Game:

Dyson Sphere Program (2021)

Duration: 9:25

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4

Voiced.

I have been slowly putting together planetary blocks ever since TDA showed them. They were very useful in our Excursions playthrough, where we went off-planet ASAP so that we didn't have to deal with all the water on our jumpstart planet. (Five achievements that playthrough, two of them speedrun.)

Planetary blocks are more complex than the simpler Zen blueprints that we were using up to that point. (Nilaus-style left-to-right, limiting to only 1-2 sectors or 5/10 big squares.) The original idea was efficiency through laziness and letting time run it's course rather than cramming as much production into a single blueprint as possible. This approach worked well - daisy-chaining the blueprints together made it so that the next build got what it needed and wasn't starved for resources.

The whole thing fell down when we moved into meta-blueprint builds: multiple blueprints designed to provide everything needed for a final product. The fail-point was when we needed to paste down something like 20-odd smelting blueprints, because we couldn't daisy-chain them all to run into the next builds which required their resources:

1/ drone balancing issues (draining one PLS/ILS dry when there were another 8-10 available with full buffers)

2/ load-balancing failures on belt outputs, the PLS/ILS wasn't designed for it (the splitter works well because of specific design)

Now that the Piler Sorter has been added, everything done so far has to be revisited. Again. It's nice to have building outputs which will be automatically stacked when the belts get full: it makes builds much easier without the automatic pilers. The builds will work well in the endgame, when using the high-tier / Dark Fog buildings.

This video shows a planetary block which smelts: copper, iron, and steel. Even with the base arc smelters it's nice to have sorters which can stack onto a Mk III belt. It's a nice quality of life feature, where upgrading the buildings doesn't require re-belting each build, adding automatic pilers, or altering the blueprint substantially because now we're trying to shove 60 items onto a belt that can only handle 30 without stacking.

For us: simpler upgrading is better, more relaxed and zenlike. Even though the builds themselves are not that simple, plus requiring stupid amounts of everything to stamp them down.

Towards the end of the video it occurred to me that we should add more buffers. Box-on-a-splitter style of buffers - and it doesn't matter if they come out of the box only single-stacked, it's better than nothing when there's gaps on the belt. The splitters themselves will happily pass through full stacks of cargo, so we're good there.

Given that a single Mk I Storage adds 3k of storage (PLS is 5k/10k, ILS is 10k/20k). Per input belt, stack 'em to the sky if we want. Having deep reserves sometimes makes sense. Any storage box with pile sorters, even better - the output will always be max-stacked. No box-on-a-splitter required.

Pity that the storage tanks don't stack their output at all. We might have to combine three separate outputs onto one belt, which is doable if we feel the need.

Finally, a nice QoL enhancement present from the developers. If we copy the full path-name of an existing blueprint to a new one, it will copy the title/comments/icons as well.

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