Welcome to this guide on the major update called The Icarus’ Evolution in the Dyson sphere Program. It makes some great new additions to the game which will help in the mid to late game. The major changes are blueprints for the Dyson sphere, a new miner that makes creating mining outposts much easier, a new geothermal power generator that generates power from magma, a new way to boost production lines and some more customisation tools. We will look at each one in turn.

Starting with the Dyson Sphere, it is now possible to copy and paste a Dyson Sphere design both between your own star systems and also from other players! You can copy just the Dyson Swarm or just the Dyson Shell or the entire Dyson Sphere. This copies text to your system clip board that you can then take to another star system and paste or you can just publish that text online or copy other people’s Dyson Sphere designs so you don’t have to do all the clicking yourself! This is a great change that I have been waiting for a long time.

The next change is that it is now possible to stack items on belts. There is new research available for the transportation station to do this stacking, up to 4 items on top of each other. There is also the Automatic Piler which takes an input belt and combines each 2 input items for a stacked output item. This does mean that you will only have half an output belt so you will want to combine 2 Piler’s so that you again have a full belt now carrying twice as much. The Automatic Pilers can also take input stacked to 2 items and produce output stacked to 4, but that is the limit. The sorters also pick up a full stack and insert them into machines which makes it much easier to fill up input buffers.

The spray coater, unlocked through the proliferator Mk.1 research, is a way to boost the production of machines. It is a bit confusing to setup but you will understand it after the first time. After building the spray coater you will need to put it in-line with another conveyor belt carrying an item to a machine producing something. You will also need to produce the proliferator material, where Mk.1 makes use of coal, and then supply it to the spray coater. This is done at 1 level higher and at right angles to the material being sprayed. You just need to draw a belt through the slot on the spray coater and it will start to work. The spray coater will put the proliferator onto the items passing through it and, if all the items going into a machine have the coating on it, the machine will produce faster and also produce free extra items. At Mk.1 you get 12.5% extra materials and 25% production speedup. This does come at the cost of more power consumption, which is 30% more. There is also a Mk.2 and Mk.3 which increase the extra materials rate, the production speed and also the power consumption.

The next new addition is the advanced mining machine. It covers a greater area than the standard miner, has 9 output belts with materials (that are also capable of stacking items similar to the transportation station), has a way to boost production by 300%, at the cost of more power and consuming more mining reserve, and has a drone port where the logistics drones can pick up materials directly from it. The advanced mining machine makes connecting mining outposts so much easier since you just need to put down a few of these machines, connect them to power and then have an export hub and you are essentially done creating that mining outpost.

This can be combined with the geothermal power station, which produces power from magma, to add the source of power to the first mining colony, which is typically a lava planet. It produces 2.4 MW, which is more than the thermal power plant, and just needs to be put down on top of lava and it starts producing power, which is very easy.

There is also a new customisation feature that I don’t really understand but it also has some prebuilt mechas that you can use and you can also import them from other people, which is what I will be doing.

There are a few other changes such as being able to put in more drones into transportation stations, more research increasing the drone capacity and the storage of the transportation stations among others including a few bug fixes.

All in all this is a great change to the game, the Dyson Sphere blueprint system was desperately needed (it used to take me hours to plan a Dyson Sphere) and the new advanced miner makes it so much easier to create mining colonies.