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10 Oct 2026 · Field Notes

A Galaxy for Dad

An unfinished Dyson sphere, a lattice of metal rings and solar panels, wrapped around a blazing amber star, with a small blue planet below and a teal nebula across a dark starfield

My dad plays Dyson Sphere Program. If you haven’t met it: you land on a planet with a mech and a pickaxe, and some hundreds of hours later you are wrapping a star in a shell of solar sails to power a factory that spans dozens of worlds. It is a game about logistics. It runs in the family.

Dad kept his empire in a spreadsheet. Planet, item, latitude, longitude, notes. The coordinates were typed the way a person types them, 62S, 16E, which is perfectly clear to a human and perfectly useless to a formula. The spreadsheet worked the way spreadsheets work: right up until you need it to answer a question.

So in late September, in a Brisbane hotel room, I started building him something better. Three days and 34 commits later it was called SphereNav, and it was on version 2.8.

The galaxy is a number

Every Dyson Sphere Program galaxy comes from a cluster address, a short string such as 12345678-64-Z10-10: the seed, the number of stars, a letter for the combat setting, and the resource multiplier. Same address, same galaxy, every star and planet in the same place. So if you can run the game’s own generation maths, you never have to type a planet in. You type the address and the galaxy appears.

Someone has already done the hard part. An open-source tool called DSPSeedCalc reproduces the game’s galaxy generation, and SphereNav runs it compiled unchanged into WebAssembly, inside the browser. It doesn’t rewrite the maths in JavaScript, where it would be easy to get subtly wrong. It’s the original code, running on a phone.

“Subtly wrong” is the whole risk with a tool like this, so it was checked against the game. Seed 10, 64 stars: 241 planets, and not one difference in resource nodes or amounts. Dad’s own galaxy came out at 64 stars and 243 planets.

It also says what it can’t do. The ore amounts are only exact at the game’s standard resource setting. At any other setting the app shows the standard figure, labels it as a reference, and leaves the real number blank for Dad to fill in. I’d rather a tool admitted a gap than filled it with a guess.

Then the spreadsheet questions

Once the galaxy existed, the rest could hang off it:

  • His factories, recorded against real planets, imported from the old spreadsheet with a review step so nothing lands in the wrong system. The compass coordinates are finally understood.
  • A recipe book. 174 items and 161 recipes from the game’s own data. “How do I make processors?” and “what uses graphene?” both work, with no AI service involved, just lookups.
  • A production planner that draws the whole chain as a flow diagram, then checks it against what he’s already making: what am I missing?
  • A logbook for to-dos and sightings of Dark Fog relays, the game’s resident menace.
  • 45 community blueprints, linked back to their creators rather than copied.

It installs to the home screen and works offline.

Why bother

There are fan-made tools for this game already, and some are very good. None of them were built around one man’s spreadsheet and his habit of writing coordinates with a compass point.

That’s the build I’d recommend to anyone who makes things: one tool, for one person, answering the questions they actually ask. Whether the spreadsheet survives is up to him.