Dyson Sphere Program

As a big fan of factory/automation games, I couldn't ignore this one and the overwhelmingly positive reviews...but my god, this software is just a nightmare to engage with. After configuring the UI to make it readable, it often remains indecipherable. Placing buildings/conveyers/sorters is so finicky and unintuitive, I couldn't believe it. With the existence of Satisfactory, StarRupture, and Factorio, I would only recommend this game to a factory fiend that already has hundreds of hours in those games.

Doesnt look like it will cross the finishline. Started out great and its a semi novel idea. But the further time has gone the seemingly less coherent the development has become. While the bones and meat are there the meals not ready yet and the chef isnt looking so hot. Wait for 1.0 is my advice.

No está en español (485 millones de hablantes nativos en el mundo) pero sí en alemán (95 millones) o francés (80 millones). No sé si las compañías las dirigen subnormales profundos o algún hispanohablante les detonó el orto y ahora nos tienen manía.

I'mma be real with you. Is it a bad game? Probably not. But the early and midgame are extremely boring as an intermediate Factorio Player and Veteran Satisfactory Player. Coupled with an extremely hostile community, I don't think I'll come back to this.

Without a doubt, if you like satisfactory and factorio but want factorio with MORE automation then this is it.

Not recommended, especially without mods, due to a couple of reasons. First one is unarguable - at some point, this is no longer a game, but a job. You'll have to dig through wikis and reddits, you'll have to use a calculator, notes and probably a spreadsheet, and all in all you'll probably realize you didn't get a game, but an unpaid job. Also, a lot of it is idling or waiting unless you like re-doing the same trivial blueprint deployment over and over again just to see a number grow (I don't), so basically you'll need another game to play in the meantime while you wait for things to happen (no pause nor speed setting... in a singleplayer micromanagement factory strategy game? WHYYYY?)... and you need to spend hours just creating the blueprints, so then you realize - ah, the pros simply _download tested pro blueprint packs from the top players_ xDDD The second one is a matter of dispute - for me, the EA here is done wrong. Key UI/UX enhancements are done at sluggish pace, updates are rare and spaced apart, the possibilities of real automation and ways to decrease manual labor are limited, and overall you prolly shouldn't expect much more than we have now in the base game. The feature creep for useless sugar is painful, and lack of core game development is painful as well. It's the modders keeping the game funky, not the devs ATM. The third one is also arguable - overall replayability is extremely low, and metadata makes no sense as it currently stands. All the runs are basically the same, more or less, and metadata can be cheesed by idly stockpiling huge amounts of research components for 100 offline hours or so, and then putting those 100h of worth of components through a big science hub, one color by one (you don't even have to re-build that hub for every color). Metadata is calculated as per-hour research rate from a single hour, so by pumping 100h of resources into high-speed research hub, you'll break the numbers. Almost all of it can be done idle. Congrats, you can now "win" a game within 60 seconds of starting it. :P Then we have the layout options and "verticality", which should be the key point in a factory game in 2026. However, splitters suck (huge footprint, lame vertical stacking, tedious connection mode - you can't just slice a conveyor with them, you need to deconstruct etc.), almost all (there are some rare notable exceptions, but they are rare) buildings require sorters, which also suck for a game in 2026, from key buildings only warehouses and research facilities stack vertically, but when they do (especially research facilities) they exceed max camera zoom... So basically, there's no real verticality, you can only do conveyor bridges (and those are really tedious and require lots of manual work in non-trivial cases) and that's all. The amount of "upgraded recipes" is very limited (just a couple of them), the hassle with unipolar magnets is retarded (debilitating for new players who overmined them for violet candy, completely redundant for endgame if you knew to wait until high VU), the early game requirement/possibility of microoptimizing the miners is totally lame in a game with no pause even for planning, the hassle with planning DS is completely absurd, the entire concept of fixed DS is basically dumb by itself (it's the Dyson swarm that's the go-to solution we accept as the best solution nowadays), lack of (even in extreme late-game!) teleportation in a game that requires you to have multi-galaxy empire and presents Very Futuristic Technology, the tedium of both low-altitude maneuvers and space travel with Icarus, the broken English in most of the descriptions and texts, only VU being a viable (and actually very much required) late game research (yes, you'll be only researching ONE TECHNOLOGY over and over again in the endgame)... I could go like this all day. I played enough and I hoped enough. I had this game for years, I played for years, I watched the devlogs and "balancing" update notes, changing some random 4.6 value to equally random 4.2, and then to 4.4 in the next patch, I waited for the "AHA" moment, I tried restarting on different settings, I tried different playstyles ("relaxed", speedrunning, metaoptimizing, you name it)... Nope. IMO the unmodded game as a whole works only for people who love hugging numbers without any meaning. The story of the game is "a computer needs big crunching power, so you're an AI mecha that needs to generate big crunching power, INCREASE THAT NUMBER BIGGER NUMBER MAKE IT EVEN BIGGER!!!! Kilowatt, megawatt, gigawatt, TERAWATT WOOOHOOO MAKE IT BIGGER THE NUMBER FACTORY GOES BRRRR". I'm not joking, that's the official backstory, just slightly paraphrased. I'm not one of people for whom that's enough, even in a factory game. Factorio did it better, and I don't even like Factorio that much nowadays :D (can't like 2D factories once you did a vertical/3D one :) But then, you think, "go for the mods!"... And now you have two jobs, 1. base game, 2. mod selection, configuration, compatibility and updates. :D Many other problems were pointed by other reviewers already; tiny spherical "planets" with absurdly high gravity for their size, yet tragically split into different zones making blueprinting miss-or-miss, tons of problems with blueprints or efficient factory layout (the aforementioned 1990's UI/UX vibe), no way to auto-upgrade (you need to do it manually every time, even with an area tool it's extremely tedious for bigger factories), no way to auto-refuel/restock warpers in Icarus, artificial building distance limit, having buildings built not by having base resources but by prefabrication (which essentially forces you to manually create a mall production line for EACH AND EVERY BUILDING... and then to go there and restock repeatedly), terribly unbalanced seeds (a brand new player might get a "dead" seed with terrible rare resource distribution and huge travel distances)... Like I said, I could go on. Unless you played up till 1TW and beyond, you prolly won't notice. By 1TW, you're an addict and you have an additional job. That's it, you wasted your life. At least there are therapies for people overdosing fentanyl, but nobody treats DSP addiction yet :( Also - don't get me started at Dark Fog. The idea sounds great on paper, as a threat and time limitation, but after a while it's just Yet Another Resource Farm. Build a cannon, collect common drops, then build a bigger cannon, collect rare drops, then a Really Big Effing Cannon Shooting Antimatter Bombs and collect Pretty Rare But Completely Irrelevant At That Point Drops... ... I really tried to like DSP. Really. If you like using a spreadsheet to optimize virtual factory layouts - knock yourself out. I'm done with it, 1TW DS, ~100 VU, huge logistic net... and all that didn't give me even an ounce of satisfaction, because the world feels sterile and dead, the task is artificial, and the game is basically as fun as solving one and the same ODE for the entire day, over and over again. --- Now just to get the comments I expect: >inb4 you're playing the game wrong >inb4 you should learn to enjoy the game >inb4 maybe the factory/sandbox genre is not for you my reply to you guys: learn to read, and learn to think. This type of comments only prove you fail at those. When you learn that, re-read this review. You should understand it by that point. But, to preempt: * you can have a factory game without tedious micromanagement and with good UI/UX, with good balancing, good growth curve and good meta, * you can have a fun factory game, that focuses on growth instead of copy-pasting things until you die of boredom, * you can have a factory game that's not just number crunching ad nauseam, * DSP is not one of the above, * just because you haven't played better factory/sandbox/builder games than DSP doesn't mean I haven't. 'nuff said. --- Count of people who told me I need to take a course to learn how to enjoy the game: 2

Game feels abandoned. still in EA...for a long time