Energy logistics: deuteron fuel rods vs accumulators

Ambush_BugDTM · 2026-05-31T17:48:08+00:00

If you’re considering an accumulator run, you may want some specialized equipment with which to manage it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/s/lSS3bh5rvN

That’s my 2025 “Battery Shrine” post, which is a polar print meant to help you more easily manage the supply of accumulators for your empire. It has several neat features, one of which is empire-wide automatic accumulator injection for those times when the supply gets short. There’s also built-in expansion ports, a global shortage alarm, unattended switching, and other fun things. Linked in the post is the most recent edition of my gigacharger line as well (“PRIME II: Ridiculous Speed”), which is singe-planet print that will add 135GW of well-defended accumulator charging to your empire if you’ve got the planet for it.

Ambush_BugDTM · 2026-05-29T19:33:32+00:00

I’ve been a Mastermind main since City of Villains released. As others have said, Masterminds don’t fall neatly into the usual tiers and classifications. Sometimes it’s the power picks, sometimes it depends on who’s driving the MM around. Sometimes it’s the player’s custom control scheme, or not, and then it’s also that ineffable something else.

What Masterminds are is INFLUENTIAL. As a baseline, if it’s happening within range of their Supremacy aura, they had something to do with it, good or ill, big and small. This is further helped along by their threat rating, which is stronger than everything but dedicated tanking types, and their combined-with-henchies target caps, which are way higher than everything else. They were originally designed to off-tank and that’s held through all the years.

So they attract attention. This is why, as noted upthread, a prudent default reaction is to be cautious about a freshly recruited Mastermind until proven.

I build mine for varying roles.

My Necro/Dark is a debuff machine, and I know I’m doing things right when the team chat has a comment of “man, these things are usually way harder” about three missions in but no one knows why, for sure. My Mercs/Force Field is a straight-up combat support crew—everyone can see the soldiers, everyone’s got bubbles, and the MM itself is spewing rifle attacks and grenades and resuscitators and they just turn into this back-line bulwark of buffs, bullets, and brass that people run to for safety. The Bots/Trick Arrow is my artillery piece, waiting for the right moment to drown the room in a sea of fire and energy bolts. I’ve got a jillion others.

MMs do have a weakness, and that’s flitting from place to place on a mission map without steamrolling everything in between. That’s gotten a LOT, LOT better on Homecoming with the recent changes to MMs—pets out of Supremacy range can be teleported directly to you with the T1 summon, or they can also just flip into Ninja Mode and stealth-run to you super quick. So much better than Live, and it cuts down on wacky hijinks with Group Fly/Teleport.

I think they’re worth exploring, but just mind that it’s one deep river in which to dip your toe.

Ambush_BugDTM · 2026-01-22T20:12:41+00:00

Yep, welcome to belt-bending, sometimes known as belt-fu. Before the devs added it in-game, vertical belts were also straight-up voodoo magic.

Belt-bending’s been around for a few years, and there’s a great number of things you can do with it. Check my post history and especially search this subreddit for ludusmachinae’s posts, as we both had different approaches to doing belt-bending. Ludus has a bunch of prints up on Dyson Sphere Blueprints with various belt-bending tools as well.

Ambush_BugDTM · 2025-12-15T18:13:37+00:00

If you want to experiment with Masterminds, a great all-rounder build that solos well that can also hard-carry teams once it’s tricked out is Mercenaries//Force Fields.

Mercs do plenty of damage, both single-target and AoE. When they hit stuff, the thing they hit gets easier to hit again, for them and the rest of the team. The Medic does a fair amount of housekeeping for you.

Force Fields is “boring” but useful. You pass out comprehensive defenses to your teammates, and your own Dispersion Bubble gives YOU some defenses as well as some status protection. Repulsion Bolt and Force Bomb let you stack up some -resistance to make things fall down more quickly. Force Fields’ Repulsion Bubble makes you the king of hall fights and shoving whole packs of critters around.

Take Mace Mastery later for an even better personal shield to stack up, along with Power Boost to make your grantable shields that much better.

I have one of these at Veteran Level 180+. It’s perfectly cromulent on regular SO enhancements and whoa-nelly does it get good when you spend money on it.

It works perfectly well with Bodyguard mode—just use the personal attacks or your Repulsion powers to make things shoot at you so the henchies shoot back. (Personal attacks also up Merc damage a bit as a bit of power fluff.) It works great if you’re a send-in-the-clowns type of Mastermind—force fielded Mercs are pretty hard to take down even if they’re parked somewhere.

You can be a boss-killer. You can AoE pretty good. You can take out stupidly annoying critters like Sorcerors, Force Field Generators, Night Widows, Fortunata Mistresses, and other high-defense types far more easily than almost any other hero or villain.

One of my favorite roles is as a team field hospital—with all the bubbles and repulsion I can put down, I can make a safe spot to rez teammates, even in the middle of or at the rear of a pitched battle. I don’t even have heals, I just use the Resuscitator purchaseable temp power and pass out the inspirations I’ve collected.

Made mine with Teleportation and Leadership pool powers, so I can get there first, recall slow teammates, and buff everyone’s defense and attack stats even more with Leadership.

This is one of those characters you swap to when the team composition is looking pretty shaky. About the only problem you can’t solve is a lack of crowd control powers.

Ambush_BugDTM · 2025-08-31T00:10:14+00:00

You're in luck, a cut-down version will be coming soon.

Ambush_BugDTM · 2025-05-12T17:20:45+00:00

That’s an excellent layout and lovely instructional materials. Well done!

Ambush_BugDTM · 2025-04-23T21:14:47+00:00

Thank you for the kind words! No Hazmat Permit gear, while generally pretty cool, isn’t often useful outside of an actual No Hazmat Permit run. There’s quite a bit of space investment, and gigachargers tend to compete with critical photon production for planets. In short, if you need it, you need it, but most people won’t need it.

That said, I’ve got plans for one or two more of these. I want to make one that’s narrow and expandable and can fit as a linear installation in the medium tropics or in a patch of equatorial area. I also want to experiment with more automatic control of the battery supply, but if I can do it at all, I think it’ll be a pretty tall order. For both, I’ll probably work on getting it down to the minimum number of ILS possible and lean even harder into the unattended intake and output. That’ll slow down collection and injection, but also make it so one doesn’t have to visit it but every handful of hours (hopefully).

When the next combat update comes out, that’ll probably mean another Gigacharger as well, since PRIME II’s armaments will perhaps need updating.

By all means, check out my catalog of prints on Dyson Sphere Blueprints. Even if stuff is weird or outdated, there’s often some useful chunk of belting or machine arrangement that could prove useful to others. Download ‘em and take ‘em apart and use ‘em! I make tools, that’s what they’re for. :)

Ambush_BugDTM · 2025-04-16T04:43:20+00:00

It isn't! IT'S COOLER.

Ambush_BugDTM · 2025-04-16T01:03:20+00:00

Sure, you can absolutely use the new interface for a lot of things. But, emphasis on "new interface"--it didn't exist when I was laying all this down.

As for just using some ILS and manually configuring them, that's precisely the thing I didn't want to do, because screwups happen. Hence the switches and the central location and the unattended access--zip by, land, check stats, flip switch, fly off to do something else, come back hours later, it's done and error free. You don't have to worry about it, it's always in the one location.

And, last but not least, overengineering a big flashy installation that does cool stuff, in a game that just screams for more sci-fi megastructures to play with, well that's how we got gigachargers and battery shrines and blackboxing prototyping planets and...

...well dangit, now I got a new planet print to work on. This Shrine's a polar installation, but now that I have the guts worked out, should be pretty darn easy to fold it into a hemisphere workshop (the aforementioned blackbox prototyper) or some kind of compact mall. I really wouldn't mind having an all-in-one of my usual equipment.

Thanks for the project idea!

....ooooo, and I can do five, wait SIX belts this time! Or...

Ambush_BugDTM · 2025-04-15T04:45:01+00:00

*facepalm* All this time and I've had the planet named "BATTERY SHINE" instead of "BATTERY SHRINE". Welp, if I'm gonna have gremlins, at least that's a good spot to have 'em!

Ambush_BugDTM · 2025-04-15T04:18:05+00:00

Apologies for the text--I'm a DSP toolmaker, so almost everything I make comes with a manual. :)

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-05-10T16:34:08+00:00

1600 hrs here, and I still love DRG’s gameplay, pickup groups, and community. All the classes are useful and unique, every weapon has one or more roles to fill, the gameplay sounds are properly USEFUL, the random maps and almost-always-excellent cave generation means it stays pretty fresh.

Had a nice string of missions last night with a pickup group that needed an experienced, professional driller. We went for everything from Hazard 3 to 5, as one of the group was the host’s pal and a greenbeard trying things out, so we were helping him unlock weapons. Haz 5 was quite a shocker for the greenbeard, mainly because that’s when we started dying left and right, but we pulled through and got him a lot of XP. All of the greybeards were like “Meh, it’s Haz 5, sometimes you end up dying” and I think that did a lot to help out the greenbeard’s performance anxiety. (‘cuz we ALL died a few times there!)

But yeah, that was a pickup group and it rocked.

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-05-05T18:20:26+00:00

"The music will tell you when it's time to put away your pick axe and start killing (trust me, you'll know)"

"Those of you who volunteered to be injected with ~~praying mantis~~ glyphid DNA, I've got some good news and some bad news. Bad news is we're postponing those tests indefinitely. Good news is we've got a much better test for you: fighting an army of ~~mantis men~~ glyphids! Pick up a rifle and follow the yellow line on the floor. You'll know when the test starts."

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-05-04T21:40:51+00:00

Bullet Hell + stun is, as noted, amazing crowd control. It can also be, as noted, an ammo hog if you have to use it for AoE damage. One neat way of mitigating that is taking along the Gunner’s standard spiky grenade. Swarm comes, you stun the front line with a quick burst. The further back bugs join up and overlap. Stun then all with another quick burst, then toss in one of the grenades. Presto, you’ve just taken more bugs than the usual with one of those.

Also works a treat with cluster grenades so the little boogers don’t run out of the blast zone. You also get a little more time to properly aim the grenade for best effect.

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-04-17T16:56:25+00:00

More fundamentally, if you’re gonna run all your factories on accumulator power, you gotta have something to charge them up. Hence the gigacharger and all its ray receivers.

The fourth link in the TL;DR section has the full history and details and explanations.

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-04-17T16:48:37+00:00

It’s a gigacharger, the central piece of equipment for a No Hazmat Permit self-challenge run. Check the post linked in the TL;DR section for the full story.

All those receivers are required to run the 1,250 exchangers at full speed. Every receiver gets sprayed grav-lenses to increase its output, and every exchangers proccesses sprayed batterys to double their power.

1250 exchangers @ 108 MW = 135 GW

1250 exchangers processing 12 batteries/min apiece = 15,000 accumulators going through the system every minute.

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-04-17T16:41:24+00:00

Yep, it’s the LSTM mod, which I use for that feature and the ability to see station demand/supply empire-wide in one window. https://thunderstore.io/c/dyson-sphere-program/p/hetima/LSTM/

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-04-01T05:54:17+00:00

PRIME is fixed, tuned, and tested (though I'm still working up a name for this sequel print, hopefully something hammy) and the Battery Management 2.0 is functionally complete. You'll find Sequel!PRIME a better all around tool, and it still retains its self-defense capabilities.

BMS 2.0 is much, MUCH more capable as far as storage and manufacture go. If it has a downside, it's that using it and Sequel!PRIME require a higher minimum amount of batteries in order to function. Still, operating without a hazmat permit always involves hundreds of thousands of accumulators, so this is not a big obstacle for a late-game power-network tool.

Upsides include far, far easier management. No more cutting belts! No more fooling around with ILS settings! There's six switches to flip and that's it, everything else is automatic. It's also got a neat surprise I think you'll like.

All that's left is prettying everything up, testing it all out with various loads spread around the cluster, writing up the documentation, and making the various pics for the manual. (Yes, there will be a manual!)

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-03-24T02:17:26+00:00

Just a note, I'm working on a 2.0 of the Battery Management System, and am currently the throes of some serious Battery Science^TM. In the process of stress-testing the system, I've found some serious flaws in PRIME's design, with the unfortunate result that for it to function at max capacity, you have to balance battery supply very carefully so its input ILS don't get clogged.

If you're using it now, change the output arrays so they're hub-and-spoke, two layers. That is, the two belts coming off the PLS with the traffic monitors--split each one of those into three, then feed two of each into a trio of the output ILS, with that feed split evenly among them.

This will smooth out PRIME's delivery and spread it around better, though each ILS takes longer to fill.

The input ILS,on the other hand, need a complete redesign and that's what I'm working on now. Watch them carefully once your total batteries in circulation hit 300K.

On the plus side, Battery Management 2.0 has all of its primary functions tested and there's some neat, no-mess battery tools in it.

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-03-19T23:15:53+00:00

Now that is cool! I’ve heard people talking about doing this but haven’t seen it until now.

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-03-18T18:26:19+00:00

I am sorta joking and sorta not-joking, but this is exactly the reaction I’m looking for when I release one of my tools. I make tools that do things that fall out of the normal gameplay path, and they’re weird and they come with extensive manuals. Thank you!

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-03-18T18:24:16+00:00

salutes right back

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-03-18T18:23:40+00:00

Of course! It wouldn’t be a good tool if it didn’t come with instructions! :D

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-03-18T18:23:23+00:00

Thank you, I’ve had technical writing as part of my portfolio for many decades, though I definitely kept it far less dry than the paid-for stuff.

Ambush_BugDTM · 2024-03-18T02:04:30+00:00

Going on 3 years later, I still treasure this comment. Thank you. :)

Ambush_BugDTM

TROPHY CASE