Jess' Cool Forum

does anyone like DSP?

if you haven't heard of it, it's a lot like Factorio or Satisfactory, where you build a Very Large Machine to do Something. in this case, Something is "encase the sun in a dyson sphere to power all the RBG lights in your gaming computer"

you get to build a factory that spans several planets and shoots material for the dyson sphere into orbit with railguns.

and it has Science Cubes

look upon the majesty of the glowing blue cubes (and some red ones)

they just released a big update today that adds some kind of enemy akin to factorio's biters: something mildly annoying that requires you to build defenses. haven't tried that yet but it sounds cool. the trailer suggests you might be able to fight them In Space, which automatically makes it 20% cooler.

Haven't seen it before, looks rad and I now have a sudden urge to consume luminous blue cubes. And you says it spans several planets? Feels like that could make things both easier and harder to organize x3

yeah! at first, you have to fly your little robot fella to the other planets and bring titanium (IIRC?) back home, like some kind of pizza delivery service. eventually you can build spaceports and have other robots do it for you!

when you've got a bunch of interplanetary deliveries going, it's quite delightful to see all your Space Trucking happening on the Interstate of Space.

Man I can imagine, reminds me of an early build of Autonauts I played some time ago. You start off with basically nothing, collecting sticks and stones to make tools to collect resources faster etc. The twist is that from a pretty early stage you have the ability to create robots, so you program those to do whatever you need until you've automated the whole production chain. I'm slowly realizing as I write this that many management games are about automation but I haven't really seen any that puts the focus on programming like Autonauts does...

lmao I looked up autonauts and it turns out I already own it. Maybe I should check it out sometime. I think the closest I've come to this kind of thing is FFXII's Gambit system

I've played a little bit (about 800 hours) of Factorio, and I've had DSP in my library for some time now; I really ought to dive into it. It's going to be a while before Factorio's space expansion is out anyway!

Autonauts is neat; I played the first ten hours or so and had things going - I don't remember why I fell off (probably just got distracted, TBH), but that one's neat in that the game doesn't give you specialized machines for everything. You sort of end up making the specializations yourself.

one of my friends saw something bananas on a stream, and it works. very well.

the thing on the bottom is a sorter. 4 places for belts to go in or out, to balance items. in the picture it's just one in and one out.

this isn't documented in its tooltip, but you can put a box on top of it! and it loads it or unloads it as needed, like a buffer.

usually i build a box with a bunch of arms to input/output things. this saves lots of arms and electricity.

i think it's documented on an upgrade to increase how many boxes you can put on top? but that never made sense to me since I didn't know you could do this at all.