If you’ve played games like Factorio or Satisfactory, then you may find a lot to like about Dyson Sphere Program: a game where you build conveyor belts to automate construction of components from raw materials like hydrogen. All while working towards a bigger goal: to create a Dyson Sphere.
Despite having an in-game tutorial, Dyson Sphere Program can be slightly obtuse, especially if you’re new to the genre. We highly recommend checking out our Dyson Sphere Program beginner’s guide for tips on how to get started, from how the logistics tools work, to effective ways to conduct research.
Speaking of Matrix Labs, there comes a point in Dyson Sphere Program where you’ll need to harvest hydrogen to craft an Energy Matrix – a material that’s required to research mid-level upgrades and technologies like Photon frequency conversion. It’s not obvious how to make your first hydrogen, so we’ll be going over the requirements needed to unlock the necessary facilities, as well as the best way to extract hydrogen to create a steady flow of resources.
Dyson Sphere Program oil
To get hydrogen in Dyson Sphere Program, you need to upgrade your tech tree to unlock the ability to build an oil extractor and refinery. These are the tech tree upgrades you need to upgrade to, and some recommended additional items:
- Plasma extract refining: 100 electromagnetic matrix
- Fluid storage encapsulation: 50 electromagnetic matrix
- Improved logistics systems: 100 electromagnetic matrix
Oil extractors need to be placed on crude oil seeps. Each one generates a certain amount of crude oil every second. We recommend rotating the building with the R key so that the rear faces towards the direction you want to transport the oil. Run this over to an oil refinery, making sure to give it a sorter at the end to load the crude oil into the refinery.
Next you need to separate the crude oil. Click the oil refinery and then click the cog to select what material you want to refine. Select the refined oil (it’s the brownish droplet). This will mostly generate refined oil, but it also generates one hydrogen block for every two refined oil drops as a by-product.
In order to make your life easier, we recommend that you have one pipe leading outwards from the refinery, and a splitter with one exit prioritising the output of either hydrogen or refined oil. Have the two paths lead up to fluid storage tanks to stockpile any resources generated.
Dyson Sphere Program hydrogen
First things first, you need to unlock the crafting of energy matrices on the technology tree. The energy matrix requires 200 electromagnetic energy to unlock.
In order to make an energy matrix, you need to lead the hydrogen you generate into a new matrix lab. Build one on an empty space, assign it to create energy matrices, and put a path from your hydrogen storage tank to the matrix lab. You also need to run energetic graphite into the same matrix lab. This can be created by mining and smelting coal, but is also a by-product of X-Ray cracking (more on that in a bit).
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Once you have 400 energy matrices, we highly recommend that you invest in the vertical stacking upgrade, then build more matrix labs on top of your existing ones. This will speed up the generation rate for your energy matrices, as well as the matrix lab research.
Efficient ways to generate more hydrogen and how to get deuterium
Finally, you’ll likely want a steady flow of hydrogen to fuel your energy matrix generating desires, so here are some tips for getting tons of this valuable resource:
- X-Ray cracking allows you to further refine oil and hydrogen to create more hydrogen blocks, as well as a steady flow of energetic graphite – the other ingredient you need to make Energy Matrices. We recommend building a splitting path that goes towards both the matrix lab and a second oil refinery.
- To get even more hydrogen, it’s a good idea to build fractionators that lead back to the storage tank. 99% of the time, the fractionator will just churn out the hydrogen, but 1% of the time it will give you a deuterium.
- When laying out your oil refineries to refine the crude oil, you can have several refineries in a row to speed up the process of making hydrogen and refined oil. You can also have a bunch in a row to expedite the X-Ray cracking.
- You can also use the energetic graphite produced from refining the refined oil to generate thermal generators.
How to extract Hydrogen from gas giants
Finally, we should probably talk about gas giants. These are planets that you can’t land on, however you’re able to syphon hydrogen from its atmosphere with the help of Orbital Collectors.
- Gas giants exploitation – 1,200 electromagnetic matrix, 1,200 energy matrix, 1,200 structural matrix (Requires both Interstellar logistics system and Interstellar power transmission)
When you do have a few of these, place them along the gas giant’s equator and have some interstellar drones fly up to collect the hydrogen. It will also be able to collect fire ice, which is useful for making graphine quickly. You can learn more about drones and transferring resources between planets in our Dyson Sphere Program titanium guide, specifically the section that talks about transferring items across planets.
And that’s how you get hydrogen in Dyson Sphere Program. There’s tons of ways to efficiently generate rare resources, so stay tuned for more on the more complicated resources to find in the game.