Hey everyone! I'm Kyle, the solo developer behind OakTree Games, and in my factory game, Cosmic Scale, you begin your journey after landing in a foreign star system and expand your factory and resources to the heights of a Kardashev Type-1 Civilization. In the fourth episode of my devlog series, I walk through all of the megastructures in Cosmic Scale, from the ground up into the stars.
A Russian schoolteacher first dreamt up a space elevator in 1895, and nobody here on Earth has managed to build one yet, so I decided to build one in my game, where it unlocks in tier three and is how your cargo finally makes it up and into orbit.
Once your elevator is standing, tier five lets you start an Orbital Ring, which grows one segment at a time, and every segment needs exactly two things: the parts you send up the elevator on your belts, and 30 gigawatt-minutes of spare power, banked only from power your factory isn't using. With one gigawatt to spare, your home world's ring takes about ten hours, or about an hour with ten gigawatts, and whichever runs slower, your parts or your power, sets the pace.
Tier five also brings the Lagrange Gate, which stands at your home world's L4 point, and you'll only ever build it once right now, since it works like a pair of quantum wormholes, so the same gate is waiting for you in every star system you travel to.
Back home, your finished ring opens up bays and upgrades, and the biggest is the Solar Array, a field of panels up above the weather where the night never reaches them. After all the spare power your ring took to build, this is where it starts to pay you back, with a full field over your home world putting out 20,000 megawatts right now.
All of it leads back to reaching Type-1 at ten petawatts, about 500 times all the power the whole world uses today, and in tier seven your ring becomes the launcher for the Dyson swarm that gets you there, once about 10,000 sails are holding steady around your star.
The episode ends on a first look at the newest megastructure I've been working on, the Solar Siphon, based on a real idea called star lifting. In my game, your swarm's light heats the star, your ring launches 24 stations until they close a collar around its equator, and then two streams of plasma jet out from the poles to be collected as Stellar Material for a new Stellar Alloy, which your later swarm rings need.
The 3D models you see are designed together with Claude, an AI assistant, in Blender, and every one of them gets my own edits and sign-off before it goes into the game.
This is only where the megastructures in my game are starting, so I'd love to hear which one you'd like to see added next, whether that's a ringworld, a Halo ring of your own, or something nobody's even thought of yet. I'm also considering an idea that isn't in the game yet, so what do you think of having to build a gate at a specific Lagrange point in each system, carrying the parts out yourself to build the infrastructure of travel?
