Dyson Sprawl — High-Level Design

Dyson Sprawl is a blockchain strategy game set on a Dyson sphere under construction, built around contested expansion, resource economies, and continuous maintenance. Players are corporations, syndicates, and lone operators fighting for hexagonal panels of the megastructure — sector by sector, around the star itself.

At a glance:

• Hex map with unique, algorithmic tile seeds
• Land sold continuously through auctions on map edges
• Every tile has a maintenance obligation and resource yields
• Players mine and discover resources by submitting PoW-like proofs
• Neighbourhood licence clustering drives maintenance rates and territorial incentives
• Factions compete for a temporary six-point frontier crown
• Earth appears as the Offworld Compliance Agency: a funded faction that threatens warrants and enforcement, but plays by ordinary mechanics
• Optional military layer creates tactical conflict and economic pressure

The key design direction is that gameplay remains mostly economic and networked, with military as a meaningful but optional amplifier.

Core loop

1. Buy or bid for frontier tiles.
2. Discover resources on your tiles via hash-based mining.
3. Pay recurring maintenance in resource streams to earn USDCx yield.
4. Trade resources in an open economy to optimise your maintenance basket.
5. Align with a faction or remain independent as frontier politics harden.
6. Accept or resist OCA compliance pressure as Earth starts issuing warrants, bounties, and recruitment threats.
7. Expand outward or consolidate existing territory.
8. Defend against or execute Harberger acquisition claims and military raids.
9. Contest the six crown tiles on the outer ring to activate the faction victory stream.

Design aspirations

No dominant strategy. Every player archetype — Landlord, Miner, Trader, Warlord, Mercenary — should be viable. No single approach should consistently outperform all others. Emergent dominance is a balance signal, not an intended outcome.

Agent and bot friendly. The game is designed to be fully automatable. Maintenance optimisation, army movement, market trading, and acquisition sniping should all be scriptable. Sophisticated players get leverage through automation; the game is better for it.

Fully autonomous players. It should be possible to deploy an agent that plays the entire game — mines, trades, manages maintenance, hires mercenaries, executes acquisitions — and turns a profit for its owner with no human input.

Stable chaos. Players of vastly different sizes should coexist without the game collapsing into oligopoly or stagnation. The Harberger acquisition mechanism, clustering incentives, and the mercenary market all push against dominance concentration.

Temporary hegemony, not permanent victory. The game should acknowledge who is ahead. A faction that captures the outer crown should feel stronger immediately, but that status must be breakable the moment the sphere expands again.

What we are not trying to ship first

• Complex probabilistic combat
• Hard strategic bottlenecks that punish newcomers
• Huge unit trees before the core economy is stable

This spec document is deliberately practical and implementation-ready.