YMMV / Dyson Sphere Program

• Annoying Video Game Helper: In earlier versions, The Advisor; his "help" resets every time a savegame is loaded, meaning he kept speaking the basics over and over again, and at the time there was no way to turn it off. Thankfully has been updated so you can adjust tips and remove them completely.
• Difficulty Spike: Structure Matrixes have a much more complex setup compared to the earlier Electromagnetic and Energy Matrixes. While Diamonds on their own aren't too bad (just requiring coal to be refined twice), Titanium Ingots require the player to get off world, as the starting planet does not have any titanium deposits^note Short of rare drops from manually mining stone and/or Dark Fog drops, but even then this won't be a consistent source of such, while Organic Crystals require a long, complex chain with oil ^note Crude Oil must be turned into Refined Oil, Refined Oil must be combined with Energetic Graphite, to be turned into Plastic, Plastic must be mixed with Refined Oil and Water to finally get Organic Crystals. Combine Organic Crystals with Titanium Ingots to finally get Titanium Crystals, add in Diamonds and you can finally get Structure Matrixes., which can take up ALOT of real estate. If you don't have logistics stations to help you, it's gonna be a huge step up in complexity until you can travel to other star systems and directly mine rare Organic Crystal veins.
• Fan Nickname: The matrices are often referred to as "Jello Cubes" because of their bright colors and shape.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Filling in lakes and oceans requires piles of soil, a resource that's acquired only through leveling hills and mountains and/or Dark Fog attacks. In a game with the latter, you gain a lot through various attacks and it soon ceases to be much of a concern, but on games with them disabled you're left with merely the former option. During such, you'll quickly find that filling in foundation typically consumes much more soil pile than the leveling process yields ^note This depends upon the planet: mainly-flat planets (including the starter one) yields dozens, hundreds at best, per leveled tile, whereas deep snow-covered and mountainous planets will easily yield thousands per leveled tile. Also, applying Proliferator to Foundation will raise the amount of soil pile gained when flattening/lower the amount lost when filling in. On planets where it's mostly water, players will need a lot of the stuff if they want to create any decent-sized room for their infrastructure.
  • Flight mechanics when flying through outer space. Changing direction consumes your mecha's energy reserves, and when you're out of energy, you cannot turn. This can a major issue if you overshot your destination planet and need to turn towards it, assuming you didn't do so while in-flight. Even with the best upgrades and the best fuel, energy charges slowly, so losing the ability to turn becomes annoying to first time players familiarizing themselves with the spaceflight mechanics.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: With the addition of achievements, this is now possible. Several involve researching "Game Completed" without using a certain aspect until then: one achievement requires the player to not fire any solar sails into orbit, another one requires not using a single piece of Foundation, and another requires you to not to use rare mineral veins period (though non-vein sources of such are acceptable).
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The start of the game sees the player dropped on a new world without the technology to do much of anything. Additionally, the mech moves at a snail's pace and recharging energy reserves usually means taking time out for actual progress to do some deforestation. The pace picks up a bit after establishing some automated labs and the production lines to keep them fed, which starts unlocking more interesting supply chains and very useful upgrades.
  • Metadata can help avert this, as completing Dyson Sphere and completing the tech tree allows player to collect Metadata that can be used to unlock technologies on new runs, allowing the player to access technologies that would unlock much later normally.
• That One Achievement: A couple of the achievements can be extremely annoying, or downright brutal in difficulty.
  • Nice Surprise 5: Collect 10 carbon nanotubes from plants. Seems easy, but the odds of you getting carbon nanotubes is extremely low. You can spend upwards of forty five minutes just harvesting random trees till the achievement finally pops.
  • Determination: Place eighty thousand foundations on a waterworld. This can easily cost you well over ten million soil pile, and way more if you don't proliferate your foundations. You'll need to level whole mountains on other planets, or farm Dark Fog bases for hours, just to get the required soil pile.
  • CentreBrain Needs More Energy III: Have a Dyson sphere output 1 terawatt of energy. Pick the brightest O class star in your cluster, and prepare to sink billions of raw resources and plenty of hours building the largest shell possible, which is required to generate such an amount of energy. The sheer amount of time and resources required may test your patience.
  • I Saw This In A Movie Once: Cover an entire planet in foundation. You'll need to pay VERY close attention, as missing even a single tile means combing over the entire planet again and again as you try to find that last little uncovered piece of land. Even picking a contrasting foundation color does little to help find any small missing patches, though fortunately you can increase the grid size of how much foundation you lay at once to speed things up/make it easier.
  • Mission Impossible: Complete the game within 10 hours on 1x (or less) resource difficulty. Similar to the "There Is No Spoon" achievement in Factorio, you have to beat the game within a time limit. You're given 10 hours to do so, but with two major restrictions: you must pick 1x resources or less and you cannot use metadata, so you can't shortcut your way to victory. To get a sense of scale, first time playthroughs take anywhere between 50-70 hours. Getting this achievement requires changing your playstyle completely: you need to disregard setting up huge production lines and busses in favor of small, temporary compartmentalized modular setups, and skip using a Dyson sphere and just use a Dyson swarm. There are several seeds online suggested for getting this achievement.

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