sorry noob question, just bought it - no pause key?

[Skye88]

Pause key on keyboard does not work?

[TupperGamer90]

Pressing ESC will bring you to the title screen, otherwise if you change the key change put.

[Marcushla]

Yeah, as far as I know you can only pause the game with Esc button menu, or while in the Dyson Sphere Editor (Button at top left in the editor).

[Kyrros]

While there are mechanisms to 'pause' the game - they're not really needed. There's no real penalties for letting your game run while you figure out or otherwise plan what you're going to do next. Nothing is ever 'wasted', and the only things that will be made/extracted will be items you need; if you have factories running, they will simply run until the outputs are full then stop. If you have research going, it will run until you have no more research going. If you have queued research, you'll probably want it to run in the background anyways.

It's a habit from other games that you can feel free to train yourself away from in DSP, thankfully.

Unless you're playing on EXTREMELY low resource settings in the very beginning of a game, there's not really any real downside to just letting the game do it's thing while you're deciding yours. 'Running out of resources' is not something that's really going to happen in a regular game, with the exception of maybe Unipole magnets, if you start to extract them before your Vein Utilization tech is high enough to decently preserve them.

[Compass]

So can you even lose? I only played a few minutes and noticed there are no scenarios, just one main game mode.

[ANTI 666 LXIX]

No, there is no failure state, really. As of now, there are no enemies that will hinder or destroy your progress, although this is changing and enemies are in the future roadmap for development. Although there are not an infinite amount of resources, there are a vast number of them, so even if you largely screw something up, it's just about always possible to get back on track.

You don't have HP, you don't have a time limit to beat the game (but there are achievements that have certain time limits), so the game really is quite sandboxy and leaves you to do what you want as you want it.

[Compass]

Hmm, I think I might actually like that better. I'm pretty bad at these builder games and don't enjoy the stress factor in things like Anno. Just hopefully it's not too boring without any real risk (until the combat is added).

[DthBlayde]

Originally posted by Compass:

Hmm, I think I might actually like that better. I'm pretty bad at these builder games and don't enjoy the stress factor in things like Anno. Just hopefully it's not too boring without any real risk (until the combat is added).

the only real risk you'll be faced with is not having enough fuel in your inventory when you engage in interplanetary travel. It costs power to turn, accelerate -and- decelerate. If you over shoot a target planet and don't have enough fuel / power to slow down or turn....

may as well just reload at that point.

[josmith7]

Originally posted by Compass:

So can you even lose? I only played a few minutes and noticed there are no scenarios, just one main game mode.

There's no designed lose state.

You used to be able to get yourself trapped against a gas/ice giant if you didn't have enough fuel -- but they fixed that by allowing Icarus to directly harvest from the giant -- which will eventually net you enough fuel to power your way out of its gravity well.

If you run out of fuel mid-space it is certainly quicker and easier to reload a recent auto-save; but it isn't actually a game loss condition. If left along Icarus will very, very, slowly trickle charge his "batteries" so if you left him flying along for several hours you should have enough free energy to (carefully) turn him around and make landfall again.
(The reason that didn't work on gas giants was that hovering on their surface consumed power at a quicker rate than the emergency trickle charge would replace it)


About the only way to get stuck now is to somehow convert every scrap of some critical path resource into, say, buildings before you spend the meager resources it takes to unlock 'Drive Engine 2' and give Icarus the ability to fly. (And it'd probably take days or weeks of profligate waste to manage that). Because once Icarus can fly you always have the option (no matter how slow) of moving to another system and starting over -- and trying to lose by running the star cluster out of resources would probably take years!!

[Dragonmaster]

Game is a sandbox game (pretty much like the other factory builder games out there).

[Bobucles]

As others have mentioned, losing takes a very deliberate effort and idle time usually counts towards progress. There isn't much reason to pause, not when it's more likely to want to leave the game on overnight.

[Techsuport]

the lose sate is when you get bored, if you know how to set goals for yourself, then you will never fail.

[Steven]

Go to tech screen or dyson sphere editor window and click on the "time passing" toggle. Very frustrating to ask for something and just get a load of comments saying 'why though...'

[CPT Chthonbeard the Pirate]

Originally posted by Steven:

Go to tech screen or dyson sphere editor window and click on the "time passing" toggle. Very frustrating to ask for something and just get a load of comments saying 'why though...'

Also very annoying to have someone necro a thread to respond with a feature that wasn't implemented when the question was asked.

[Krycus]

I'd honestly love a rewind key/option

[Shiroe (cortana)]

Originally posted by Krycus:

I'd honestly love a rewind key/option

there is...
Its called save files...