Dyson Ball Project Review: Building the Sky with the Goal of Picking the Sun

Hello, welcome to the real world. The physics here is different from the world you are familiar with, but I believe you will soon get used to it.

Note: The review version is a preemptive experience version, which includes promised content such as combat systems and space stations that have not yet been implemented. The following content is only for the preemptive experience at the time of writing, versions 0.6.15.5706 and earlier& nbsp; 

Me, Icarus

I, Icarus, a lightweight industrial mech, descended from the sky onto a brand new planet waiting to be developed.

  Hello, World& nbsp;

&Nbsp; In order to explore more star regions to obtain energy supply for the brain, you need to build infrastructure in this unexplored new world and build Dyson spheres to transmit energy back to our home. Do you see the copper mine in front of you? Can you go mining and see those trees? You can chop them down and turn them into wood. Alright, now go build the Dyson sphere that wraps around the entire star!

The assistant robot disappeared after saying this.

  The beautiful vision in the starting interface& nbsp;

If you are a player who has not played factory games in depth, facing the lack of mandatory teaching guidance in the Dyson Ball Project, it is likely that you will also become like me with a bewildered face and stumble to start the great cause of building Dyson Balls.

  The sun shines in the sky, and the flowers smile at me& nbsp;

The first challenge I encountered was that I ran out of battery.

Yes, Icarus is a robot that doesn't need to eat or drink water. But it needs to be charged. Whether it's walking, making things, collecting materials, or conducting research, it consumes electricity. At the beginning of the game, you will be given five hydrogen fuel cells, but it does not tell you how to charge them again next. So, with great ambition, I chopped down a few trees, picked up a few stones, and then froze in place.

  What's this? Can it be burned& nbsp; 

It has been proven that any material that can be burned, whether it is wood, leaves, coal, graphite, or even diamond and graphene, can all be put into the combustion chamber as energy. In the initial difficult days, this high-tech robot from Kardashov's 2.5 level civilization could only rely on wood and leaves as fuel to move forward. Fortunately, Icarus is not picky eaters and does not have the negative feeling of burning wood today. At least in the early stages, there is no need to worry about survival pressure.

Then let's continue building!

  After unlocking the wireless transmission tower, you can also directly charge it using the planetary grid& nbsp;

Rube Goldberg machine

After all, this is not an action game. Icarus on the screen is mainly responsible for building factories, building massive Dyson balls, and obtaining energy for the main brain.

As the technology tree was unlocked one after another, it was as if I had received a new toy, and I happily set up the new buildings. Unlocked metallurgical table? Great, connect the iron ore to melt the iron plate. Unlocked manufacturing table? Not bad, then I'll leave the manufacturing of the coils and gears to you. Because the conveyor belt can move up and down freely, pulling wherever it is lacking, soon a barbaric and illegal building complex was slowly established.

  Believe me, I am an engineer& nbsp;

Does mismatched production rates lead to low efficiency? Can't supply another material when one material accumulates? no problem! Add more water to the noodles. With this mindset in mind, the production chain I have built on my home planet is becoming increasingly bizarre, with conveyor belts fighting each other and sorters crossing boundaries at will. To clarify the origin and development of each product, one needs to follow the conveyor belt and travel throughout the entire planet.

The more advanced the technology is in the later stage, the more dependent it is on the materials unlocked in the earlier stage, and the production process becomes longer and longer. However, I have almost no room for expansion, and can only insert a thread to the left and a factory to the right according to every opportunity. Some materials even have to be flipped over half a planet before being processed. Then, because I often put various types of materials on a conveyor belt, it also caused serious chaos, with machines lacking materials that could not start work or factories that could only stop due to product accumulation.

  Create Stars& nbsp;

However, even with such chaotic production, when the game time reaches 15 hours, I can still start launching solar sails into space, forming a magnificent Dyson Cloud.

I mean, usually in factory games, you just look at the ground, right? The manufacturing platform and chemical plant need to be placed on the ground. What about the conveyor belt? Most of the time, they are also on the ground, mining is on the ground, and oil wells that suddenly produce crude oil are also on the ground.

But ah, this is a game of building Dyson balls.

After building the solar sail launcher, I left a few there and didn't pay much attention. Instead, I was busy with other things.

But when you need to flip back and forth between different planets. The sun sail production line that was set up unintentionally before has gradually formed the Daisen Cloud now.

The light dots composed of solar sails rise one after another on the horizon. Countless scattered solar sails surround the dazzling star, and every second, blue light spots emitted by electromagnetic catapults can be seen shooting straight into the sky, becoming another sparkling spot. After working hard for so long, I have finally become the star of the universe.

God in Calculation

Looking at it this way, can I clear the level quickly? Watching the launch of Dyson Cloud start in 15 hours, and the technology tree seems to have reached half of its archive, I thought happily. Then, reality hit me hard in the face.

With the continuous extension of the production chain and the emergence of multi product production facilities, the initially disorderly and disorderly construction of the production chain will soon become overwhelmed, and the uneven matching of various material production capacities will be gradually amplified. The system will continue to remind me that the research speed is too slow, but I am struggling to find a way to continue increasing production capacity in illegal building clusters. At this point, I was forced by the system to start researching how to correctly carry out large-scale production.

  The production chain built blindly due to youth is gradually falling behind the development needs in the mid-term and beyond& nbsp;

Dyson Ball Plan is a game that focuses on designing industrial production chains as one of its core gameplay elements. Although it may not seem to have mandatory teaching guidance, players will have to start learning how to plan production, design assembly lines, and gradually master the characteristics of various facilities in the game, in order to optimize the production chain.

From the perspective of gameplay design, the Dyson Ball Project has excellent step-by-step guidance design. In order to ultimately pass the game, players need to create five matrices: blue, red, yellow, purple, and green, and then use the antimatter produced by the Dyson Ball to create a white matrix to pass.

Under this purpose, players need to produce various colored blocks one by one. The blue electromagnetic matrix is the simplest, requiring only magnetic coils and circuit boards. Players will build automated mining and processing facilities for copper and iron ore in order to manufacture it. The red energy matrix requires high-energy graphite and hydrogen, and players need to start processing coal mines and refining crude oil.

Crude oil has two products, and here players can first encounter the gameplay of balancing the two products. And when it comes to the yellow structure matrix, players will have to leave the planet they first set foot on and search for titanium ore on other planets to obtain the material for creating the structure matrix: titanium crystal. In addition, the excess refined oil produced during the manufacturing of the energy matrix can also be used to produce another material for titanium crystals: organic crystals.

  Approximately one-fifth of the production chain that produces the gravitational matrix& nbsp;

As the game progresses step by step, players will learn to plan production capacity more accurately. The main brain needs you to upload the universe matrix to solve the ultimate puzzles about the universe, life, and everything.

So you plan to produce 42 cosmic matrices per minute, so you need 10.5 research stations for producing cosmic matrices, 8.4 research stations for producing gravitational matrices, 7 research stations for producing information matrices, 5.6 research stations for producing structural matrices, 4.2 research stations for producing energy matrices, 2.1 research stations for producing electromagnetic matrices, and further 1.1 furnaces for producing magnets, 16.8 crude oil refineries for processing crude oil into refined oil and hydrogen

When you need to produce a later stage product, you need to synchronously calculate and plan a long chain of production in the front, in order to build a large-scale and orderly galaxy industrial cluster.

  Large scale electromagnetic gun arrays after mass production& nbsp;

During the continuous gameplay, players can also gradually gain the means to build more efficient production lines with the unlocking of technology. Initially, due to the maximum capacity of the conveyor belt, players could only choose to process various products nearby the mineral resources, and the assembly line also needed to be deployed close to each other. However, because the conveyor belt can be easily stacked up and down, players can more freely design the product transmission path.

After unlocking the function of leveling the ground, the construction of production lines no longer needs to be restricted by the sea areas of the initial planet. After unlocking the logistics tower, players can build this intelligent logistics transfer facility to make production more modular without being troubled by complex logistics routes. The production rates of various products are also well coordinated, and the corresponding proportional relationships are almost integer multiples. As long as calculations are carried out correctly, it is rare to encounter situations where the production chain is not properly coordinated and production efficiency is low.

However, if you are exploring and playing step by step, in the early stages, you plan like me in a chaotic manner, and in the later stages, if you want to make changes, it will be extremely painful: you don't know what the previously laid down production chain in front of you is related to the production of something, nor do you know where the root cause of the manufacturing station that is currently shut down lies. If you want to dismantle it all at once, and the current version also does not have a box selection and deletion function, the complex conveyor belt reel twisting and twisting is a nightmare to correctly dismantle a certain conveyor belt, let alone completely transform your old industrial area.

Players who gradually understand the gameplay during the game often start to go crazy at this point, either restarting or finding another planet to plan for.

  A neat and uniform post production line& nbsp;

In addition, the current version of the Dyson Ball Plan also has numerical issues. The most difficult part for players to experience is the balance of hydrogen production capacity. Perhaps for the sake of challenging players, the hydrogen production capacity in the game is the most headache inducing.

At the beginning of producing the energy matrix, hydrogen is often severely insufficient, and players need to use X-ray cracking to produce more hydrogen. When it comes to the production structure matrix and information matrix, due to the need to consume an extremely large amount of refined oil, producing this material will also produce hydrogen as a byproduct. Many players will encounter an embarrassing situation where hydrogen reserves are depleted at this stage, leading to a halt in refined oil production and subsequent production interruptions.

When it comes to producing the gravitational matrix, the Kasimir crystal consumes a huge amount of hydrogen, and strange substances consume a large amount of heavy hydrogen converted from hydrogen. Hydrogen production capacity will be severely insufficient again. If hydrogen production still relies on crude oil at this time, it will lead to an excess of refined oil and stop hydrogen production. Players can only ensure the balance of hydrogen production capacity by mining gas giants.

However, the priority of interstellar logistics transportation has not yet been implemented. If gas giants extract too much hydrogen, it may once again lead to the accumulation of hydrogen produced on the planet, causing all subsequent products associated with refined oil to shut down. In the later stages of the game, if it is suddenly discovered that a production chain has stopped working, the most likely scenario is not the completion of mineral extraction, but the overproduction of hydrogen.

  Even relatively small production lines can produce too much excess hydrogen& nbsp;

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