about being on planets (vs factorio "surfaces") is that it's always day on one side. So if you build a ring around the whole planet solar is also stable - no need for accumulators. As I didn't want to sacrifice equator prime-real-estate I usually built two rings - one at each pole.

MEOWMI wrote: Mon Feb 22, 2021 9:54 pm I was often ahead of the power consumption curve by almost 50%.

Nice. My home planet was usually between 90%~110% depending on production/science. And because placing solar panels is a PITA I never placed much more than nessecary.

MEOWMI wrote: Mon Feb 22, 2021 9:54 pm My second planet was a tidally locked lava planet

Overall I only saw one 1:2 locked and one 1:4 locked planet. And that's basically just very long day/night cycles. The best solar planet I saw was a 140% normal planet in a blue-sun system where I built my titanium alloy (sulfuric ocean), which shifted about 140MW of power-burden off of my rocket planet.

MEOWMI wrote: Mon Feb 22, 2021 9:54 pm My starting planet was next to a gas giant with hydrogen and fire ice.

I think the starting planet is always a gas giant sattelite. Mine was hydro+deuterium which helped a bit, but during the rocket-stage I completely used up the stock and had to colonize two more gas giants. Even if I'd had enough - on the main planet with all the water it would've been difficult to find space for all the generators.

MEOWMI wrote: Mon Feb 22, 2021 9:54 pm Mostly just in reference to using wireless poles for automated charging

I remember reading the description "allows charging from the grid", rushing the tech, building one and being totally disappointed by how slow the charging was. Switched to graphene fuel and never looked back. I used very few of them for long-range connections, but later dismantled all of them because of the running cost (who thought that power poles with a running cost were a good idea?!).

MEOWMI wrote: Mon Feb 22, 2021 9:54 pm Also if DSP ever gets space-faring enemies

I hope not, unless they blow it up into half of a 4X game with your own defense fleet. I noticed that one of the mecha hands looks a bit gun-like...


Conclusion: Interesting how the home-system RNG encourages different playstyles. Regrettably you can't see the home system resources before early mid-game.

It's interesting.

It feels like they played a lot of factorio, and streamlined it.
1: You get construction bots right from the start. Infact, the only way you build is via your bots.
2: Belts hold one item at a time. No more belt balancing
3: Simplified fluid physics. Water, oil, hydrogen gas, all of these items are solid blocks on belts.


Whilst it is possible to build a bus, the design philosophy of factorio doesn't work here, and with the logistics stations, I find myself in a rush to get to bot based builds. I'm trying to play without mods, and that's made my progress slow as the last game I unlocked all research and gave myself unlimited buildings so I could straight away turn a desert planet into a forge world (almost a direct copy of Nilauses forge world, going over it frame by frame to see that he was using 17 smelters at the top, and 30 or something like that at the equator). Even with a mod for making blueprints, I was looking at 3-4 hours of solid work, as I had to design numerous forges to fit the various latitude lines. I divided up the planet based on longitudinal lines.

For that reason, when you get into the late game, manufacture is a doddle. You get your interstellar logistics hubs that can have 5 items (technically 6, as space warpers occupy a separate slot and can be fed in with a belt) and 12 slots for belts. Simple recipes will be 1 input, 1 output, a lot take 2 inputs and 1 output (so four lines of factories per hub)

The main thing, maybe a design quirk, I dunno, is the way you take power and items from the dyson sphere. You use a planetside building called a ray receiver that converts gamma rays into electricity, or "critical photons" for antimatter production. Normally, to put an item into a building you use an inserter (sorter, in DSP terminology) and you use an inserter to take the item out. Except a ray receiver uses belts to directly feed items in and out, which means you use a splitter to take something off the belt and feed it on.

I like the game. It's pretty, it's straightforward enough. It's incomplete, but the team are working on blueprints, which is very interesting how it'll wrap a 2d grid onto a globe.

Never played satisfactory, I'm sure I'd like it, but I'm happy with factorio. Dyson Sphere Program to me feels like "Ok, you've launched your rocket in factorio, built an FTL communication device, downloaded tech blueprints for a mecha factory that can jump from planet to planet, go ahead and build an interstellar factory and build a type 2 civilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

One of the biggest problems of DSP, for me, is that there is no official multiplayer support. Luckily there's an unofficial mod.

sorahn wrote: Mon Feb 01, 2021 10:49 pm And since we were talking about it before, here's the polar research station which would be impossible to copy/paste to anywhere else on the planet.

you could place it at the south pole