Dyson Sphere Program was released on Steam on 21 Jan, 2021 and developed by Youthcat Studio.
About The Game:
Build the most efficient intergalactic factory in space simulation strategy game Dyson Sphere Program! Harness the power of stars, collect resources, plan and design production lines and develop your interstellar factory from a small space workshop to a galaxy-wide industrial empire.
Dyson Sphere Program is a sci-fi simulation game with space, adventure, exploration and factory automation elements where you can build your own galactic industrial empire from scratch.
In the distant future, the power of science and technology has ushered a new age to the human race. Space and time have become irrelevant thanks to virtual reality. A new kind of supercomputer has been developed – a machine whose superior artificial intelligence and computing capability will push humanity even further. There is only one problem: there isn’t enough energy in the whole planet to feed this machine.
You are a space engineer in charge of a project launched by the space alliance COSMO, tasked with a massive undertaking: constructing Dyson Spheres (a megastructure that would orbit around a star, harnessing all its power and energy) to produce the energy that humanity needs. Only a few decades ago, Dyson Spheres were considered a hypothetical, impossible invention – but now it’s in your hands… Will you be able to turn a backwater space workshop into a galaxy-wide industrial production empire?
Every playthrough will be unique: your universe will be procedurally generated every time you start a new game. There will be different types and distribution of stars, planets and resources. Will you manage to thrive and build your Spheres, no matter what the universe throws at you?
As a space engineer, you are expected to design your interstellar factory and production lines, not to micromanage every small package going back and forth. You have to transport materials from one planet to another, forming interstellar transport teams that gather resources and bring them to where they are needed.
Then, your resources can be transported between facilities through conveyor belts, and you’ve got the technology to help your buildings fit the grid automatically during the construction process. You’ve got the best tools COSMO can afford to build a massive-scale automated production line – the most efficient one ever seen in the universe!
Game Features:
- Build a galactic industrial empire from scratch: start with a small workshop and improve it until it spans the whole galaxy
- Develop your very own Dyson Spheres, a megastructure that orbits around a star harnessing all its power and energy, from the first screw to its completion
- Explore a vast universe procedurally generated with all kinds of celestial bodies: neutron stars, white dwarfs, red giants…
- Gather resources in planets of all types: ocean, lava, desert, frozen, gaseous planets…
- Research new technologies to improve your factories… and discover the secrets of the universe
- Enhance mecha fly, sail or jump through outer space and planets
- Transport materials across the galaxy to your facilities: thousands of transport ships will flow endlessly to your factories and back!
- Design the most efficient automated factory and production line
- Customize your factory and Dyson Sphere to make it unique
- Design a balanced power network capable of producing energy in all kinds of power plants like wind turbines, artificial stars, etc.
About Youthcat Studio Developers Team:
We are a five-person team from Chongqing, China. For the love of sci-fi, we’ve created this game Dyson Sphere Program. Perhaps Dyson Sphere has already appeared in many games, but this time we hope that players can build it step by step with your own hands.
Let’s see now some Reviews on Steam:
Thumbs UP Reviews:
Do not buy this Game …. at this point I have been playing this Game for 150 hours and the game is not out that long.
Addiction Warning!
Aurumlamina
I spent dozens of hours perfecting my logistical systems in the gem that is Factorio and I’d gladly spend dozens more doing it again. For a title that I’d originally thought sounded like one that I’d never have much of an interest in, it made a liar out of me within only moments of starting it up for the first time. I was converted and every logistics-based game that comes out immediately has my curiosity. Judging from the general opinion surrounding it, I was far from alone.
So imagine my surprise when I started building up my world in Dyson Sphere Program and realized that it had managed to surpass the framework laid out by its spiritual predecessor. Old flaws were shored up, new innovations were implemented, and the less fun but still important systems were streamlined without losing their depth. Factorio may be a gem, but Dyson Sphere Project has nearly perfected the concept by flushing away its impurities.
To Infinity and Beyond!
Dyson Sphere Program puts you into the role of an engineer that’s responsible for harvesting the power of the stars to meet the ever-increasing energy needs of humanity. As you may expect considering the genre, there isn’t much more of a narrative outside of that and you’ll be spending most of your time in your own head hammering out ways to improve and expand your industrial network. Even more exciting, this time around you’re not working with a single planet but an entire procedurally generated system with more planets and stars than you could reasonably conquer.
Starting with mining raw resources and processing them along simply conveyor belts, you’ll eventually look on with pride on an interplanetary network that include logistical drones flying around and delivering your products and towering structures that effectively serve as landmarks as you fly around your worlds. You’d best clear your calendar now.
Gears, Magnets, and Gas For Days
Extracting resources and processing them into increasingly more advanced projects via a forever expanding assembly line is the name of the game in Dyson Sphere Program. It doesn’t sound glamorous but you’d be amazed at how satisfying it really is. I attempted to dip my toe in on the first night just to check it out and ended up not wanting to put it down over two hours later.
Resource harvesters, like mines, water pumps, and oil extractors, provide the raw materials that everything else is made from. There are few real surprises for fans of the genre when it comes to your methods of processing, though the conveyor belts that are your industrial complex’s lifeblood have had a handful of absolutely incredible quality of life improvements.
From the start, you’re able to adjust their height so that they can transport your products over or under belts that you’d previously constructed, a feat that has previously required an investment in the tech tree and even then was heavily restricted. You can get some serious height, it’s not just a unit or two. Splitters play an important role and are especially convenient as well as they have four ports that are easily managed to be entrances or exits with filters to separate items down differing paths if need be.
Outside of conveyor belts, the rest of the logistical system is a pleasure to use. Any grabber can be assigned a filter to sort and separate items as you see fit and can reach up to three spaces away. When it comes to other structures, building stacking is a huge benefit to take advantage of. With it, storage buildings and matrix labs can be stacked vertically, making it so that they can effectively multiply the proficiency of what they do without taking up and land area. Throw in the added effects of not having to deal with any hostile creatures that are gunning to burn it all down and your automation of the system ends up being complex but leisurely, and you can expand at your own pace.
Charge Up Your Mech and Get To Work
For those of us who don’t like to get our hands dirty with manual labor, Dyson Sphere Program kindly provides us with a mech packed full of drones. You’ll be planning each and every construction project of your assembly line, but this pleasant batch of drones will fly out and perform the menial labor themselves. As you progress and unlock higher levels of technology, your mech and its mechanical servants will be improved as well. Beginning as a lumbering machine that has just enough capability to get your starting infrastructure up, within a few hours you’ll have a flying super mech capable of traveling between planets with incredible speed. You’ll have to keep it fueled up though or else its functionality will plummet.
The Shining Stars and the Sounds of Progress
I noticed almost immediately that the atmosphere of Dyson Sphere Program was crafted in a way that far exceeds my expectations for the genre. I was excited before I’d even landed on the first planet thanks to the opening sequence where you’re flying through space in its direction with adrenaline-inducing music that fits the overall theme and the detail that’s gone into making the galaxy and its worlds beautiful. While it lacks any truly unique landmarks that would make one planet immediately stand out from another of the same type, it never gets old to fly around a beautiful green planet or to sail over one that’s composed almost entirely of magma.
The Bottom Line
I don’t say this often but Dyson Sphere Program blew me away with the level of polish that it’s brought to the genre. I lost six hours to it two days in a row which is beyond rare for me. One of the most thrilling parts of DSP was how much easier it was to build a complex automated belt network without the headache that previous entries had baked into some of their systems. The best parts of its peers have been touched up to a point of near perfection. The sights and sounds drive that even further home as you’ll likely enjoy kicking back and just taking a peek at the world around you once in a while.
If the concept of the game interests you, I highly recommend giving it a shot; the general concept may not sound like one that will rivet you to your seat but I can say first-hand that once you’re in there industrializing the system, it’s highly addictive. I’m very much looking forward to its future as it’s one of the better titles I’ve played recently and it isn’t even out of Early Access yet.
Bought it at about Noon today and am finally turning it off after 9 hrs straight.
TL;DR: This game is worth twice the $20 price tag so I highly recommend you buy it now while it is in early access as you WILL EASILY get your money’s worth if you enjoy Factorio or Satisfactory.
The Good:
– Beautiful To Look at the art and models are fantastic and sharp.
– Plenty to do so far in the early game. Appears to be plenty to do in mid and late game.
– It is Similar to Factorio and Satisfactory but it has an entirely unique feel and pulls you in even more than those games.
– The Developers have been patching bugs DAILY since just after release of the early access version.
– The Hypothetical Science behind the Dyson Spheres is quite fun and the “story” of the game is actually motivating. Rather than ESCAPE like Factorio per say, You truly feel like you are industrializing a planet and not just a massive field, due to the scale of the planets in this game.
The Bad:
– The ONLY complaint I have so far is that the UI feels just a little clunky at times. Trying to place rails above one another is a bit troublesome at times but not impossible, once one of my labs wouldn’t stack up so i had to destroy and rebuild it.
– Another Issue with the UI is that selecting a different menu doesn’t cancel out the build tool or structure you have selected. So I will go to grab something out of an inventory of a crate I just opened and end up deleting a sorter or conveyor or what have you.
Otherwise this game is worth twice the $20 tag so buy it now while it is in early access as you WILL get your money’s worth if you like these types of games.
This game is so much fun, very simple, and incredibly addicting. If you’re not careful 11 hours will pass by and you won’t even notice. For an early access game, it feels almost complete and the bugs feel rather quaint when you consider other games and their woes.
If you have played factorio, this game will definitely feel like step up. I won’t go into features and a bunch of other details because not only is it easy to get into, it is the first game I have played in years where the learning curve is low and the discovery of all the things you can do is just as fun as playing the game itself.
Thumbs Down Reviews:
PS: Took us some time to find some Negative Reviews and what is not Trolls …
Despite having a great design and a really nice implementation it has at least one (late) game breaking bug/missing feature.The logistic ships will go for resources wherever they want and you can not control it.
For example if you have both a remote and a local systems with a resource available the ships might decide to travel many lightyears without warp cores instead of going to closest planet in the same system with requested resources available.Will change the review once this is fixed.
For those on the fence I would say if you enjoy games centered around assembly lines and resource management go for it, the game looks to have much potential on top of what seems like a promising early access, however personally I’m more of a Civ guy where while managing resources is fun, building the actual system for gathering, refining, production, etc is much too much for my taste.
“Oh, scary red review!”, I hear you think, but hold on one minute! This is a good game. I enjoy it. You might assume that I also enjoy games like Factorio and Satisfactory, and you would be correct, but this isn’t about what I like, this is about this game. This game has a lot going for it. Dyson Sphere Program can probably keep you long into the night if this is your kind of game, but it desperately needs a few quality of life improvements to the user interface and experience.
So if I like this game so much, why am I not recommending it (yet)?
1) You cannot rebind any controls, and the mouse rotation is strictly bound to holding the middle mouse button. If your middle mouse button is a piece of scrap, you’re in for a bad time. A very bad time. Especially because the game likes to slightly forget your camera angle when zooming around. Zoom out to the planet view and back in? Your camera won’t be at the same angle anymore, in my experiences. And because this is a game very much in the style of Factorio and yet also 3D, a birds eye view is usually best to avoid constantly spinning around because you want to place something on the far side of the building (the far side as far as your view is concerned), and it can be very finnicky. I have heard that controls rebinding is coming, but as of now, this is what we’ve got.
2) There is nothing like the deconstruction planner of Factorio, and trying to tear down anything with mild complexity becomes an incredible chore. You can click and hold the mouse button while in deconstruct mode, but the moment your mouse drifts from a conveyor (which is the only building type that holding the mouse button down on seems to work with, and I mean only conveyors, not sorters or splitters), it stops deleting and you’ll be finding yourself basically pixel hunting for stray bits constantly. Also since you’re on a planet which is a sphere, and it is tiny as far as real planets would be, the curvature of the planet will absolutely ensure that the Factorio strategy of holding down the button and just running in a direction to clear a line of something tends to not work for very long without constant adjustments. And unlike Satisfactory each tile of conveyor is a separate entity that you need to deconstruct! Which brings me to the next item..
3) There is also nothing like blueprints or copy and paste (except for settings of a building, in a limited way). Have you set up a nice little set of 3 refineries with two recipes and a whole oodle of sorters and belts and a splitter or two, in a nice little pleasant practically modular block? Well if you want to build fifty of those you’re going to be doing it all by hand. Over and over and over again. The first time was enjoyable as I redesigned and tweaked, the second time not so bad as I went through some improvements, the fifth time I was bloody sick of it and already considering spamming out a massive less efficient but easier to spam design.
4) On a related note there is no way to alter or update a conveyor on the fly. You want it to reverse, change direction, or upgrade to a faster version? Tear it all up. There’s a key for change direction when placing them but it doesn’t do anything right now. This applies to buildings as well, whether you want to upgrade to the Mk2 assembler or rotate them, you must remove it first.
5) The replicator (hand crafting) is a bit awkward, there’s no shift or control or numerical input for changing the amount of something you want, you get a plus and minus button that you need to mouseclick to change the increment one at a time, to a maximum increment of ten. For most items I set the increment to ten and leave it there. Fortunately this increment seems to persist through play sessions.
6) Placing sorters (the rough equivalent of a Factorio inserter) is also clunky mostly because you need to wait for your construction drones (yeah, you don’t place anything, you place a ghost item which your limited number of slow drones places) to place the items on both sides before you can order the sorter to be placed, which gets annoying when you know what you want and are just waiting for the buggers to put that specific bit of conveyor down so you can get on with things. It doesn’t sound like much but it gets old swiftly.
7) A minor annoyance is item rates, there’s a bit of inconsistency when item rates are shown, whether at all when the building isn’t operating, or whether it is in items per minute or per second, which is just another level of slight awkwardness when trying to plan out a balanced production line.
8) Items that overflow your inventory for any reason are deleted. This includes items you were producing by hand (the replicator), or buildings you’re deconstructing, or their contents. This can be anywhere from a minor aggravation to, if you’re unlucky, an absolute killer if you did something which caused a material from another planet to be deleted, and you don’t have the system wide logistics set up to replace it for you without taking a whole additional round trip to another planet for the sake of something small. In any case it can result in a not so insignificant sum of lost materials and time. On the up side you’ll get real paranoid about checking your inventory. For the right definition of ‘up side’ that is.
9) To further compound on item 8), the game does not auto stack items in your inventory, and items which are taken for hand crafting (using the replicator) are taken from left to right, which is the same way they are added to your inventory and thus results in multiple partial stacks clogging up your inventory slots. As an example, say you take a stack and a half of iron plates, it takes up two precious inventory slots, the first slot is full, the second half full. You then craft some items, consuming half a stack. The first stack will be partially depleted, you now have two stacks of iron plates though they could fit in one slot. Individually this isn’t much difference, but when you have a dozen different materials in your inventory it is a simple matter to wind up in a situation where a quarter of your inventory is used up when it shouldn’t be. The player has to manually hit the autosort button in their inventory or otherwise deal with the issue, constantly. Every single time I’ve lost something important to the issue in 8), it could have been prevented if my inventory wasn’t swarming with partial stacks of the same materials.
Conclusion)
If you can forgive all of this, give it a try. Otherwise I would say maybe put it on the backburner until this potential diamond in the rough has had the chance to see some more polish. If you want to read about good things, go take a look at the other 95% of reviews here, as I really don’t feel the need to rehash what that supermajority is saying. And I won’t disagree that Dyson Sphere Program deserves a lot of good reviews, even if I think that 95% seems a bit high for its current state. As updates come out I’ll update this review after being able to experience the update.
Update, 27 January 2021-
Added the section numbers to make updating and keeping track of the update easier.
Added 8) and 9), updated 4) slightly to clarify that buildings/conveyors can’t be upgraded in place.
Reminded myself that I am literate. (I was calling it Dyson Sphere Project in the Conclusion. Whoops.)
Overall Steam Players Reviews:
Is It Worth To Buy?
Our answer is YES! We play the game for few days, and we really enjoy it, The game is similar to Factorio and Avorion, if you love games like Factorio style then you gonna love this game too!
With a huge amount of Positive Reviews most players who buy it have a good opinion about it!
Dyson Sphere Program was Rank Top 10 in the first few days on Steam release and now is Rank 25 with 40,000 Players Online! (By Date 7 Feb, 2021)
We have a huge amount of guides for this game and if you want to try it out, check out:
PS: When we test the game, time passes too fast … so expect confusion and don’t be scared when you play the game 🙂
Hope this post helped you decide if is Worth to Buy Dyson Sphere Program, if you believe we should add more information about this, please let us know in the comments 🙂
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