Here, we’ve answered some of the more frequently asked questions about Dyson Sphere Program — we’ll keep it updated as we learn more.
How to extract and refine crude oil
Crude oil is an item you should encounter fairly early on in the game, as it’s a natural resource in the world where you begin building your factory. Oil is a very useful item in the early game, as unlike coal and other items it doesn’t seem to be limited by anything other than the speed at which you can extract it — so it’s the most efficient way of heating your thermal power plants, for example. You can begin making use of this item using the appropriately-named Oil Extractor. To extract crude oil, you need to manually drag with the transport belt while hovering the mouse over the Oil Extractor. Players are reporting that this currently results in a red-lit collision error from the game (Early Access teething problems, presumably), but it should still work regardless.
Once oil is extracted, it can be moved around in the same way as other ores — despite being a liquid, it will behave quite agreeably like a solid block for transport purposes. This means you can plop it right down on a conveyor or sorter and send it to a refinery without worrying about it going everywhere. After taking a trip through the refinery, your supply of refined oil will remember that it’s a liquid. Fortunately it can still be transported in cube form on sorters and conveyors, but for the long-term you will need to ship it to a dedicated liquid storage tank. In practice the tanks behave just like crates for moving and storing more solid items, including being stackable if you’re tight on space.
How to find titanium
Titanium is a pretty vital resource in Dyson Sphere Program if you’re hoping to take your factory production up to an intergalactic scale — which is kind of the whole point, after all. You need a small amount of titanium before you can even begin to ship items off-planet, thanks to its involvement in unlocking the Interstellar logistics system research node — so here’s how to make sure you get what you need to really get things moving.
The key thing here is not to panic if your starting planet doesn’t have titanium as a natural resource. While you can’t transport items between planets until you’ve got your transport logistics all ironed out, you can complete the research that allows you to travel to other planets until you find one with the load-out you need. The raw resource needed to mine titanium is stone, so once you find a planet with stone, set up a mining outpost to harvest the resources there. Mining stone nets you both titanium and steel, both of which are needed to unlock the full logistics system tech branch.
How to use secondary recipes for energetic graphite, increased hydrogen production, and more
To use secondary recipes — such as the one that gives an alternative method for making energetic graphite, or allows you to produce hydrogen much more quickly — you’ll need to use the X-ray cracking technique. X-ray cracking is unlocked by researching it in the tech tree.
How to maximise efficient use of Crude Oil in generating Hydrogen and Graphite
Credit for this one goes to Reddit user u/pi2infinity, who’s worked out a winning formula for converting 30 Crude Oil into 30 Hydrogen plus 15 Graphite, as well as giving some helpful pointers about how best to distribute the excess. Check out their flow chart here.
For more on Dyson Sphere Program, check out our guide to logistics and transport, including how to unlock the Interstellar logistics system.
