PowerMeter

日本語版はこちら / Japanese version

A Dyson Sphere Program mod that keeps the power situation of your current planet, your current star system, and every star system on screen at all times.

You no longer have to reopen the statistics window every time you want to check power. While you are building, the headroom you have left and the energy moving through your Energy Exchangers are simply there to read.

In the screenshot above, the planet the mecha is standing on only generates 20.6 MW against a demand of 288 MW — the rest arrives as 270 MW of discharge from an Energy Exchanger. At the same time the star system as a whole is at 88% load, so its generation headroom is running thin.

The widget is drawn with uGUI underneath the game's own HUD, so it follows the game's font and UI scale, and hides itself in the main menu.

Columns

Column	What it is	In-game statistics panel
Gen	Power actually being generated	(sum of the lower circles)
Demand	Power the consumers are asking for	Consumption Demand
Cap	Maximum generation capability	Generation Capacity
Load	Gen / Cap. How much generation headroom is left	(PowerMeter's own)
Suff	Served / Demand. Below 100% only when power is short	Sufficiency
Charge	Power going into accumulators and Energy Exchangers	Charging Power
Discharge	Power coming out of them	Discharging Power
Stored	Energy sitting in accumulators	Accumulated

Gen, Demand, Cap, Load, Charge and Discharge are shown by default. Suff and Stored can be added in the config.

Load turns a warning colour at 90% and above, Suff below 95%.

A note on the numbers

The last digit can differ from the in-game panel (for example 35.9 GW against 35.8 GW). This is not a difference in the data — the game's StringBuilderUtility.WriteKMGPower truncates, while PowerMeter rounds to 3 significant digits.

Requirements

Dyson Sphere Program	Unity 2022.3 line (verified on Early Access 0.10.34)
BepInEx	5.4.17
Mod manager	r2modman

Installing

PowerMeter is not on Thunderstore, but r2modman can manage it like any other mod through a local import — it appears in the mod list alongside everything else and can be toggled on and off.

Option A: let r2modman manage it

Build the package:

dotnet build -c Release -t:Package

This produces artifacts\endo5501-PowerMeter-<version>.zip. Load it from Settings → Install local mod in r2modman. The zip carries a Thunderstore V1 manifest.json, so the name, author, version and the BepInEx dependency are all picked up automatically.

Do not combine this with option B. The same plugin sitting in both plugins\PowerMeter\ and the folder r2modman unpacks means one GUID registered twice, and BepInEx will refuse to load one of them. When you switch to r2modman, delete plugins\PowerMeter\ and set DeployToProfile to false in Directory.Build.props.

Option B: copy straight into the profile

Building copies the DLLs into the profile's plugins folder by default. During development this is the quicker loop — edit, build, relaunch.

dotnet build -c Release

Lands in:

%AppData%\r2modmanPlus-local\DysonSphereProgram\profiles\Default\BepInEx\plugins\PowerMeter\
  PowerMeter.Plugin.dll
  PowerMeter.Core.dll

The automatic copy is controlled by DeployToProfile in Directory.Build.props. To suppress it for a single build, pass /p:DeployToProfile=false.

Either way, launch the game from r2modman afterwards. The config file is created on the first run.

Using it

Alt + P toggles the widget. The key is configurable.

Configuration

The config file is written to the path below, and is also reachable through r2modman's Config editor.

%AppData%\r2modmanPlus-local\DysonSphereProgram\profiles\Default\BepInEx\config\com.endo5501.dsp.PowerMeter.cfg

Position, font size and which columns are shown all take effect without restarting the game.

General

Key	Default
Enabled	true	Turns the mod on and off
ToggleHotkey	P + LeftAlt	Visibility toggle
UpdateIntervalSeconds	0.5	How often the values are recomputed. 0.1–5.0
Language	Auto	Label language. Auto follows the game's setting. Japanese / English

Layout

Key	Default
Corner	TopRight	TopLeft / TopRight / BottomLeft / BottomRight
OffsetX / OffsetY	16	Offset from that corner
FontSize	14	Font size. The whole widget scales with it
BackgroundOpacity	0.55	Background panel opacity. 0 for no background

Columns

Key	Default
ShowCapacity	true	The Cap column
ShowUtilization	true	The Load column
ShowSatisfaction	false	The Suff column
ChargeColumn	Split	Split (charge and discharge separately) / Net (one signed column) / Off
ShowAccumulated	false	The Stored column
UtilizationWarningPercent	90	Load warns at this value and above
SatisfactionWarningPercent	95	Suff warns below this value

Diagnostics

Key	Default
DiagnosticLogging	false	Writes the aggregated results, and the unrounded W / J values, to the BepInEx log
DiagnosticLogIntervalSeconds	5	How often

If a displayed value looks wrong, set DiagnosticLogging to true and the raw numbers appear in BepInEx\LogOutput.log, ready to compare against the in-game statistics panel.

Development

Layout

The logic that depends on neither the game nor Unity lives in PowerMeter.Core, and that is the part covered by unit tests. GamePowerSampler is the only file that touches game types.

PowerMeter.sln
Directory.Build.props            Game / BepInEx paths, deployment switch
packaging/
  manifest.json                  Thunderstore V1. Carries author, so no filename convention needed
  icon.png                       256x256
src/
  PowerMeter.Core/               netstandard2.0. No game or Unity references
    PowerScope.cs                Aggregation scope (Planet / Star / Global)
    NetworkSample.cs             Raw values of one power network
    PowerSnapshot.cs             Aggregated result
    PowerAggregator.cs           Per-scope sums and ratios
    PowerFormatter.cs            W / J / % formatting
  PowerMeter.Plugin/             net472. BepInEx glue
    PowerMeterPlugin.cs          Entry point
    PowerMeterConfig.cs          Config binding
    GamePowerSampler.cs          Game state -> NetworkSample, the boundary
    UI/PowerMeterWidget.cs       The uGUI widget
    UI/WidgetLabels.cs           English / Japanese labels
tests/
  PowerMeter.Core.Tests/         net7.0 / xUnit

What you need

• .NET SDK 7 or newer
• The game, and an r2modman profile with BepInEx 5.4.17 installed

Game DLLs and BepInEx are referenced straight from the local install, so no NuGet feed configuration is needed — the only packages are the net472 reference assemblies and the test dependencies.

If your paths differ from the defaults, override them with environment variables:

DSP_GAME_DIR      The game folder
DSP_BEPINEX_DIR   The BepInEx folder (inside the profile)

Tests

dotnet test

Packaging

dotnet build -c Release -t:Package

Collects manifest.json, icon.png, both READMEs, LICENSE and the two DLLs into artifacts\endo5501-PowerMeter-<version>.zip. It is a Thunderstore package as-is, so the same zip works for publishing there.

PowerMeterVersion in Directory.Build.props is the single source of truth for the version. Packaging fails if version_number in packaging/manifest.json has drifted from it, and it fails outside the Release configuration.

The screenshot is deliberately left out of the zip. Neither Thunderstore nor r2modman resolves relative image paths in a README, so the READMEs link to it by absolute URL on GitHub instead and the image still renders on the package page.

Where the power values come from

Every PowerNetwork in GameMain.data.factories[i].powerSystem.netPool[] is summed directly. Those values persist across ticks, so reading them from UI code is safe. Converting to watts is a multiplication by GameMain.tickPerSecI.

The following are not used, and the reasons are worth keeping:

• FactoryProductionStat.powerGenRegister and the other registers — cleared after each tick's aggregation, so reading them from the UI catches zeroes or partial values
• AstroPowerStatPlan.CalculateAstroPowerBaseInfo() — depends on internal state such as statFactoryIndices and cannot be used standalone without the OnInit lifecycle
• PowerNetwork.energyAccumulated — close in name, but it belongs to the building tooltip. The statistics window's Accumulated is energyStored

Every column was checked against the in-game statistics panel on a live save. The behaviour of planets receiving from and charging into an Energy Exchanger is pinned by regression tests.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.