Everything is going on in an orderly manner.
As the planet slowly turns, the player's light mech "Icarus" hovers low above the surface and builds new buildings, and hundreds of orderly electromagnetic catapults are "hitting" countless solar sails into space...... This kind of work has been going on for dozens of hours, and I don't know how many days and nights I have spent in the game.
Another sunrise is coming, and the stars of this galaxy are slowly rising from the horizon with the glow. But today's "sun" is a little different, the player stops what they are doing, lets the mecha fall to the ground, and looks at the sky in the distance with it - countless solar sails finally converge in the universe to form a "Dyson shell", gradually wrapping the stars. At first, the small mecha that could only cut trees and mine on the surface to obtain resources "conquered" this planet that was tens of thousands of times its size, and held its energy into its hands......
Talking about their most exciting moments in the game, almost every Dyson Sphere player will describe such an "early morning" after a sleepless experience - both in the game and in reality.
Players have typically spent nearly 100 hours in the game to do this, and among veteran players, building their first Dyson ball like this is often jokingly referred to as "congratulations on completing the beginner's tutorial".
It's also like when Project Dyson Sphere first came out, and because of the level of completion it showed, it's hard to believe that it was only an "early access" version, and in the three years since, Project Dyson Sphere has proven that this is really just the starting point.
1
Back in early 2021, when Project Dyson Sphere was a "phenomenal" game.
Even though the project easily achieved its crowdfunding goal and became well-known in the indie game community, the game's momentum after its official launch was still amazing.
The game topped the global best-selling list on Steam less than a day after its release, and then won the first place on Steam's global weekly sales list for many days;
Anchors at home and abroad are like participating in a "cyber marathon", reluctant to live broadcast day and night to build their own Dyson ball;
Thousands of related videos are uploaded on video websites every day, and regardless of the source, as long as the content is interesting and useful, the number of views is often gratifying;
Almost everyone in the industry is talking about how a team of five people can make a game like this.
Such "topical" games that attract traffic may appear every once in a while, but there are only a handful of popular games that have been unanimously recognized by players in all circles and genres like "Project Dyson Ball", and have hardly involved any contradictions and controversial topics.
It can be said that the debut of the "Dyson Sphere Project" makes "automated base construction" no longer an unpopular and niche game type in China, and it has an extremely detailed guidance design, even if there is no such foundation, as long as you have the patience to follow the guidance, you can also build your own space wonders independently.
In the overseas territory of this type of player, "Dyson Ball Project" is even more respected as an emerging first-line "base construction game", three years later, even if the game is still only available in English language except Chinese, but non-Chinese messages account for nearly half of the evaluation, and many of them are not in English.
Spanish: This game is "very pure"
Compared with previous similar games, "Dyson Sphere Project" integrates many space sci-fi related concepts and terms into the game, and intuitively shows it in front of players' eyes through gameplay, truly showing "down-to-earth and looking up at the starry sky". Compared with the "industrial beauty" displayed by the slightly cold machine factory, it is easier for anyone to feel the wonder and romance contained in "capturing the sun" or "passing through a black hole", which is one of the reasons why it is more popular with the public.
If you want to say that "Project Dyson Sphere" has caused any controversy outside of the game content, it is probably to single-handedly raise the ceiling of Steam's "early access" release model and put pressure on peers, but who can say that this is a bad thing.
In fact, in the following three years, "Dyson Sphere Project" has indeed maintained a high frequency of updates, from minor optimizations and bug fixes, to the addition of gameplay content such as "Blueprints", "Big Miners" and "Custom Mechas", and today is the biggest version update "Black Mist Rising" since the birth of the game, which represents the official addition of the game's long-awaited combat system to the game.
This update even "reversed the bounce", which was launched half a month earlier than the original time
In addition to building their own production base, players will also face the threat of "black fog" from outer space and the ground, and they will send warplanes to harass and destroy the player's base from time to time on normal difficulty. As a countermeasure, players can now not only equip their mechs with weapons and drone formations to transform into "Gundam", but also build their own defense system on the ground.
Just from the nearly one-third increase in the branch of the technology tree in the game, it is not difficult to see that "Rise of the Black Mist" has added a lot of new content to the game, including new materials that will be dropped by the Black Mist forces, bringing new technology ...... And this is still a free update included in the game itself, and the price of the game is still 70 yuan, and players don't even have any additional channels to play a little more money to support it.
It's no wonder that players left messages in the official comment areas: "Please collect some more money!"
But in fact, in addition to this, many players have given more important support than money.
2
After an initial peak of popularity, Project Dyson Sphere has maintained a fairly stable number of players online for a long time, which is quite rare as a single-player game.
This is inseparable from the long-term hard work of the development team, and it is also because a fairly core player group has been formed around the game, of which many people have played for thousands of years.
The Dyson Sphere Universe Design and Science Institute, abbreviated as "CIDT", was founded by such a group of players.
The organization was founded two months after the game's release, and later successively set up the Circuit Research Institute, Blueprint Warehouse, Academy and other institutions, with more than 60 core members and more than 1,000 participants. From instructional videos for players at home and abroad, to blueprints and mod sharing, to work on the whole story or give feedback to the development team...... They are active in almost every aspect of the Dyson Ball Project.
In May 2021, Project Dyson Sphere updated the "Level 3 Civilization" to include the "Galaxy View" feature, where players can view the amount of electricity generated within the star area.
Initially, the upper limit of this power generation was 632TW, representing the total number of minutes of existence in the Milky Way as measured by humans, which was discovered by CIDT when it attempted to challenge the 1PW of power generation in a single region the following year.
At first glance, the challenge of total power generation may seem simple, after all, as long as you keep expanding your production line, launching more solar sails, and building more Dyson spheres, you can continue to improve efficiency and generate more electricity.
In particular, as the development team has successively updated features such as "Blueprints" to save and reuse player-designed building complexes, or added one-click drag and drop batch construction, it has greatly facilitated players to further expand their territory.
However, just as the game reminds players that "there is no inexhaustible energy", there is no unlimited computing power in reality.
There's one significant difference between new and veteran players in Project Dyson Sphere. On the one hand, newcomers are often amazed that the game not only requires the configuration of civilians, but also the saving and reading speed is often far beyond expectations, which can be called "god optimization", and it is easy to play with almost no hardware anxiety.
At the same time, you'll often see veteran gamers thinking about how much computing power can be freed up for the memory module by optimizing such a component, and whether the frame rate can be higher in the later stages of the game.
It's not uncommon for masters to play at single-digit frames like this in post-production
Therefore, for CIDT members who want to challenge the power generation of 1PW, in addition to building 782139 Dyson balls in the game to maximize the output of resources, they also used an i7-12700K processor and 3090 graphics card in reality to omit almost all the rendered 24 frames of 2184 hours of gameplay, and finally achieved this goal.
The development team has also revised the original display cap as a recognition of the efforts put in by the players.
Many gamers mentioned that the moment they were most obsessed with Project Dyson Sphere was often the first two years when they were isolated due to working from home or quarantine. In this game, they are down-to-earth towards a grand goal, experiencing the joy of the moment of success, bringing peace and tranquility to their hearts at that time.
3
If you simply think of "completing the plan to build a Dyson Sphere" as a playthrough, according to Steam achievements, at least 15% of players have achieved this feat in the game in three years. According to the recently announced sales, "Project Dyson Sphere" has sold more than 2.5 million copies worldwide.
As a single-player game, Project Dyson Sphere is mostly a lonely experience, with players only busy controlling a small robot, and occasionally a narrator will talk to you (the same voice as MOSS in The Wandering Earth).
But when you watch your Dyson sphere rise above the horizon, you're sharing it with 370,000 people across time and space.
As mentioned before, up to this point, the game has a fairly intuitive and detailed guidance, and almost as long as you light up the tech tree step by step, you will always be able to pocket the sun, a process that usually takes less than 100 hours.
For many players like CIDT members who play hundreds or thousands of hours of action, this is really just the beginning.
As the development team continues to enrich the game's content, players are also engaged in more and more diverse fields in Project Dyson Sphere.
At the end of 2021, a new device, the Flow Detector, was added to the game, which in addition to displaying the speed of the conveyor belt and setting alarms for different items passing through the detector, for a total of 24 sounds to set - it's not so much a new industrial tool as it is a musical instrument added to the game.
Flow rate monitor
In the first official music competition, CIDT member "Eye of the Spectator" built a planetary instrument and played "Bell" won first place.
And after a few months, players were no longer satisfied with the music, but also played the music video synchronously with the planet monitor.
In addition to playing music, there are also looks like custom mechs:
Or make the Dyson ball look like Doraemon:
It's all the players' answer to "where did the time go?"
And even among the members of CIDT, Martin Jr. (Station B ID "My Little Pony is called Ding Zhen") is also known as a "hardcore player". He has played more than 5,000 hours, most of which has been spent making super-large blueprints, including the "supermarket blueprint" to facilitate the production of various materials, the "conveyorless blueprint" to free up computing power and improve efficiency, and the "spherical shell blueprint" to cover stars with one click.
He often spends a week or two building a blueprint for a very large building, and he always feels the same excitement every time these spectacular complexes are completed and electrified.
Many of them, both veteran and novice, have benefited from many of the blueprints created by Martin Jr., and some other players have even stolen them for sale on Taobao at one point, but they still insist on sharing them selflessly.
It's not uncommon to hear calls from the Dyson Sphere community for the production team to launch an online mode, after all, it's fascinating to think about it and explore the wonders of the universe with like-minded friends.
However, the development team has repeatedly responded that it will not consider updating the online mode, on the one hand, because the current design of the game is based on single-player gameplay, and from a practical point of view, because the save of "Dyson Sphere Project" will continue to expand with the increase in the number of buildings, even to tens or hundreds of G, which is dozens of times that of the game itself, it is undoubtedly a problem for network synchronization.
Players mostly understand this, after all, "loneliness is the main theme of the universe", and as we can see, the players of Project Dyson Sphere are never alone.
epilogue
Recently, with the operation of the production team of "On the Eve of the Catastrophe" to run away with money after releasing bad works, the controversy about Steam's "Early Access" (EA) has been rampant.
Subsequent updates to this distribution model are almost entirely based on the developer's conscience, and just like "borrowing money from friends often ends up empty", players often don't get much in return for their trust and money in advance. So even "Baldur's Gate 3", which finally lived up to expectations and won the game of the year, was not less questioned in the EA stage.
In contrast, "Dyson Sphere Project" is more of an outlier, and veteran players have said that the game has long been enough to be released as an official version, and according to past practice, the release of official versions of popular works usually welcomes another wave of sales growth, and subsequent updates can also be justified as DLC sales money.
However, the development team still insisted on completing the "space platform" and more "space battles" they had promised before considering moving to the official version.
For players, when they control the Icarus mecha and rush to the lair of the "Black Mist", they will certainly expect a more hearty space battle
In the early hours of yesterday morning, the development team updated a notice through Steam, announcing that "Rise of the Black Mist" will be officially updated at 16:00 Beijing time, so that players who want to come to the card point update can sleep peacefully. In the comments section, you can see players from all over the world calculating what time it corresponds to local time.
"Geography Exam"
If at the beginning, the "Dyson Sphere Project" was called "the light of China" as a compliment, then now, it may be said that the "Dyson Sphere Project" represents the gold content of "the light of China".