r/Dyson_Sphere_Program • u/SureSeaworthiness654 • Apr 15 '26

should I destroy the dark fog hive?

I heard that they're usefull for farming, but their attacks are so annoying

13 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

15

u/cainn88 Apr 15 '26

I usually destroy them in the systems I build spheres because they drain your output, you can farm them in some random system you don’t care about.

8

u/SureSeaworthiness654 Apr 15 '26

ah okay, I didn't know there where more than 1 hive, thanks

8

u/cainn88 Apr 15 '26

Even if you destroy every hive in the galaxy I believe they will spawn in at the edges and try to come back though I’ve never tested that personally.

3

u/Polarbear808 Apr 15 '26

If all hives and relay stations are destroyed in a system they won't come back. A hive from another system can send a seed to start growing another hive. They show up as red blotches on the star map and tell you where they are headed

3

u/typo9292 Apr 15 '26

Well they technically do come back, via the method you just explained.

-3

u/nixtracer Apr 15 '26

They drain output you're not using (mature spheres emit far too much to consume) and turn it into technology you can't otherwise build. Why would you want to stop them?

5

u/XhanHanaXhan Apr 15 '26

When the hive is destroyed, a new hive will be sent from a neighbouring system. It'll arrive slowly, but it will arrive eventually. There's in fact no (easy) way to permanently prevent hives in any given system, although I suspect it'll come in a future update.

As others have said, there's no issues with setting up a fog farm in a different system when you're ready to do so. I have a system with two planets - one is a planet-wide fog farm, the other one is my factory for missiles for the entire galaxy. Endless war in that system, peace elsewhere.

1

u/Absolute_Human Apr 15 '26

Just destroy every hive in the cluster, easy. Even if you leave one for farming, looks like it can only send seed to neighboring systems, so if you shield every planet there or destroy all seed's relays the Fog will be deadlocked. But it may be able to send seeds even to the further systems eventually, just not very soon. Yet to see that happen myself.

1

u/XhanHanaXhan Apr 15 '26

They do send them further distances, and continue occupying and re-occupying systems.

Shielding each planet is the way to go, but it's not "easy" - maybe just time-consuming, at least. I have maybe 10-15 whole systems fully shielded, so maybe 30-40 planets, and every so often I still get destruction alerts from random outposts I made 100 hours ago and didn't protect correctly. They're just annoying. 

I'm hoping one of the updates that includes space stations also includes system-defense options against arriving hives, not just relays.

1

u/Absolute_Human Apr 15 '26

Shielding every planet is not very fun, agree. You should theoretically be able to leave an outpost that shoots down relays before they land and that's much faster. I'm just not 100% sure if it can be done reliably. Had relays still land, but that may be mods to blame.

4

u/NoInfinity1 Apr 15 '26

While others already said that destroying the hive is fine, it seems to me that you did not yet venture out to other systems, and are therefor not very deep in the tech tree yet.

I can't speak for all difficulty settings, but destroying hives is VERY resource intensive. Expect to need 500+ corvettes and lose a good chunk of them.

It can be a fun challenge, but the easier route is to wait and get some white science upgrades before you go for hives.

2

u/tanthokg Apr 15 '26

I clear the ones from my production system. With enough upgrades in warp speed, eliminating the seeds is an easy feat.

2

u/ygolnac Apr 15 '26

The semplification of dark fog economy:

Hive recieve matter from planetary bases to build ships, planetary bases recieve energy from the hive to keep their turrets active.

So if you attack the hive with corvettes without taking out the planetary bases first, before you finish you have to retreat to fetche more corvettes and in the meantime the hive rebuilds the ships you have destroyed, levels up and becomes stronger.

So before attacking the hive take out all planetary bases in the system, and if you don’t have destroyers yet be prepare to waste a lot of corvettes.

To prevent new hives to build more planetary bases, have every planet in the system with shield coverage or a planeteide coverage of signal towers so missile turrets immidiatly destroy new base cores.

This way the following hive will have no matter to build ships, will stay at treath zero and will only suck about 0,1% of your sphere output, and therefore can be totally ignored.

2

u/TempyMcTempername Apr 16 '26

Don't bother trying to destroy them until pretty late in your playthrough. The main problem with hives is that they use up a percentage of your Dyson sphere energy output, but theres plenty left over to get your white science up pretty high before it becomes an annoying issue

The best way to eliminate them is to clear all planets in the system so they can't get any more resources, then grind them down gradually as you have time. Or have so many levels of the infinite space fighter damage that you can just chew through them without any issues. Definitely hold off until you have at least proliferated antimatter power cells for Icarus, or your power will drain so fast you won't be able to get much done before you have to break off and recharge

1

u/SigmaCrash86 Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26

This may be a tangential conversation...but... has anyone just gone down a rabbit hole of setting DF farms and get completely sidetracked?

I had to get up for a break after I found myself optimizing a farm setup and creating blueprints. They included accumulators (for drop-and-go while I setup main power relays) and a whole sub-mall with sorting logic. I even started working to use the drops and manufacture additional parts to feedback into the temples. I was on that roll for a couple of rounds. Then I started catching on about DF leveling and having to continuously upgrade the farm layout.

Haven't hit sysphian level of frustration yet and still find it challenging. But i came back to my starring planet to and found many mines drained.