Published 29 Jan, 2021
While I keep changing my mind about how much I personally enjoy Dyson Sphere Program, there’s one thing I can say without hesitation: this is a bloody impressive piece of work. Despite being new into early access, it’s got a honkingly broad feature set already, and the sort of wildly ambitious premise you’d sneer away as a pipe dream, if it wasn’t implemented already.
That premise? To create an interstellar industrial empire, on a scale where you can capture entire stars and put them to work, like those poor dinosaurs which the Flintstones would imprison in their kitchen appliances. But great galactic oaks from little acorns grow, and this preposterous work begins with a single mech, walking about on a spherical 3D planet.
The Plasma Extract Refining tech also unlocks the Oil Refinery, which breaks down 2 Crude Oil into 2 Refined Oil and 1 Hydrogen. Which isn t a great ratio, because we re going to need a lot of Hydrogen if we want to automate production of those pesky red Matrix cubes.
For anyone confused about how to get some good Hydrogen production started, the answer is: X-Ray Cracking.
Unlock X-Ray Cracking for Hydrogen
X-Ray Cracking is a marvellous technology, and you should make it the very first thing you unlock with red Matrix cubes.
X-Ray Cracking is a technology which unlocks a new recipe in the Oil Refinery. Instead of 2 Crude Oil becoming 2 Refined Oil and 1 Hydrogen, the new X-Ray Cracking recipe converts 2 Hydrogen and 1 Refined Oil into 3 Hydrogen and 1 Energetic Graphite.