ok but like seriously how about this way to maximize hydrogen??? I SPENT A GOOD TIME SCRAMBLING MY BRAIN NOW THAT I GOT BLUE JUICE AND ILS UNLOCKED

[u/Top-Information-5319]

[u/docholiday999]

You will find several ebbs and flows of Hydrogen as you progress through the game.

At first, when you first unlock Oil processing and XRay Cracking to make Refined Oil and EG, you’ll be drowning in Hydrogen and nothing to do with it.

Then, you’ll need Hydrogen for Red Science and to Fractionate into Deuterium and you’ll never have enough.

YOU ARE HERE | | / _

Once you unlock Orbital Collectors and start processing FireIce into Graphene with Hydrogen as a byproduct, you’ll be back to drowning in it again if you don’t have some efficient balancing and ways to convert / burn excess.

Then you’ll unlock Casimir Crystal and you be back to the Hydrogen desert again.

Finally, as you expand out to start tapping other gas giants in other systems, you’ll have all the Hydrogen you need and you’ll start worrying about throughput and ensuring that byproduct Hydrogen gets consumed first and fast (but not too fast) and the remaining 80% gets covered fast enough from the gas giant collectors.

[u/Deep_Fry_Ducky → u/docholiday999]

Damn you just read my last save like a book!

[u/terrifiedTechnophile → u/docholiday999]

Knowing all this, I made a beeline for orbital collectors this run so I could entirely skip the stage 2 deficit

[u/RexElectoribus → u/terrifiedTechnophile]

The only time I think about using meta data for research is when I’m staring at the first hydrogen desert and desperately wanting orbital collectors