Dark Fog FARMING! Is it Worth the Trouble? | 05 | Dyson Sphere Program | Lets Play

[@Nilaus]

PC crashed during recording so I had to redo it, hence the delay and the low res if you are watching immediately upon release.

[@DAMDARAMDAMDAAAAAMM]

My PC is now 8 years old - still keeping up with the games I play, but I'm pretty sure he wont love this Update 😅

[@rekrn12345]

You can probably do a lava planet farm with pure laser turrets and skip the ammo. Geos should provide enough power

[@Erkle64]

I'm considering doing that on a lava planet in a different system for late game farming the unique drops.

[@08047870]

good one

[@jetah50]

my only issue with that is the lava doesn't have enough coal to build missile set

[@rekrn12345]

@@jetah50 What do you need missile turrets for if you use lasers?

[@jetah50]

@@rekrn12345 i dont have lasers yet.

[@thr3308]

I could see using this as an alternate source for titanium and silicon before you have interplanetary logistics available

[@ThePhilNews]

That's exactly what I've been using it for. Unfortunately the output is nowhere near enough for yellow Matrices, even at lvl.9 Dark Fog base. But It's been great for early logistics and processors and Silicone is definitely more output than you can get through mining stone.

[@rantalmore]

Still tho seems easier to just hand-move it tbh

[@SmokeJam]

Only if your starter planet has copper for ages. Otherwise the time and resource effort is simply not worth it. They level extremly slow if you just attack one base and if you farm more, the noise is literally everywhere and you can watch your copper drain on the planet overview^^

[@kingcupcakes5171]

@@SmokeJam The copper drain is negligible. I tried this out and I only needed one assembler making ammo on a 500% xp growth, rampant, 150% initial growth save until I was able to build laser turrets. My starter planet is already utilizing PLS for malls and production and I haven't even left the planet.

[@SmokeJam]

@@kingcupcakes5171 hm Im fucking around a lot, so maybe thats why my copper drain is noticeable^^ I didnt have a lot on my starter planet and started to run low after like 10h or so

[@matteocdt5214]

i mean, you could toss the energy shards into combustion generators while using laser turrets to scavenge for said shards, potentially making the farming process free of charge. also, it could serve as a way to obtain titanium and silicon without having to visit a second planet

[@HelicopterShark]

Yup up to purple science and haven't had to leave the planet yet. (I did jump off to the gas planet cus it's fire ice so easier than the ground recipe but did it mostly by hand and now just have 1 orbital miner)

[@kerbodynamicx472]

High level Dark Fog even gives Deuteron fuel rods (Lv 21) and Antimatter fuel rods (lv 24), making a self-sustaining laser base possible

[@MrNeutral01]

I would take the 3rd planet and sensor tower the entire thing, so only a single FOG base exists. Import ammo and missiles so the entire planet can be used solely for farming. This provides the supplies but keeps you from having to listen to the noise, since it'll be on a planet you rarely go to.

[@tricorius9653]

My plan is to go back to drained worlds and set up dark fog farms on them. I want to build out a sorting system, then you can shunt everything into whatever tech level storage and distribution you have. Ultimately they would be shipping out resources via ILS to other planets as the dark fog spawn loot piles up. Now, all your exhausted planets are producing intermediates agin.

[@mediandirt]

Filtering using splitters leads to overflow backing up your belt. Instead set 9 individual types of filters on battlefield base and then set filters on sorters coming out. You could potentially filter every single type of dark fog drop coming out of BAB by stacking large storage depots on top of it and using those extra 12 slots + sorters with filters to belt every item out. This will also empty the BAB more quickly allowing it to pick everything up. This sort of strategy could be modular. Early game it could lead to storag boxes. Then next storage boxes with hats. Then next it could go to pls and finally to ILS. Potentially setting up dozens of DF farms at every relay using renewable energy + laser turrets to farm later. Missiles to deal with space attacks. You could travel to every star dropping farm bases.

[@conallwetzker1134]

It's neat that you can gather a bit of Titanium this way. I'd say the most useful item Dark Fog drops is the soil piles, it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to get 200k soil if you run out while laying out a production line.

[@Deathwish026]

ok i need to see a speed runner catagory using only materials gained from the dark fog.. that would be fun as hell to watch.

[@aimozg]

To avoid clogging you could lock BAB inventory slots to specific item types and retrieve items through filter inserters. It'd be 12 item types per BAB, for more you can just add another one BAB with different filters nearby. And speaking of item-locked inventory slots, what's your opinion of "chest bus" design that is now possible? (a sequence of chests with filtered slots, transfer items with filter inserters, add verticality to transfer more item types). I've heard that it allows for much more compact mall designs.

[@liesdamnlies3372]

Can you explain a bit more? I don’t understand what exactly you mean.

[@mediandirt]

You can stock large depots ontop of BAB and use one to filter every single item through one BAB

[@aimozg]

@@liesdamnlies3372explain which part?

[@trentonhewitt4773]

Once you go to a new solar system there are planets that you might visit once to set up miners and that's it, you could put it there for the noise problem, and if you let a lot of fogger bases land you can get a lot of geothermal power to power laser turrets. Farm it before your base becomes so big that processing power matters.

[@roymain36]

Can you use energy shards as fuel for the combustion generators? If so, it might be economical to still collect them and turn them into energy to replace some of the guns/missiles with laser turrets to lower the resource drain.

[@MirageGSM]

Are laser turrets the plasma turrets? Those are pretty far down the tech tree... But certainly might be a good early game source of energy if those shards can be used by power generators - And can burn plant matter and wood just for the heck of it.

[@liesdamnlies3372]

@@MirageGSMNo they’re just lasers, and come before the plasma turrets (which only fire at space targets). Don’t think they use ammo and if memory serves they’re just red and blue science. Might be wrong there, but at most it takes yellow.

[@roymain36]

@@liesdamnlies3372 Seems like its just red science since Nilaus has them on his hotbar in this video.

[@MirageGSM]

@@liesdamnlies3372 Ah, I found them. They are under "Planetary Defense System" along with the shield generator. 600 Blue/red.

[@joelv4495]

Energy shards are a fuel source, but they get used up pretty quickly in a thermal generator. Just a bit more energy than coal.

[@ThomasG1971]

I could see MAYBE doing this later in another system specifically set up for it... at least to get the Dark Fog Materials... if that is the only way to get the better machines that is

[@Zro_Daye]

Looks like the only way to get the cores and stuff to build T4 smelters/assemblers/etc is by farming the high end dark fog enemies. Also that starter hub BP is goat!

[@kerbodynamicx472]

I managed to set foot on a black hole planet infested with Dark fog, and farmed them to the point that I mass-produced thousands of these high-end buildings. Dyson Sphere Program is never the same again, and I can instantly double or even triple the output of everything just by replacing them with Dark Fog Tech. CentreBrain will not be happy about this

[@Elucidus4]

My planet nearest the sun is a tidal locked planet so I did this there for a while with only lasers, means there is no ammo requirement, and it was easy to do power, also meant no noise. I ended up stopping it as the dark fog space hive was leveling up quite a bit and I wasn't sure what to expect or how much it would take to fend them off. After killing off all of the planetary hives there, I e3nded up with something like 10-15 holes, which I also turned into lava generators, surrounded by a base and three laser turrets, and left the last two bases (as they kept respawning anyway). So I can always turn things back on as needed by deleted one or two of those generators. The higher level resources (especially the titanium and silicon) helped out a lot since i didn't have a good factory or distribution system when I started it.

[@eozineable]

I remodeled your MAKE ANYTHING blueprint to sort the loot and make stuff, works pretty well around lvl9 base, and as no mobs actually get through, the base takes a while to gain xp so it will hopefully work for a while, it can make almost any building you need to mass produce

[@MDHilgersom]

Thank you for looking into these things mechanics, I'm always interested in how testing with new updates turns out and farming this way could add a different layer to the game. For example: if it's viable to farm for specific resources, you could use a planet in a star system where you produce, let's say particle containers, to farm additional motors. Don't know how safe it is in the long term, suddenly running out of ammo with a high lvl farm seems dangerous, but I'll gladly watch you work out if your farm works or not xD.

[@SmokeJam]

just use laser towers instead, you only need unholy amounts of power :D Lategame farming Dark Fog becomes quite trivial as soon as your ammo is not as depending on copper as in the early and mid game.

[@deredware9442]

One big interesting thing about dark fog farming is the later levels give both optical grating crystal and unipolar magnets as drops, so you can use dark fog to produce the mk2 miners and smelters without having to leave the starting system. I think its only really worth it though when you can use laser turrets.

[@kerbodynamicx472]

Since you got to unipolar magnets, I'm assuming your dark fog base is level 24+. In that case, you have access to the Re-combination Assembler, Self-evolution lab and Negentrophy smelters. They are the tier 4 assembler, tier 2 lab and tier 3 smelter and provides a whopping 3x producticvity.

[@Marcel-eg9bz]

I was today years old when I found out you could put storage boxes on splitters.

[@YouCountSheep]

I am pretty sure you can do that self sustainable. They also drop titanium which you can use to upgrade the ammo which means you halve the amount of copper you need since the damage doubles. You can also use the graphite and the energy shards to burn in thermal powerplants and reinforce the line with laserturrets that don't use ammo. Some combustibles then can also be used to build missiles and they drop everything to build attack drones which would further up the damage. You can limit their spawnrate by putting signal towers just in range of their outskirts and have most of their spawners destroyed. Its definately an interesting way to get ressources. Not to mention it would become very nice on a 0.1x ressource run.

[@diamonje]

Since they don't level up when you're off planet then you could get them to the level you want and then leave. I don't know if they'll still be dying from the turrets next to their base but they won't overtake your planet while you're afk.

[@VinceBlas]

They definitely level while off planet; I've had a farm working it's way up to level 9 on my lava planet and I've mostly let it run by itself

[@aracuron9956]

They do try and if something went wrong overrun your defenseline, they will the pretty fast built up threat Level nd the they will go for your jeweils, so better have the defense at 200% of what you think you need.

[@Scottybones11]

This seems pretty viable mid game when you have deuterium and laser turrets. I could see farming just the dark fog components with that strategy. Also forgot to mention that you get an insane amount of spil piles this way

[@HelicopterShark]

The sound does go away when you move away from it, also lasers are easier on the ears. Can also use the crystals to fuel the power plants and have it on its own electric grid with a warning system for under power going off using a traffic monitor with the pass condition as monitoring charged accumulators

[@Matok1]

Ah didn't realize that you could filter what the bases pick up, that's useful. I can get rid of some junk in my setup. I ended up using lasers on my home planet. There's enough geothermal spots I took over and accumulators built for a buffer to deal with the power draw when the lasers all fire at once and still keep my grid stable. I think you can eventually get the components you need to manufacture more missiles off these guys too, making a laser + missile backup system basically free. Very useful for scarce resource games, silicon was drying up quick in my home system but now these guys just supply me the components I need.

[@Emilis2023]

Very nice. Like you, I'm not sure I'd go to the trouble considering how easy it is at least on the home planet to just wipe them off, but I really like it's an option. Probably a god-sent for low resource playthroughs.

[@CoolColJ]

Turn up the difficulty and your getting large attacks every 30secs, not so easy anymore :)

[@bastronom4496]

Some of the items seem to only be collectable from the dark fog Hive, i killed some of them but they dont drop anything or at least i dont know how to collect stuff in space.

[@jurjen909]

I wonder what the processing cost would be for a farm planet in another star system. If it even processes the spawning and killing of the mobs.

[@Bishop1091]

please tell me if you find out

[@Alexandragon1]

Biters... Yeah) Thx for the video!

[@jimmaynard]

whats your favourite building and why is it splitters ;)

[@kerbodynamicx472]

The loot from Dark Fog is seemingly random and is only worth to obtain things you couldn't normally obtain. Titanium and silicone on the home planet, and in the late game, Dark fog Matrix, Matter Recombinator, Silicon Neurons, Negentrophy Singularity can allow you to build assemblers, smelters and matrix labs that have 3x the producticity, and that "Core Matter" that gives you the Strange Annihilation rod, that can provide 288MW on a single Artificial Star when profilerated.

[@wizywig]

One thing to note, you can box it in via laser turrets, sure that requires extra power, but then you don't need to worry about ammo at all, just make a nice box all around. At that point sounds like 100% free materials.

[@seanskelton2007]

i would say that set up a few planets for this later on when you start to have planets that have low value to you....also do any of the higher level turrets just use energy instead of ammo? if so then once you get to that point you can set them up on planets that you dont need for anything else.

[@RichardHennigan]

Is it worth burning the energy shards in thermal plants to cover the power costs of running the farm?

[@kiffeeify]

Could have used the other type of splitter for filtering 2 items per splitter?;)

[@jurjen909]

Just like the New Bus Design. Instead here its just 2 filtered outputs below.

[@MortekX]

You should try laser turrets. It works for me for now with fog bases at 4 lvl. And i have those 15mw geothermal plants all over planet. Each is enough for 5 turrets when shooting.

[@TheHamtie007]

Loving the series! Helps me as a starting player out a ton! Question: Do you have a blue science blueprint you can share? I can't find it on the drive you shared :(

[@plastictouch6796]

The blue science is just at the end of the starter hub. It's green chips and magnetic rings so you basically put the research facility at the end of your starter hub.

[@photepsjourney]

HI @Nilaus, first off all I´m a very big fan and love all your videos and content you are creating. Sometimes i try to challenge myself, if I could be more efficient as you are, but mostly I´m failing. ;) Never teh less, i figured out that there are some issues within your recent shown blueprints. Sth. like wrong markings, splitters or so. So, I wanted to ask, what is the best way to get in touch with you?

[@MirageGSM]

Seems like it would be best to have this on your home planet - where you have the least space for it... But a lot of the stuff would be nice to have early game. Sometime soon someone will forscience the drop rates.

[@G2nelson]

im staring at that 2 storage boxes full of titanium bars on your home world. Does this make 1 world challenge possible?

[@SmokeJam]

Sorta, kinda, if you do speedruns to white cubes, I see this definitely cracking the records. But for normal playthroughs I honestly don't think you can keep doing that, your copper will run out sooner or later. You'd probably have quite the negative resource balance (used vs. useful farmed). Only other option is to have an ungodly amount of power flying about and switch to laser turrets.

[@diamonje]

It looks like you can at least delay the first space trip by farming some titanium and silicon and then at lvl 6 you can dip your toes in yellow science as well and try to get interplanetary transport before you even leave. It's not as cheesy as flying over and slapping down a bunch of collectors and then flying back carrying 40k items on your cursor lol

[@MikelNaUsaCom]

radio tower helps keep the dark fog attacking one area... also it scales up pretty hard.... I've found the lasers good, and you can use the fuel in a thermal plant to give electricity for the lasers so that you don't need a bunch of bullets, or wind generation, etc. The downside is that it seems to also level up the space variants or it may be that wasting time on farming the ground bases, let the space guys get levels. Fun times.

[@Izakde]

Do you play with any mods at all? If you do not, are there any - with a quick browse - you would recommend for new players?

[@micheljolicoeur6094]

Interesting farm. Worth depends on what level the pother items come from. Now is it only that spot that levels up or do all locations on a planet level together?

[@Verechter]

huh, been doing this from day 1, build a wall of solar panels all around the planet with guns behind and then, started sorting materials collected by the bases.

[@Omniknightish]

Wonder if this would be a good way to automate organic crystals?

[@AdamSaxton]

Probably would be good to setup on a planet you don't care about so you don't really deal with the noise. Wouldn't do this on a main production planet. So, specific farm planets and make sure the supply in and out are good. I would think you would want to bring in better ammo also for the higher levels.

[@michaelhanson5773]

There are some crazy items that you can get from this update that i have no clue how you even get. I found out about them from sandbox mode when i used it to create my blueprints for my new game...

[@dicerson9976]

Just use Geotherms on a Lava world with laser turrets just far enough away to avoid hitting the core structures so it feeds an endless gravy train of drones to a drone base that harvests the fog shards that can then be logi'd elsewhere for use as fuel when you need to manually build something. Each singular geothermal powers 1 laser turret essentially, and you really only need maybe 40-50 to shut down a base.

[@phoenix7289]

So it seems if you want those late game items you basically have to do this. I don't exactly like it, either, but how else can we get those neat items you showed?

[@KriliJack]

What's that red line you put looks to be very useful.

[@tomikexboii5403]

I just went "Fuck it LMAO" and on my first play through with the Fog I use Infinite resources.

[@Shadoriso]

One way for this method to work is to make a dedicated deathworld that only does this farming and then send the resources to use them on other planets. Mostly for the new crafting 3x buildings

[@MrSamogot]

with the stated downsided it seems like latter on you can dedicate a whole planet for dark fog farming and export from there.

[@zeros5456]

i am thinking that probabiy would not bother with a farm at the begining, not gonna let it grow up, way too much hassle . but on the neutrostar/black holes .... probably those bases are already high level. set an ammo factory / ILS and a perimeter and send all the goodies back

[@Moleculor]

I haven't made it as far as building laser turrets, but don't laser turrets avoid the ammo cost?

[@QuestionableObject]

I think this'll only really be worth doing when you have efficient ways to transport all the normal resources away, or flat out just don't need them, but you need the dark fog resources for the buildings. Also when you have more powerful weapons that can destroy the dark fog very efficiently The highest level dark fog components you likely only get for destroying their space hives. It'll probably be a lategame goal to have dark fog farming planets dedicated entirely to blowing up their stuff and collecting the drops.

[@2velyn]

do you unlock yellow science + PLS between episodes?

[@jotunn2396]

I guess getting one singular dark fog base surrounded by defences in the middle of nowhere would be cool for making 225/min strange fuel. one question left though: will it keep making drones after destruction of the hive(s)?

[@AbsoluteHuman]

The hive supplies its bases with power so I think not

[@DAMDARAMDAMDAAAAAMM]

Havent played the Update yet, but i can Imagine to establish a desicated farming Planet 😂

[@contetacchia7]

As the fog is continuously leveling up, how do you avoid reaching a level so high that it may break your defense and overrun your base? Is there a possibility to stop the level-up process?

[@Nilaus]

Not possible to stop the leveling process, but if you kill them as they spawn then you should be fine even at lvl 12, but if you let them build up a massive attack force then it may overwhelm you. This is the reason I am positioning the turrets so close that they continually aggroes

[@telgames]

I don't think the early game farm is worth it, but once I have energy weapons I'll probably set up a farm somewhere else. That said, I did camp a missile battery on top of my home planet's single spawner for long enough to get a couple million soil piles - you can get that just repeatedly destroying the re-spawned base. Much quieter, less spam, and no more running out of soil to pave the oceans when I first start!

[@nevthesimple]

i opened so fast i only get 240p version of it

[@HUNmerlin]

Adding combat to Dyson was...ambitious to say the least. I was hoping for it to require creativity with building defense patterns, turret placement, walls etc. (basically like in factorio) and frankly it's a bit of a letdown.

[@GeorgeMonet]

But Dyson Sphere is not Factorio. There are spaceships. Going from barely being able to move to creating an interstellar distribution network is the point of the game. The point of the game isn't killing respawning robots on a single planet.

[@HUNmerlin]

Games feel unrewarding without the chance of losing, I enjoy it if they push back a little. Some like Surviving Mars or Timberborn achieve this without enemy NPCs but dyson decided to go down that route and I just pointed out that in my opinion the challenge doesn't inspire as much creativity as in other games.@@GeorgeMonet

[@darianleyer5777]

You also seem to be gaining Soil Pile Stuff with each kill.

[@plastictouch6796]

I bet that you probably farm them in other systems where you don't need to constantly be watching them. And probably in the outer systems they start out naturally at higher level so you don't need to grind their level up. It's probably something more for late game.

[@Lodestone8]

Late game you get secret tech, antimatter and unipolar magnets, so yes

[@CorvinoDan]

Is possible to upgrade turrets to use less ammo and more dmg?

[@martindinner3621]

No, but you can use titanium to upgrade the ammo to deal twice as much damage.

[@shietinghd3020]

Best farm is rampage with 10x regrowth i have never left the planet now. I have a save with max dark fog with minimal resources that means dark fog is my best partner. Tipp: 3 base max or it will give problem.

[@0x0404]

Is there an energy based weapon you can get later to deal with them only consuming energy?

[@martindinner3621]

Several.

[@MrSaywutnow]

The biggest problem is that the grind of farming just isn't as much fun as raining missiles on a base from the other side of the planet.

[@sgtmichael812]

If you want to farm it use lasers they need energy so no waste in resource

[@SassyPants34]

This is worth for the soil pile alone IMHO.

[@debamibroeder4783]

Help my dark fog farm keeps overflowing bc I’ve got a shortage of some resources but then my other resources keep overflowing

[@kerbster135]

What if you used lazer turrets and a ton of wind turbines? Wouldn't that let you farm resources withoit using ammo? I guess you would have to use a whole planet of wind turbines to power a decent amount of the turrets lol.

[@AristophMarloque]

No reason to limit yourself to wind. Solar and geothermal would also be fantastic on the right planets.

[@kerbster135]

@AristophMarloque that is a great point lol. I may have forgotten those are a thing.

[@mediandirt]

It's really not that much energy. You can use the drops to create more energy too.

[@elijahcanning3020]

One thing not mentioned is the sheer amount of soil you get. I'm still in my Starter system and have 16 Million soil.

[@zeff605]

I have almost 300 million soil piles, don't know what to do with them. I have 2 holes leveled to 24 and 26 on lava planets

[@MikeVoidKai]

HAvent even see a single gameplay from a end game save file side, only from a restart save file been looking for end game playthrough so far 0 ive seen people playing in this update with there end game save file

[@Nilaus]

Dark fog only spawns in a new save

[@Malte133]

maybe to it with energy weapons like lasers

[@SmokeJam]

Seems to be another thing to do in the late game when you don't have to use copper for ammo. I get the feeling this whole update is either about people trying to speedrun the game and getting more "hidden" buffs for hodge podging, or to basically get rid of the Dark Fog until late game when farming it becomes trivial. Gotta admit, I'm not that impressed by this new update, I understand the reasoning, but why does DSP need hostiles? It was somewhat what set this game apart from all the other ones, nice colors, space and no bloody braindead AIs who are just annoying until you don't really care about them anymore because your tech is finished. This feels like a try to introduce elements of Factorio mob spawning, but worse. If you could just get rid of Dark Fog in a system and literally turn it into cattle and a viable resource provider mid to late game, then this would have a whole different swing. As it is now, it just puts holes in your planets and is more annoying than enriching.

[@tricorius9653]

One of the reasons they stated is to bring “life” into the emptiness of space and give an extra something to do off-planet and between planets. This is phase 1 of the combat update. Phase 2 is suppose to bring orbital and space combat options, including space platforms and such.

[@gamerelite3989]

hmmm this might be taken as a late game passive item farming or it may be later on flagged as an exploit because as stated in comments if you use energy based weaponry you can make a farm with infinite ammo using no other ressource than energy you setup a planet with this and leave it farming forever ( no noise to annoy you XD ) nice find on this tho i did not consider this myself at all :) cheers

[@AbsoluteHuman]

Certainly not exploit. It's just mining with extra steps. An exploit is killing the relay tower in transit to avoid raising the threat level. But maybe the DF hive AI could be set up to counter the farm and launch an attack on your planet to defend the base after sone time.

[@gamerelite3989]

@@AbsoluteHuman yeah that was my line of thought since this update is very fresh out players will think of alot of things to try out and the devs are certainly watching as well to see what they can tweak later on :)

[@wizmo57]

biggest value is prolly the soil u get constantly... dunno why but u do

[@alienalienovich7593]

Despoiler space program 🤣

[@TVT.v1entetain]

Hoooooooo

[@musizlover2008]

Your soil pile is getting really high

[@47DKDS]

My personal opinion about this patch is that this forced warshit is good for business but misses the point of the game. A lonely robot building a dyson sphere for humans that could be extinct for all we could know.

[@tricorius9653]

Still not forced. You can disable it. But then space is empty again. I like the feel of not having empty space. But to each their own.

[@PyubX]

Late game im farming an entire lava planet, i already have dark matter so its 2 artificial suns, about a 150 missile turrets, dozens of battlefield bases and lasers. Im getting enough unipolar magnet to make particle containers consistently.

[@PyubX]

Also, im farming all the materials involved in making green missiles and dark matter, theyre literally feeding the war effort against them😅