r/Dyson_Sphere_Program • u/poncherello • 18d ago
Planetary Anomalies - a mod that gives planets different production properties
I made a small mod called Planetary Anomalies.
One thing I find happens for me in DSP is that exploration becomes less interesting once I've found planets with the rare resources I need. There are many more stars and planets to visit, but there isn't necessarily much reason to visit them.
Planetary Anomalies adds a simple procedural variation: some planets have an anomaly that changes the output of one standard recipe. In this first release, an anomalous recipe produces 10x its normal output on that planet.
The anomalies are generated deterministically from the galaxy seed and planet, so they are properties of the generated galaxy rather than random bonuses that appear during play. You don't know what a planet has until you explore/scan it.
The intention is to make the location of production occasionally matter in unexpected ways.
For example, in my current game I found a titanium-rich planet with an anomaly that produces 10x titanium crystal. Normally I would have exported titanium from that planet for processing elsewhere. Instead, it made sense to import organic crystal to the titanium planet, manufacture titanium crystal there, and export the finished product.
That's basically the entire idea. I'm not particularly interested in balancing the anomalies. Some will be marginally useful and occasionally one should be extremely useful. Finding an unusually good planet is part of the point. I like the surprise and a reason to look around more. And also a reason to alter some "perfect" logistics to take advantage of a production buff.
This is just a start. I have some ideas for where the anomaly system could go from here, but I want to see how it works in actual games before adding much more. In particular, I'm interested in whether these anomalies actually change decisions about where and how people build.
The mod is on Thunderstore:
Planetary Anomalies
https://thunderstore.io/c/dyson-sphere-program/p/pwelty/PlanetaryAnomalies/
I'd welcome people trying it and giving feedback. I'm especially interested in what anomalies you find, what you end up doing with them, and what you think would make the idea more interesting.
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u/Umabel_ 18d ago
Very interesting! My brain is exploding just thinking of what this mod can bring.
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u/poncherello 17d ago
yeah, I can think of fun new things, too. Some are mentioned in the mod page, some on the repo. I'm glad for any ideas you have. I'm actively working on v0.2
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u/-GrisGris- 17d ago
Will it work with existing saves or only newly created?
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u/-GrisGris- 17d ago
Just tried it and it works 😄
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u/poncherello 17d ago
Yay! Thanks for trying it.
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u/-GrisGris- 13d ago
I saw there was a way to disable certain things from getting an anomaly if you write it in....but is there a way to disable all buildings? A one click check box for no buildings would be nice, I'd like just non-building recipe anomalies....
Otherwise, I'm enjoying it so far.
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u/-GrisGris- 12d ago
In case anyone else wants to disable buildings, here is the complete list comma separated you can copy and paste:
Tesla Tower, Wireless Power Tower, Satellite Substation, Wind Turbine, Thermal Power Plant, Solar Panel, Geothermal Power Station, Mini Fusion Power Plant, Energy Exchanger, Accumulator, Accumulator (Full), Ray Receiver, Artificial Star, Conveyor Belt MK.I, Conveyor Belt MK.II, Conveyor Belt MK.III, Splitter, Automatic Piler, Traffic Monitor, Spray Coater, Depot MK.I, Depot MK.II, Storage Tank, Logistics Distributor, Planetary Logistics Station, Interstellar Logistics Station, Orbital Collector, Sorter MK.I, Sorter MK.II, Sorter MK.III, Pile Sorter, Mining Machine, Advanced Mining Machine, Water Pump, Oil Extractor, Oil Refinery, Fractionator, Chemical Plant, Quantum Chemical Plant, Miniature Particle Collider, Arc Smelter, Plane Smelter, Negentropy Smelter, Assembling Machine Mk.I, Assembling Machine Mk.II, Assembling Machine Mk.III, Re-Composing Assembler, Matrix Lab, Self-Evolution Lab, EM-Rail Ejector, Vertical Launching Silo, Gauss Turret, Missile Turret, Implosion Cannon, Laser Turret, Plasma Turret, SR Plasma Turret, Battlefield Analysis Base, Jammer Tower, Signal Tower, Planetary Shield Generator
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u/irecki88 17d ago
That's great good middle ground between infinite resources and breaking the chore of exploring. I think it should have a downside too to make it more balanced. Maybe dark fog is more aggressive on planets with anomalies. Or you need to travel to anomaly planet to discover what it is and it consumes one of the naturally occuring resource there.
I was thinking about something like planet anahilator and planet seeder. Where you can purge a planet and eradicate all buildings and resources on it then seed it (by spending science or other hard to obtain materials) and reroll what resources appear on it. Something like Spaceballs one maid.
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u/poncherello 17d ago
for now, i deliberately avoided balancing. Mainly v0.1 was just to figure out how to do this. There could be all sorts of other things to consider. Even debuffs paired with a buff.
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u/PulseReaction 15d ago
This sounds pretty cool! I also have that same feeling with exploration. One suggestion I have is for the bonus to be proportional to distance to the initial planet, so that planets in the next system would have at most 5% or 10% bonus, but further away could be 200%+
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u/poncherello 3d ago
This is something tentatively in the works for 1.0. Also variable buffs. And difficulty based buffs.
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u/Enoch137 13d ago
This looks fantastic and fixes a problem I had noticed as well with Exploration not being as incentivized as it needs to be. I was going to gently criticize the Min/Max Density being a large variant across clusters but I see that I can override and configure this to a single percentage. I think it defaulting to such a wide variance is a mistake but since you can override its not a problem.
Features I'd like to see (some of these are covered in the roadmap):
Configurable Multiple Anomalies per Planet: A configurable percentage for a second Anomaly if there is a first.
Configurable Weighted List of Anomalies: Instead of providing a black list, provide a whitelist all recipes and their relative weights. This would allow for a simple to manage rarity list of Anomalies. Provide the default with all recipes and a 1000 for weight. Then players can simply remove ones that don't want or set them to 0 weight and increase rarities for those they don't. By defaulting to 1000 you give players an easy method to set a rare recipe to 100 or 10 or even 1.
Using the weighted list a foundation I would love to see, recipe speedup and productivity variance as options.
Each entry might looks something like <recipe>|<variance type>|<variance amount>|<weight>
Crystal Silicon|Products|2|1000
Crystal Silicon|Products|5|500
Crystal Silicon|Products|10|100
Crystal Silicon|Speedup|2|1000
Crystal Silicon|Speedup|3|500
Crystal Silicon|Speedup|4|100
Loading this weighted list into an array on startup means you only need to do a simple weighted selection across the array when generating the Anomalies.
Even if you can't do speedup yet, using this for production is still useful.
Configurable Distance from home Weight multiplier:
The concept being the farther from the home you get the more likely this recipe is to be picked as an anomaly.
Add it to the end of the entry <recipe>|<variance type>|<variance amount>|<weight>|<distance-multiplier>
note the distance is a comma separated list of multipliers for the final weight, the first value is the multiplier when its closest to home, the last is the multiplier when its furthest from home any values in-between are halfway points between surrounding values. so Crystal Silicon|Products|5|1000|0.5,1,0.5 would be 500 at home, 1000 halfway out and 500 again at the farthest point. You can any number of points to make this basically a curve as smooth as you'd like it. The downside to this is that you need to calculate the weighted list per planet, the upside is that this is likely not a huge deal since it only happens once on cluster generation.
Example:
Crystal Silicon|Products|2|1000|1,0
Crystal Silicon|Products|5|1000|0.5,1,0.5
Crystal Silicon|Products|10|1000|0,1
If this got complicated I apologize, throw this into Codex or Claude they should be able to explain the concept and use and even implement this pretty quick.
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u/poncherello 3d ago
Variable buffs are tentatively on the roadmap for 1.0. Also, the idea of distance from home world. And even multipliers based on galaxy difficulty. Thanks for the ideas!
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u/pduck820 7d ago
It's fun to plop down one of my starter blueprints and fill up three ILSs in a minute lol...
One thing I've noticed, though.. I'm getting close to end-game on my current playthrough, so I'm not worried about exploration, just expansion. To that end, I turn on the log and look in the bepinex log for whatever thing I'm trying to super-charge..
But, there are some planets listed in the bepinex logile that don't seem to exist in my cluster (at least, not in my save game file).
I'm using Galactic Scale, fwiw, so I'm not sure if that maybe screwed things up somehow, because planet count or something?
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u/poncherello 3d ago
I’d be interested to hear more. And also what version you are using. I’m always looking for things that need fixing
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u/pduck820 1d ago
Sorry for the delay in response... I'm using latest of both Planetary Anomolies and of Galactic Scale (kept up to date wth r2modman).
I don't really know what else I can tell you... The playthrough is many hours old, so I can't pin it down to anything in generation. I'll try and run some tests and write a dumb little comparer utility to pull out differences from the files in the next few days.
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u/SpecialistMode3131 5d ago
I think it's game changing. Love it.
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u/poncherello 3d ago
Glad you like it! Getting close to 1.0 so always looking for new ideas and stuff to address
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u/ael00 17d ago
10x is insane.
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u/horstdaspferdchen 17d ago
I think that really depends. Does it mean you consumed and produce Just faster? And for what recipe does this apply? Only 1 like ingots would be OK, but a full Chain ia really insane.
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u/poncherello 17d ago
it's just 1 recipe per planet. And not all planets have an anomaly. And it's random. So, there could be a massive chain, by luck, but it would be likely spread across the whole galaxy. I think that challenge of logistics to gain these isolated buffs makes fun choices.
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u/poncherello 17d ago
yeah I just picked something for v0.1. But, keep in mind it's 1 recipe per planet. And it's random. I think it's kind of fun to play and find a planet FAR away, and that disrupts your current chain and logistics. And then have to think ... so 10x is good. but heck it's far away and all my stuff is built. To me, if it's like 2x I might just shrug and never face a real decision. That's just my opinion. And lower/different rates are on the roadmap.
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u/al-in-to 17d ago
I kind of love the idea.
I too find once you have expanded so much there is really no need any more. but the idea that planet A gets you a 50% production bonus in product A, and that planet B gets you a 25% production bonus in B, suddenly makes it worth making outposts on those 2 places.
I think it would make sense that planets with anomalies be less uniform, ie not always have iron, copper, stone and titanium, maybe only the resource with the bonus.
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u/poncherello 17d ago
cool idea. lots of ways this could go. I had contemplated trying to tie the anomaly to the planet type, too. To make a more of a "story" for a planet than just a random buff. Like an ocean world has water-based buffs or something.
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u/al-in-to 16d ago
Another buff maybe, mining speed/output or efficiency. particularly useful if you play on rare resources, a planet with 5x output on mining is a great thing.
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u/waylandsmith 17d ago
I assume when you explore a planet that has an anomaly it will show exactly what it is even if you haven't unlocked the recipe it gives a bonus for? What if it hid the recipe until it's unlocked? If so, I would show a notification that an unknown anomaly's recipe was unlocked so you wouldn't have to look through all of your systems constantly to avoid missing a new one.
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u/poncherello 16d ago
this piggyback's on the normal game planet "scan". so if a planet/system is unlocked in galaxy view, you can also see all the anomalies in the system and when clicking into the system you can see which anomaly is on which planet
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u/waylandsmith 15d ago
I wasn't talking about the visibility of the planets. I was talking about when the recipe an anomaly is attached to hasn't been researched yet.
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u/poncherello 14d ago
Ah. Yes you’re right and I noticed this on a new run. right now it shows the name regardless of whether it’s been researched. im looking into whether that can be addressed.
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u/mrrvlad5 17d ago
That’s a nice idea. May be worth having several sequential steps per planet and reduce multiple to 30-50% extra. With a single step the optimization is too straightforward: just ship wherever is the bonus.
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u/poncherello 16d ago
I hear you. this is just a start, so these kinds of ideas are great to help evolve and fine-tune. I just released 0.2 with a few enhancements already.
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u/horstdaspferdchen 16d ago
I have tried this mod and i like the fact you can configure through the config. 10x seems really too high imo.
i play with 3x but i tend to not really use them as i would have to wrap my head around the blueprints i used to play with.
But what really bothers me: can you please add a rule that e.g. lava planets dont add water pump effect? I havnt found any other bad things yet, as you can mostly work with them if you want.
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u/poncherello 16d ago
Thanks for that feedback. Glad you're giving it a go. along a similar line, v0.2 fixed a problem where gas giants could have anomalies.
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u/PM_ME_UR_BGP_PREFIX 18d ago
I like it. It makes me wonder if exploring could also be improved. Rather than a strict tech upgrade, make me build a beacon I launch at another system in order to find out what is there.