Galactic Monitoring and Cross-Docking | #31 | Dyson Sphere Program | Lets Play/Guide

[@ragerancher]

I'd love it if DSP introduced a serious late game logistics system of some sort of star base where you could build mega-tanker type ships that can only be in space and will fly between the star bases. Each ship is able to carry multiple products in large quantities allowing bulk moving of many things all around the galaxy more efficiently than tons and tons of smaller craft. Maybe even tie it into the sphere building so, as well as building the solar panels, you can make part of the sphere a logistics hub.

[@Lezenda]

Lets just be honest with each other, this is the buffer -chest- planet :)

[@jgischer]

Lol. I see. Good one. AND, I can see one important difference. Adding another ILS in the middle allows you to add 10 more transport ships carrying the same goods. In Factorio, if you want more drones, you can just add them, you don't need to put in a buffer chest to add them. HOWEVER, the buffer chests allow you to swap construction drones for logistics drones, which might be beneficial, but I don't really know that stage of the game well enough to be sure.

[@RobertLeachman]

"You might have a lot of problems, but in-game there are 2 problems I am going to focus on" hahahaha

[@QuantumJump451]

Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 4:20 (🔥) - clean up GuyInACube 5:30 - explanation of objective, what is cross-docking? 8:00 - Interstellar Stations build begins 11:50 - Monitoring 15:40 - How to ensure cross-docking 21:25 - The system in action

[@txstevenb4332]

This was great to see, and I've reached a point in my end-game where I'm building spheres constantly. Having a central hub would greatly increase the productivity. And thank you for all of the wonderful Blueprints that you have created and shared with us. It makes my day when I see a new post from you for DSP!

[@tesky1680]

It's great to see you apply your logistics knowledge to a game! This is what I want to see!

[@Lucandos]

I think game needs view where you can manage all stations, grouped by systems, and planets to better know what is going on inside the cluster. Also there should be possibility to set demand/supply/storage mode of stations, and if stations should be able to transfer resources between systems, etc.

[@jproctor2010]

Yeah I actually suggested something like this early on... though the devs definitely need to hear this more than once to be interested. I think it would make sense as a quite late game tech rather than just being something you have. A bit of messing around with it can be fun before things get to this huge scale. I've actually started a play with inf resources just to not have to deal with the issues he's talking about with keeping track, which is kinda sad to me.

[@paulschorfheide6006]

There are mods that do just that. I'm sure with the wide variety of mods available, it is changing the devs priorities since they know there is already currently a solution so they can concentrate on other things.

[@davecrupel2817]

@@paulschorfheide6006 unless they're steam workshop, i dont want mods for it. If only because i dont know how to include mods otherwise.

[@ecogreen123]

this may not be as insane as my biggest project but it's more powerful then my entire home system.

[@andreas1337able]

I like it. And I would also love it if they implement some more control. That you can say to which planets a ILS is linked. So that one can specify things more in depth, instead of having the ai decide where it needs to go. Some more control (across the whole game) would be nice.

[@abdulrehman636]

Thanks for the wonderful blueprints.

[@garath_]

That planet looks awesome! Loved the video title. It def grabbed my attention. To work or watch the video…

[@ameliadriscoll8634]

This is brilliant, really glad you did this episode.

[@12321dantheman]

Nilaus just solved the travelling salesman problem

[@brohvakiindova4452]

Warper consumption aside, this solution would kill the remaining 5 ups I got xD

[@stoneyd63]

Would like a search function to find where products are being produced. The game obviously tracks this because the ships do it automatically. Then have the ability to zoom in to see what the problem is. You would still need to travel there to make changes. With even just a handful of planets it becomes very difficult to remember everything.

[@stoneyd63]

Nilaus used the traffic monitor to do this to some effect.

[@GamerGER]

i did the same for some far away materials with a buffer planet in between. Did work well. I dont think you need to limit the range since they will prefere the nearest possibility.

[@08047870]

thnx for all your blouprints

[@Angmar3]

I do my warehousing on the planet that I need the resources. for instance, for my quantum chip planet, to supply enough hydrogen for all the casimir crystals I have a ring of interstellar stations set to remote demand hydrogen and local supply. whilst my crystal factories are just set to local demand for hydrogen. this has been able to keep hydrogen supplied really well, even with long travel times for logistics vessels heading out to gas giants that are far away.

[@paulschorfheide6006]

Why would you source hydrogen from outside a system? Very view systems, in my experience don't have a gas giant. And if you had a system without a hydrogen gas giant, I personally would just NOT make that a production system for something that needs it enmasse.

[@Angmar3]

@@paulschorfheide6006 cause I like centralised production, it's much easier to find and sort out problems that way, and 1 gas giant doesn't produce enough hydrogen

[@paulschorfheide6006]

@@Angmar3 ah true, my numbers are skewed cause I use mods in all playthroughs. So I have improved OLS that run at 36x speed instead of 12x. So a normal 75k giant makes around 215k for me. Such a huge different. Vanilla logistics stations are so lackluster when it comes to massive production lines.

[@Angmar3]

@@paulschorfheide6006 lol yeah I see how that could make quite a difference!

[@ExZero16]

Just read the thumbnail and just thought "galactic ipsec tunnel?"

[@ivandelarosa6438]

Thank you very much! Great series

[@achtsekundenfurz7876]

About new factory game series, I'd like to see some Craftopia, even though automation / production is only part of that game. For those who don't know (or where the name doesn't ring a bell), its graphics are decidedly Zelda-style, there's much variety when it comes to combat, and it's more about crafting individual items rather than Factorio-esque mass production. Still, all the tools are there, and it seems to work quite reliably on everything but the "S" X-box. Your call, tho.

[@TheSkepticSkwerl]

My only complaint is that zero traffic is rare. I'd set it to at least 5k a minute test. Otherwise you're running out. Cause you can be hitting 100 a minute and still not making enough

[@maximvoronin1569]

You are not running out if you have zero traffic and the belt is full. You are running out of something else, sure, but not this item.

[@SakkieGB]

Would be awesome if the game had an equivalent of districts to limit where exports and imports can happen to.

[@Tenebrousable]

I would add 3 resources each tower, fit 6 more belts nice and symmetrical, and it would be a mess.

[@markomuncan6811]

u impress me every time more ^^

[@bretthamilton6975]

The game needs splunk monitoring! Then you could build a proper monitoring dash board!

[@andrewstrauss7166]

loving it!

[@josephcoon5809]

17:20 You could have set each pair of ILS to handle four different items since you only used two belts per item…

[@matthewwright57]

If you do all the deuterium gas giants its also free and you dont need fractionators once your VU is over 35 or so.

[@Tenebrousable]

I believe vessels request and send to the nearest, do they not? So when the cross-docking runs empty, it's because requester is getting it from the source directly. It still runs, longer warps, but...hmmm.

[@phillipdelatour7729]

Yes but if you are producing an excess of a given item then then it will stockpile in the cross-docking hub, so if it runs out there you are drawing down on your inventory and need to make more. It provides a buffer for temporary fluctuations in demand as well as a crude indicator of insufficient production. As Nilaus says though, the way to find out is to build and test.

[@Chaun1998]

Why is the planet matte blue? I assume you laid foundation over the whole thing, but did you paint it as well?

[@phillipdelatour7729]

You can change the colour of the foundation.

[@Chaun1998]

@@phillipdelatour7729 Gotcha, thanks. Didn't know that

[@Fortunateson69]

Do you think multiple depots like this could work? Having them on opposite sides of the galaxy so the distance is even shorter?

[@Skilez]

i feel like using only raw ressources as inputs for your builds solves all those problems. if something doesnt work as intended just mine another planet and its fixed. i really like remote smelting and intermediate products. but only using raw ressources makes this problem detection problem so much easier :)

[@paulschorfheide6006]

This has been my view on logistics so far. All the blueprints I use I have noted in the descriptions how much raw materials it takes to run the entire array. So I can just check I have the resources, and plop it down. I rarely move produced materials unless it's like the higher tier stuff like processors going to quantum processing.

[@jacob416]

You have to transport far more items if you always start with raw resources. Small scale that works but once you get to the point where your moving rss across multiple systems you’ll probably run into a pretty big bottleneck.

[@matheusmarchetti628]

I think it would be a nice idea to rename the logistics towers to the name of the system/planet where that resource comes from

[@triggerunhappy.]

And be able to assign drops Like this resource goes here always

[@SyverX]

for the next update of DSP, i heard they working an a "combat system"

[@BFG10K-From-Doom-Eternal]

Its really helping me progress

[@valentindorigny6242]

So how can you ensure that remote provider will only send to the central hub and not to the location requesting it ?

[@skysocalbalen6075]

He explains this around 16:00

[@tempy2440]

As the other commenter said. In words he's range limiting so that cross galaxy distances for any planets intersystem range finding is the distance to the galatic core +- a few light years.

[@viltur83]

It's a really cool idea. Did you run in to buffer problems? With Only 2 belt's and the size of the tower can limit the throughput significantly

[@Nilaus]

2 belts = 240 / sec and for high throughput items I have multiple tower. No issues with throughput

[@EgnachHelton]

I think it's better to just use an excel spreadsheet to keep track of all of your production capacities and demands for various products, since almost everything is deterministic in this game...

[@AhmadSammy]

Is the blueprint for this design available on atlassian? If so, what is it called?

[@GoblinKnightLeo]

Next game is Captain of Industry, yes?

[@dimmudimmu8512]

What is your pc specs? I'm gonna upgrade my pc for this game. Thnx in advance

[@alsoteam5544]

Im just gonna say... this is kinda... a little bit... sort of...like buffer chests

[@Lezenda]

just my thought:)

[@syzygy4702]

Have to be honest I don't really like this solution for basic things like graphene and smelted minerals because it adds a lot of unnecessary trips and warping, and it's still not easy to monitor supply levels. Using those traffic monitors isn't going to tell you the actual source of a problem, and the constant spam would be really annoying. Personally I keep things organized by keeping star systems as self contained as possible. I only warp a small list of high level materials and manufactured components between systems, so if a process is running low on silicon I know it's happening within that system. Using a traffic monitor within that system lets me go right to the source of a problem if it occurs. That said I do have a whole storage planet set up exactly like this, except only for rockets. It's still not easy to see how many rockets I have on the planet though at any given time. I just know I have a lot!

[@brohvakiindova4452]

yes! also it's a lot more ups friendly.. technically you want to avoid long range raw resource transport whenever possible (if ups is a big concern), especially silicon and titanium

[@phillipdelatour7729]

You don't need to know the source of the problem to fix it, you just need to know you need to provide more. The problem with keeping things in star systems is exactly that, you have to monitor everything and know where to fix it. I've done the star system thing before as well but by the time you are spamming Dyson spheres I actually agree you want to centralise things like this so you are looking at your system as a whole rather than individual components.

[@brohvakiindova4452]

​@@phillipdelatour7729 If you build, let's say 4500 science/min in a system and only handle raw resources you don't have locally you never have to check back on it if you simply overproduce raw resources, proliferator, warpers and antimatter fuel. You know exactly what numbers you need for each system build like that. A huge part of the issue with "globally" producing everything is that the transportation network can be pretty whacky requesting from the other side of the galaxy, if the closest location doesn't fill a vessel, therefore "starving" the other possible requesters and itself for the longer flight time. Also ILS working as buffers can lead to quite some hiccups while expanding. You sometimes throw extra production on a problem that is solely caused by transportation. Baseline is a galaxy wide network will always come with a lot more transport inefficiencies than a system contained network. If you want 4500 science/min running as close to 100% at all times it simply works smoother and you don't waste space on overproduction. You do spend more time on picking a suitable location of course. In the end it's more of a preference question.

[@dukecunning7046]

I don't understand the "120,000" number Nilaus keeps using. The ILS is holding 20,000.

[@dukecunning7046]

I wonder if it is because he is counting on using 3 pairs: 3 x 40,000 = 120,000?

[@z135210]

What kills me about this game is you can travel faster than the speed of light, but you can't see what your inventory is with a simple report.

[@Silastar31]

You can view the production and demand on your inventory, so it's close to the same thing

[@z135210]

@@Silastar31 Not really, that's just real-time data. I want to know if I have 0 or 10,000 of an item. Maybe there's a mod that tells me that.

[@jakubprusek3793]

Maybe you could fix your description 😅, its a bit old

[@shadowhenge7118]

This is ultimately the part of the game where the in-game systems break down. The game works fairly well up until the end of the tree. After that theres just not the required tools and systems to efficiently grow.

[@paulschorfheide6006]

I fully agree. When you get into the "I want to make more than 80/minute carriers" part of the game, you have to move into mod usage to expand to the scale you need. I have a mod that shows all resource generation and consumption in real time. So I can literally just look at it and be like "cool, I have the 3600iron, 5400 copper, and 15k silicon I need to lay down another of my 1800/minute processor arrays" On the other hand, this game blueprinting system is the saving grace to when you are at this scale. I pull my hair out when I play satisfactory solely because how spoiled this game blueprint system has made me lol.

[@dehe82]

OR just use the mod that shows you galactic stats...

[@paulschorfheide6006]

The problem with this game is that it is so unbearably uninformative without mods. There is a great mod that literally shows you ALL resources produced/consumed in real time, from cluster wide. Along with buffers from all ILS/PLS you have. Not to mention the mod that shows you all ILS/PLS using/supplying a certain resource.

[@paulschorfheide6006]

@Ian Flack bottleneck is the one that shows you all production, which can be looked at by planet, home planet, system, and cluster. LSTM I believe is the mod that let's you pull all PLS/ILS by supplied resources.(note, it defaults to 10minute production numbers on game start. I always change it to 1minute intervals, as that is what I personally use to determine my current production) They go well with GigaStationsUpdated, which massively improves the numbers you can move through each PLS/ILS. Makes them much more viable for those end game systems where you are moving literally millions of resources from system to system.

[@paulschorfheide6006]

@Ian Flack I also recommend PlanetVeinUtilization as a simple QoL mod that shows you in the planet view how many of the available resource veins you currently have miners/oil extractors on.