But fear not! Below I’ve written up a foolproof Dyson Sphere Program guide that covers everything you should be doing in your first hour or so. Stick with this template and you’ll be off to a roaring start! On this page:
Dyson Sphere Program guide: your first hour First steps: Initial techs Mining Machines and your first Iron belt Belts of Copper and Magnets Blue Science production Next Steps
Dyson Sphere Program guide: your first hour
Dyson Sphere Program is a pretty complex game, but after following this guide you’ll have firm footing for everything that comes next. Bear in mind that you don’t have to do everything exactly as I did it, nor keep up with me fully. I had the benefit of a good starting seed (41009301 if you wanted to try it for yourself), and a fair bit of practice. The main point is to give you an idea of some starting goals, and an approximate timeline for accomplishing each one. Oh, by the way: the above video contains unedited footage of my first 45 minutes in a new game of Dyson Sphere Program, where I follow the below guide more or less to the letter. It’s not perfect by any means, but it should give you a good idea of everything I’m going to talk about below. I’ll leave it here for all you more visual learners out there. Now, on with the guide!
First steps: Initial techs
Deconstruct the landing capsule. Queue up first five techs. Place a Mining Machine on Iron Ore and connect with a Wind Turbine. Fabricate components for your first techs. Mine copper, coal, stone, and iron until first techs are complete.
After landing, the absolute first thing you must do in Dyson Sphere Program is right-click your landing capsule to deconstruct it. While it’s deconstructing, hit “T” to open up your tech tree, then queue up the following techs in this order: These are the big five starting techs to unlock, and you can unlock them just by crafting a few items in your fabricator. But you’ll need resources. (If you’re a bit unsure about everything related to research and unlocking new techs, check out our Dyson Sphere Program research and Matrix Labs guide!) The moment the landing capsule is deconstructed, go into your Fabricator (“F”) and construct 10 Magnetic Coils (each click creates 2, so click 5 times). The coils you craft will automatically be used to research the starting technology. It only takes a few seconds, but in the meantime bring up your Fuel Chamber by hitting “C”, and pop those 5 Hydrogen Fuel Rods from your inventory into your Fuel Chamber, to keep your mech powered for a while. Once the first tech is unlocked, you’ll be gifted a Mining Machine. Place it on the nearest patch of Iron Ore, trying to cover exactly 6 ore nodes with its cone of reach. If you’re having trouble, hold “Shift” to ignore grid snapping and finely control the building’s rotation. Place a Tesla Tower next to the Mining Machine, and a Wind Turbine a little further away (but still connected to the Tesla Tower) to power it. If you’ve read our Dyson Sphere Program tips you’ll know not to make things too cramped and compact! You can now periodically return to the Miner and pick up a stack of iron ore ready to turn into useful stuff in your Fabricator. Your next step is to craft all the components needed for the remaining four techs. So, in this order, you should craft:
5 pairs of Circuits 5 pairs of Magnetic Coils 5 pairs of Circuits 10 Gears 5 pairs of Circuits 10 Gears 5 pairs of Circuits 5 pairs of Magnetic Coils
You could of course craft all of the same type in one go, but the above order means you’ll unlock the techs faster! Keep mining Copper and Stone, and drawing from your Iron Mining Machine until you have enough to craft all this. If you need more fuel, grab some coal or wood and place it in your Fuel Chamber. If you have time to kill, just keep mining ore or chopping wood until things happen.
Mining Machines and your first Iron belt
Have 1 Mining Machine each on Copper and Stone, and 2 each on Iron and Coal. Put together your first full belt of Iron Ingots. Make a temporary Gear automation station.
Once you have enough ore of all kinds, queue up 5 Mining Machines, 8 Turbines, and enough Tesla Towers to connect your ore patches together. You’ll want one Mining Machine each on Copper and Stone, and two each on Iron and Coal. This way you don’t have to spend all your time manually mining ever again. From now on, you’ll have to stay on top of your energy levels. Make sure you keep building Wind Turbines to power everything. Click a Tesla Tower to see how your power grid is doing. If your energy satisfaction drops below 100% then Miners and Smelters will slow down. Place your second Iron Mining Machine so that it covers 6 ore nodes, like the first Miner. 6 nodes means it’ll mine at a rate of 3 per second, so two of them will fill up a Conveyor Belt (because a belt transports 6 items per second). Next step is to construct enough Smelters (6) and Sorters (12) to make a Smelting station that can output a whole belt’s worth of Iron Ingots. Here’s what you’re looking to create: Connect the two Mining Machines and feed the iron ore into the central belt. The Smelters will pick up the ore, smelt it, and deposit the iron ingots onto the outside belts where they connect at the end to make a full belt of ingots. This done, put down a couple of Assemblers to draw from your new iron ingot belt, set them to create Gears, and have them deposit their Gears into a Storage building for the time being. It’ll make life easier going forward, because Gears are used to build a lot of things you’ll need.
Belts of Copper and Magnets
Get a full belt of Copper Ingots running. Get a full belt of Magnets running.
This next section is simple, because all you’re going to do is repeat what you did for iron, but for copper. It’s exactly the same: 2 Mining Machines covering 6 nodes each, feeding into a little group of Smelters. Remember to build another 8 or so Turbines to keep power levels happy. That done, find another Iron Ore patch, and get that set up too - but this time, you’re not smelting Iron Ingots, you’re smelting Magnets. Magnets take 1.5s instead of 1s to smelt, so you’ll need 9 Smelters instead of 6 to make a full belt, and about 11 Turbines to keep it all powered. But otherwise, it’s exactly the same process, just with 3 extra Smelters tacked onto the end.
Blue Science production
Automate production of Magnetic Coils and Circuits. Create a Research Factory (18 Labs) and start researching again.
Here’s where things really start to happen. You’ve got a full belt of iron, copper, and magnets, which means you can start to automate production of Magnetic Coils and Circuits - the two ingredients needed to start producing the blue matrix cubes you’ll need to continue unlocking new techs. First thing to do is queue up a whopping 18 Matrix Labs in your Fabricator. This’ll take a while, so make this the first thing you do. Now find a nearby area with some space around it, and feed your three full belts of resources in that direction. Craft 8 Assemblers and place them in two columns of 4, with a gap in-between. This is where your copper belt will go, because both Magnetic Coils and Circuits need copper. Now place belts on the outside as well, as seen above. The belt next to the Coils is where your Magnets will go. The other belt is where your Iron Ingots will go. Matrix cubes are created inside Matrix Labs, and we’re planning on having 9 Labs producing these blue cubes. Why 9? Because I like the ratios involved. 9 Labs means you need exactly 2 Assemblers each on Coils and Circuits. So why did we build 4 each? Because the remaining Assemblers are going to just store their items in Storage boxes so that we can take from them whenever we like. So, for the initial two Assemblers in each column, place a Storage Box across from the outside belt, and then hook everything up with Sorters. Because the Assembler-to-Storage sorters are stretching across 2 tiles, you’ll want to replace these sorters with the faster Mk2 sorters when you can, because otherwise it’ll bottleneck your research. But for now, normal sorters are fine. For the other four Assemblers, have them feed their products into new outer belts (use two sorters for each Assembler, to maintain throughput). Once your Matrix Labs are completed, place a row of 3 somewhere nearby. Stack 2 more Matrix Labs atop each of these first Labs (yes, Labs can stack vertically. You really ought to read that Dyson Sphere Program tips page). Feed the Coil belt and the Circuit belt beside these Labs, both on the same side. Use sorters to feed them into the bottom layer of Labs. Again, use two sorters per Lab for the outer belt, to make up for the speed lost due to the longer travel distance. Set these Labs to produce blue matrix cubes, and they should start churning away (and drawing massively from your power grid, which you’ll need to fix in a moment). Now go to the other side of the Labs and construct another row of 3 Labs running parallel to the first Labs. Leave a gap, just to make it easier for you to reach in and directly connect the Labs with sorters. Hook them up, then stack the remaining Labs up to the top of your current height limit of 3. Make sure everything is powered by Tesla Towers. Now set the new stacks of Labs to research mode, and queue up your next techs to unlock! I’d suggest you start with the various techs in the Upgrade tab, because your poor old Mech needs a bit of love after all this work.
Next steps
Alright, that’s where I finish the video, even though it wasn’t a full hour. I’m guessing it’ll take a lot of players around an hour, if not more, but no one’s really counting in Dyson Sphere Program so it doesn’t matter. Just go at whatever pace you like, as long as you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. As for next steps, here’s what I’d recommend:
Meet your energy needs (I’d recommend unlocking coal power plants to help with this, or it’ll take an awful lot of Wind Turbines!). Unlock all techs that only require blue cubes. Get a basic Steel smelting station up and running on a new iron ore patch. Take steps towards producing red cubes with some basic oil refining.
If you want some good clear instructions on how to do that last step, then the best place would be to head to our Dyson Sphere Program Hydrogen and Oil guide. But for everything else, I’ll leave it up to you to solve each problem how you like. That’s the fun of these games, after all. If you’re looking for some more information on the future of Dyson Sphere Program, you may wish to look at our guide on the prospect of multiplayer.
