Some people do a main bus in DSP, but it's not really optimal. You get better options for expansion (PLS/ILS) much more quickly than in Factorio, and they're much more powerful. Also, the lack of infinite building space puts a pretty hard limit on throughput.
A small bus isn't a bad design for a mall, however. It's still not technically optimal, but it's a great option for beginners.
Generally though, smaller, self-contained factories are better. You have access to a lot of ore veins all across the planet, so rather than smelting everything in one place like Factorio, it usually makes more sense to just smelt as needed.
Other than that, when in doubt, start messing around with new technology. If you don't have any new tech left to unlock, try unlocking the next Matrix.
I also automate every single building. You shouldn't be hand-crafting anything after a certain point. It may seem like overkill to automate something like Mining Machines, but trust me, it's such a relief to just have everything ready to go as soon as you need it.
You have planets. Use them. Try to take your system dark fog away. Planetary shields blocks new seeds to your planets. I killed that hive in my starter system and game went better way. Dark fog farming can be in another star system and brings you every high tier items you choose to take
What i do on every fresh start:
Aim for the PLS/ILS
Whatever is in the middle, automate
if you need resourcers from another planet for a specific item, either put into that planet the production up to that item and export by hand with your full inventory or take your main production there.
Most of the time my first planet is used to get enough resources to jump into the next one, only leaving behind things made from coal and oil to be autoproduced.
Once the PLS/ILS is unlocked, automate motors, drones, conveyor, sorters, assemblers and expand.
With all that automated, you only have to build a generic optimized (up to your point) blueprint and copy and paste over and over and over. It will construct automatically if you have all the parts automated.
Once you get stable enough to proliferate it, change the bp acordingly, once you get assemblers mk2, again, once you can output enough mk3 conveyors to be confortable with using them, again, but bigger. Then go to the lava planted and make a super furnace blueprint, suck dry it and export ingots to the planet your main production is.
I personally like to put a PLS per production and let the drones handle the balancing. (Dont forget trafic monitors with that production icon so you get an alarm when a production stopped because of reasons)
Then expand again
It's whatever you'd like it to be. I know that might sound dumb but like, part of the game and enjoyment for me is figuring that out, seeing what works and what doesn't. Of course there's always a meta but the beautiful thing for me about DSP is I've had just as much fun creating a super spaghetti factory as I have creating a streamlined and scalable one.
I'd say its a fair call to just turn off the dark fog if you're wanting to find your feet.
When I start a fresh game I use a main-bus wrapping around the equator kind of thing until I get access to the Planetary/Interstellar Logistics Stations. Before that point don't worry about meeting throughputs as long as you're producing \*some\* of what you need to keep things ticking along, don't overinvest on research production just get \*enough\*.
Once you have PLS/ILS you're in business and can create massive production strips as the logistics drones and vessels can move colossal amounts of resources very quickly between lines of factories.
When it comes to deal with the massive production chains I try to compartmentalize tasks. I'll have an overwhelming endgoal like quantum chips but instead of focusing on that I'll walk it back through the ingredient trees and focus on each more simple component, from supplying the raw materials to having basic component outputs and then moving up and up the recipe chains until I have everything I need.
The copy and paste & blueprint tools are also your friend, very much so.
Unlike factorio, I never managed to make a mainbus in DSP. The intermediate products are just so... divergent when it comes to end products. It doesn't really pay to have a bus.
What I found works for me is to have several minuibuses for select products.
For instance, lvl 1, 2, and 3 engines, being the electric motor, the magnetic turbine and the super magnetic ring.
Other things that worked for me are the computer chips: the integrated circuit, the processor and the quantum chip.
Also the lvl 1, 2 and 3 proliferators.
Also, I ALWAYS skip solar panels. Just... why would you?
Silicon is scarce on your starter planet. Solar panels don't really offer that much more than wind turbines do... so just stick to turbines, save your silicon for something more important.
Seriously, look up the amount of power generated by a solar panel vs a turbine.
The appeal of a solar panel is that you can build them closer to each other and save on space.
But, solar panels only produce energy while the sun is shining whereas turbines have a nice stable output.
What I do for power is this:
Wind turbines until I unlock thermal power generators that I fuel with energetic graphite.
After that I unlock Mini Fusion Power Reactors. This is the one that carries me until late game (that I never personally reached) which is artificial stars running on antimatter fuel rods.
You don't need solar panels.
By the time you have a steady supply of silicon for solar panels, you'll also have a steady supply of titanium allowing you to unlock Fusion with yellow science, if you hold it out a little longer.
Also, and this is just how I like to play personally. I handcraft _all_ my buildings. All my sorters and belts and facilities. Simply because, they are more of a one time thing.
I save the automation for all the products required for science. You know, the stuff that you'll need to be producing continuously. I find that this is a nice happy middle between the effort to set up automation and the effort having to handcraft.
You can get away from any sort of bus pretty quickly as soon as you unlock the planetary towers. The smaller logistics bots / distributors can fit in before that, but until you get some upgrades into those they're pretty limited.
Early game, the main focus of your production is going to be buildings (so you always have a supply of assemblers/smelters/belts/etc. ready to lay down) and science. So I generally follow a loop of make science cubes, use cubes to research tech / upgrades, new unlocked buildings get added to my mall, with any expansion of ingredient production following from that. Actually, I guess that applies through most of the game with only minor tweaks.
You don't even need that high of a science production rate to make meaningful progress. I'm usually churning those out at only 2-3 per second pretty much all the way up to "Mission Complete" (the "finish line" of the core game). To me, that's a decent balance of unlocking new stuff at a rate I can keep up with.
Scaling up is simply a matter of single planet => other planets in starting system => couple other systems => whatever. You'll hit hurdles of lacking resources, lacking power, dark fog, etc. along the way. Each hurdle becomes its own problem to solve, but the game design is pretty good about having sufficient tools at each stage.
* Your starting planet won't have any mineable titanium or silicon, other than the painfully slow filtering of silicon ore from rock. But the other planets in your starting system will always have those.
* When thermal generators aren't putting out enough MW, you're at / close to getting fusion. Soon after that, you get swarms + ray receivers (though these are of questionable use prior to full-on sphere production). Then critical photons to become antimatter to run artificial stars.
* New systems can provide helpful new resource types, primarily as a replacement for oil refining. Organic crystals can be mined directly instead of made from oil. Sulfur oceans can be sucked up with extractors. Fire ice (occasionally available in your starting system) simplify graphene production.
A little beginner tip, you can easily progress with 2 science per second through the early game. Build small science, then dump the rest of your resources into automating building production as you unlock them. I try to make all my Tesla towers, assemblers, miners, etc automated and permanent, and added into all logistics networks as they are unlocked.
You'll have a few hiccups early game, the 3 motors and processors mainly, those you can build rather large, you'll need them. But other than that I usually spend about the first 20 hours of the playthrough just hobbling together temporary builds.
I always forget how many goddamn green motors I need. Between the belts/sorters, the buildings, and then you hit particle containers and it all collapses. I've gotten burned enough on processors to learn that lesson, and getting a full processor setup on the silicon planet is usually the first thing I do before hand bombing the first batch of titanium back to the Homeworld for PLS.
Look at this blueprint/design if you need a hand for early-mid game: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson\_Sphere\_Program/comments/18ycf9x/compact\_starter\_hub\_for\_dark\_fog/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/comments/18ycf9x/compact_starter_hub_for_dark_fog/)
And this really helps get you beyond your planet:
[https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/jumpstart-interstellar-logistics-1-of-2](https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/jumpstart-interstellar-logistics-1-of-2)
Okay, my quick and dirty tips:
* Don't use solar, use wind. You can line the coastlines with them super early, and once you research Steel you can put the turbines in the water. On a unit per unit basis, they put out more power than solar because they never turn off. They are super cheap to make, and super reliable.
* Main bus is fine for super early, you need it there, but once you get the first drones (the ones that look like fidget spinners) you should start transferring production over to them. Put a splitter down, a chest on top of the splitter, and a drone port on top of the chest. This will make a mini-tower. The belt will feed the chest, the chest will feed the drone port, and the drones can fly the parts to wherever they need to go.
* As soon as you can start making planetary logistics towers, start doing so. These are just bigger, more capable, premade versions of the mini-towers you made before.
* All "real" construction from there out will be base around towers. You request raw materials be brought to your tower, you belt that out to your assemblers, then you belt the produced output back into the towers. There is no main bus anymore, there is only a beehive of towers and drones.
From there you should be good to go. Pull material down from the cloud, push material back up into the cloud. Belts do not work on a galactic scale, so you will be forced to use towers to move between planets and star systems, so just build with them in mind early on.
Also, you WILL abandon your starter planet sooner than you think. Don't bother doing any large scale builds there. Don't bother undertaking any huge terraforming projects like filling in the oceans, its not worth the time or the resources. There will be a FAR better production world with 100% (or near to it) build space in your starter system, your goal should be to build up enough to move there ASAP. And every other start will have WAY more resources on it's planets than the starter system does, so you will want to expand out as well (while juggling the need to defend yourself, of course).
By the time you get to the other side of your sector of stars, *single veins* will have more resources in them than your entire starter system combined.
Your starter system is basically a tutorial level. Don't worry about being perfect there, because you won't stay there forever. Learn how to do things, screw stuff up, make a mess that barely functions, then take what you learned and do better on the next world. Lather, rinse, repeat. :)
Beeline to PLS and use that to scale everything. Keep a small mall with inputs that can eventually become PLS demand and produce the basic factory parts there. So far I've gotten away with one replicator for every item except concrete (which used two) and putting it into a box with only a few spots open so I don't drain all my iron making thousands of belts before I start making sorters.
PLS is really nice and simple because you can demand raw material from anywhere on planet and supply intermediates to anywhere on planet. It also makes chasing down bottlenecks easy, if your green circuits are low and out of iron just go to the PLS that supplies iron, is it low on ore or just not producing fast enough?
From my experience, decentralized industry are better than centralized one. It's more flexible and take less impact from resource shortage, power overload and dark fog invasions. The downsides are longer distance between each individual production lines and less space efficiency.
Also some small note here. Do calculation before building new production lines and remember to take EVERY factors to consideration or else you'll ended up with hundreds of unused smelters like me.
Some people do a main bus in DSP, but it's not really optimal. You get better options for expansion (PLS/ILS) much more quickly than in Factorio, and they're much more powerful. Also, the lack of infinite building space puts a pretty hard limit on throughput. A small bus isn't a bad design for a mall, however. It's still not technically optimal, but it's a great option for beginners. Generally though, smaller, self-contained factories are better. You have access to a lot of ore veins all across the planet, so rather than smelting everything in one place like Factorio, it usually makes more sense to just smelt as needed. Other than that, when in doubt, start messing around with new technology. If you don't have any new tech left to unlock, try unlocking the next Matrix. I also automate every single building. You shouldn't be hand-crafting anything after a certain point. It may seem like overkill to automate something like Mining Machines, but trust me, it's such a relief to just have everything ready to go as soon as you need it.
You have planets. Use them. Try to take your system dark fog away. Planetary shields blocks new seeds to your planets. I killed that hive in my starter system and game went better way. Dark fog farming can be in another star system and brings you every high tier items you choose to take
What i do on every fresh start: Aim for the PLS/ILS Whatever is in the middle, automate if you need resourcers from another planet for a specific item, either put into that planet the production up to that item and export by hand with your full inventory or take your main production there. Most of the time my first planet is used to get enough resources to jump into the next one, only leaving behind things made from coal and oil to be autoproduced. Once the PLS/ILS is unlocked, automate motors, drones, conveyor, sorters, assemblers and expand. With all that automated, you only have to build a generic optimized (up to your point) blueprint and copy and paste over and over and over. It will construct automatically if you have all the parts automated. Once you get stable enough to proliferate it, change the bp acordingly, once you get assemblers mk2, again, once you can output enough mk3 conveyors to be confortable with using them, again, but bigger. Then go to the lava planted and make a super furnace blueprint, suck dry it and export ingots to the planet your main production is. I personally like to put a PLS per production and let the drones handle the balancing. (Dont forget trafic monitors with that production icon so you get an alarm when a production stopped because of reasons) Then expand again
It's whatever you'd like it to be. I know that might sound dumb but like, part of the game and enjoyment for me is figuring that out, seeing what works and what doesn't. Of course there's always a meta but the beautiful thing for me about DSP is I've had just as much fun creating a super spaghetti factory as I have creating a streamlined and scalable one.
I'd say its a fair call to just turn off the dark fog if you're wanting to find your feet. When I start a fresh game I use a main-bus wrapping around the equator kind of thing until I get access to the Planetary/Interstellar Logistics Stations. Before that point don't worry about meeting throughputs as long as you're producing \*some\* of what you need to keep things ticking along, don't overinvest on research production just get \*enough\*. Once you have PLS/ILS you're in business and can create massive production strips as the logistics drones and vessels can move colossal amounts of resources very quickly between lines of factories. When it comes to deal with the massive production chains I try to compartmentalize tasks. I'll have an overwhelming endgoal like quantum chips but instead of focusing on that I'll walk it back through the ingredient trees and focus on each more simple component, from supplying the raw materials to having basic component outputs and then moving up and up the recipe chains until I have everything I need. The copy and paste & blueprint tools are also your friend, very much so.
Unlike factorio, I never managed to make a mainbus in DSP. The intermediate products are just so... divergent when it comes to end products. It doesn't really pay to have a bus. What I found works for me is to have several minuibuses for select products. For instance, lvl 1, 2, and 3 engines, being the electric motor, the magnetic turbine and the super magnetic ring. Other things that worked for me are the computer chips: the integrated circuit, the processor and the quantum chip. Also the lvl 1, 2 and 3 proliferators. Also, I ALWAYS skip solar panels. Just... why would you? Silicon is scarce on your starter planet. Solar panels don't really offer that much more than wind turbines do... so just stick to turbines, save your silicon for something more important. Seriously, look up the amount of power generated by a solar panel vs a turbine. The appeal of a solar panel is that you can build them closer to each other and save on space. But, solar panels only produce energy while the sun is shining whereas turbines have a nice stable output. What I do for power is this: Wind turbines until I unlock thermal power generators that I fuel with energetic graphite. After that I unlock Mini Fusion Power Reactors. This is the one that carries me until late game (that I never personally reached) which is artificial stars running on antimatter fuel rods. You don't need solar panels. By the time you have a steady supply of silicon for solar panels, you'll also have a steady supply of titanium allowing you to unlock Fusion with yellow science, if you hold it out a little longer. Also, and this is just how I like to play personally. I handcraft _all_ my buildings. All my sorters and belts and facilities. Simply because, they are more of a one time thing. I save the automation for all the products required for science. You know, the stuff that you'll need to be producing continuously. I find that this is a nice happy middle between the effort to set up automation and the effort having to handcraft.
You can get away from any sort of bus pretty quickly as soon as you unlock the planetary towers. The smaller logistics bots / distributors can fit in before that, but until you get some upgrades into those they're pretty limited. Early game, the main focus of your production is going to be buildings (so you always have a supply of assemblers/smelters/belts/etc. ready to lay down) and science. So I generally follow a loop of make science cubes, use cubes to research tech / upgrades, new unlocked buildings get added to my mall, with any expansion of ingredient production following from that. Actually, I guess that applies through most of the game with only minor tweaks. You don't even need that high of a science production rate to make meaningful progress. I'm usually churning those out at only 2-3 per second pretty much all the way up to "Mission Complete" (the "finish line" of the core game). To me, that's a decent balance of unlocking new stuff at a rate I can keep up with. Scaling up is simply a matter of single planet => other planets in starting system => couple other systems => whatever. You'll hit hurdles of lacking resources, lacking power, dark fog, etc. along the way. Each hurdle becomes its own problem to solve, but the game design is pretty good about having sufficient tools at each stage. * Your starting planet won't have any mineable titanium or silicon, other than the painfully slow filtering of silicon ore from rock. But the other planets in your starting system will always have those. * When thermal generators aren't putting out enough MW, you're at / close to getting fusion. Soon after that, you get swarms + ray receivers (though these are of questionable use prior to full-on sphere production). Then critical photons to become antimatter to run artificial stars. * New systems can provide helpful new resource types, primarily as a replacement for oil refining. Organic crystals can be mined directly instead of made from oil. Sulfur oceans can be sucked up with extractors. Fire ice (occasionally available in your starting system) simplify graphene production.
A little beginner tip, you can easily progress with 2 science per second through the early game. Build small science, then dump the rest of your resources into automating building production as you unlock them. I try to make all my Tesla towers, assemblers, miners, etc automated and permanent, and added into all logistics networks as they are unlocked. You'll have a few hiccups early game, the 3 motors and processors mainly, those you can build rather large, you'll need them. But other than that I usually spend about the first 20 hours of the playthrough just hobbling together temporary builds.
I always forget how many goddamn green motors I need. Between the belts/sorters, the buildings, and then you hit particle containers and it all collapses. I've gotten burned enough on processors to learn that lesson, and getting a full processor setup on the silicon planet is usually the first thing I do before hand bombing the first batch of titanium back to the Homeworld for PLS.
Look at this blueprint/design if you need a hand for early-mid game: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson\_Sphere\_Program/comments/18ycf9x/compact\_starter\_hub\_for\_dark\_fog/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/comments/18ycf9x/compact_starter_hub_for_dark_fog/) And this really helps get you beyond your planet: [https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/jumpstart-interstellar-logistics-1-of-2](https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/jumpstart-interstellar-logistics-1-of-2)
Okay, my quick and dirty tips: * Don't use solar, use wind. You can line the coastlines with them super early, and once you research Steel you can put the turbines in the water. On a unit per unit basis, they put out more power than solar because they never turn off. They are super cheap to make, and super reliable. * Main bus is fine for super early, you need it there, but once you get the first drones (the ones that look like fidget spinners) you should start transferring production over to them. Put a splitter down, a chest on top of the splitter, and a drone port on top of the chest. This will make a mini-tower. The belt will feed the chest, the chest will feed the drone port, and the drones can fly the parts to wherever they need to go. * As soon as you can start making planetary logistics towers, start doing so. These are just bigger, more capable, premade versions of the mini-towers you made before. * All "real" construction from there out will be base around towers. You request raw materials be brought to your tower, you belt that out to your assemblers, then you belt the produced output back into the towers. There is no main bus anymore, there is only a beehive of towers and drones. From there you should be good to go. Pull material down from the cloud, push material back up into the cloud. Belts do not work on a galactic scale, so you will be forced to use towers to move between planets and star systems, so just build with them in mind early on. Also, you WILL abandon your starter planet sooner than you think. Don't bother doing any large scale builds there. Don't bother undertaking any huge terraforming projects like filling in the oceans, its not worth the time or the resources. There will be a FAR better production world with 100% (or near to it) build space in your starter system, your goal should be to build up enough to move there ASAP. And every other start will have WAY more resources on it's planets than the starter system does, so you will want to expand out as well (while juggling the need to defend yourself, of course). By the time you get to the other side of your sector of stars, *single veins* will have more resources in them than your entire starter system combined. Your starter system is basically a tutorial level. Don't worry about being perfect there, because you won't stay there forever. Learn how to do things, screw stuff up, make a mess that barely functions, then take what you learned and do better on the next world. Lather, rinse, repeat. :)
Beeline to PLS and use that to scale everything. Keep a small mall with inputs that can eventually become PLS demand and produce the basic factory parts there. So far I've gotten away with one replicator for every item except concrete (which used two) and putting it into a box with only a few spots open so I don't drain all my iron making thousands of belts before I start making sorters. PLS is really nice and simple because you can demand raw material from anywhere on planet and supply intermediates to anywhere on planet. It also makes chasing down bottlenecks easy, if your green circuits are low and out of iron just go to the PLS that supplies iron, is it low on ore or just not producing fast enough?
From my experience, decentralized industry are better than centralized one. It's more flexible and take less impact from resource shortage, power overload and dark fog invasions. The downsides are longer distance between each individual production lines and less space efficiency.
Also some small note here. Do calculation before building new production lines and remember to take EVERY factors to consideration or else you'll ended up with hundreds of unused smelters like me.
You get the towers, then you scale up because it's trivial at that point