Guide:Starting Research
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After reaching level 8 research is one of the best things to help you advance quickly. This guide will walk you through the available research and advise on the best options.
As you may already know, this 
is an Isolinear Chip. These chips (commonly referred to as Isos) are required to research anything so now you probably have two questions - "How do I make them?" and "Where do I make them?".
Research Centre
This is a research centre, these can only be built on grass and cost just 60 Plasteel and 5 Duranium to build. It is probably best if you build this on either your M class planet or your moderate class planet. Each tick this will require 5 Workers and consumes 6 Energy, 5 Plasteel, 2 Iridium Ore, 2 Duranium and 2 Deuterium, but will make 1 valuable Isolinear Chip!
Each research centre can also support 5 scientists, each of these scientists will make 0.1 Isos each tick, meaning every 2 ticks the centre will produce 3 Isolinear Chips. To assign scientists go to the colony, click on settings, type 5 into the scientists box and then click assign - you will of course need 5 unemployed people to assign as scientists.
Contents |
What to research first
When your Research Centre is complete, enter the building and select the 'Research' option from the list they give you. Click on the Research Centre and then on "Research" this is shown in the image below.
You will then be presented with what might be a daunting list of research items; most of them will be Grey which means that you have yet to unlock them. Some will be in Yellow meaning that they are unlocked, but you have yet to start them.
We recommend that the first item you research is Orbital Construction, this costs 40 Isolinear Chips and will take 2 days to research. This will cause Jupiter Station Construction to be unlocked and you should research this for 60 Isolinear Chips. That will take 3 days to complete.
Jupiter Stations
Now that Jupiter Station Research is complete you can build jupiter stations, when 10 scientists are assigned, these produce 2 isolinear chips each tick for 20 energy. Jupiter stations are the most popular type of research building and the plans shown below give some options for building a research planet using them, generally water and desert planets are popular for this.
None of these plans require research* (excluding jupiter station research) or terraforming (excluding woods to grass) and don't need lots of internal reputation to run. The first plan produces 6 isolinear chips self sufficiently on a water planet - it also has some nature preserves and environmentalists which will help boost your internal reputation. The second of the plans also is on a water planet and produces 8 isos but imports 2 food each tick. The final plan is on a desert planet, this also produces 8 isos at the cost of 19 deuterium each tick, however its main benefit is its extensive storage capacity.
* The subsurface storage facilities on the desert require global blasting research but tunnel systems would work in the short term
What should I research after Jupiter Stations?
There are many options open to you, but this guide will be split into three sections for ease of explaining it.
- Economic Advancement
Very useful to make sure you can build a lot of the bigger colony plans and so you can produce more building types on your colonies. - Offensive/Defensive Military Advancement
Military ships/fleets and torpedoes which are essential for defence or attacks. - General Research Items - stations and other areas which do not fall neatly into one of the two other categories.
Firstly we will focus on Economic Advancement lines of research. Research can accurately be described as a tangled web which many can find confusing. Therefore, we will lay this out in a step by step approach so you can hopefully easily follow along.
Section 1 - Economic Advancement
Our primary aim for economic advancement is to complete Global Blasting research, this allows a number of new terraforming techniques which are essential for many colony plans such as creating more craters on your asteroids. Unfortunately Global Blasting has a number of prerequisite technologies which must be research first for it to be unlocked:
- Warp Field Theory
This is a good starting point for 60 Isolinear Chips taking 10 ticks. It is a basic requirement for many ships, but also Torpedo Construction which is needed for important terraforming which is the end point of this research sequence.
- Adv. Antimatter Technologies
This costs 80 Isolinear Chips and needs 10 ticks to be completed. M/AM Annihilation and Double Accelerator Construction become unlocked.
- M/AM Annihilation
This costs 80 Isolinear Chips and after 7 ticks will enable Torpedo Construction.
- Torpedo Construction
Costing 100 Isolinear Chips and taking 10 ticks to complete Torpedo Construction allows you to build Photon Torpedoes from Torpedo Factories (
) . These will be needed for terraforming later on so you should set up at least one torpedo factory producing them. Now you can build Photon Torpedoes 
you have completed half of the research required for the main type of terraforming: Global Blasting.
- Terraforming Technologies
This costs 100 Isolinear Chips taking 10 ticks. It unlocks Global Blasting and Cascade Melting which is something you may never need.
| From | To | Requires |
|---|---|---|
| 
| 5 Ticks 200 Food |
|
| 5 Ticks 200 Food |
| Note: Desert can only be converted to grassland on M class planets. | ||
| 
| 21 Ticks 2000 Deuterium |
- Global Blasting
We have finally reached the end goal of this research chain, global blasting a vital piece of research for numerous colony plans. Research this for 200 Isolinear Chips taking 15 ticks and you will be able to do lots of new terraforming techniques which all cost 10 Photon Torpedoes to do, it also allows upgrading tunnel systems to subsurface storage facilities:
| From | To | Requires |
|---|---|---|
|
| 3 Ticks 10 Photon Torpedoes |
|
| 2 Ticks 10 Photon Torpedoes |
|
| 
| 1 Tick 10 Photon Torpedoes |
|
| 3 Ticks 50 Reputation 10 Photon Torpedoes |
| 
| 20 Plasteel 50 Duranium 5 Photon Torpedoes |
Optional Steps
While we have completed the most important research to enable most colony plans there are a number of other technologies which could be useful for you
- Tectonics
This might be useful in some situations, but probably shouldn't be a priority for research. Generally it is only used when creating an additional volcano on a lava planet or if converting an M class to a storage planet. For 400 Isolinear Chips taking 30 ticks it enables you to undo most methods of Global Blasting except Rock to Crater which needs Cascade Melting.
| From | To | Requires |
|---|---|---|
| 
| 14 Ticks 50 Antimatter 40 Photon Torpedoes |
| 
| 16 Ticks 50 Antimatter 40 Photon Torpedoes |
| 
| 4 Ticks 50 Antimatter 40 Photon Torpedoes |
- Cascade Melting
The last remaining terraforming research is cascade melting, this costs a further 800 Isolinear Chips and takes 50 ticks. This should NOT be necessary for you to do and therefore we strongly recommend you don't waste your Isolinear Chips! Generally the only viable reason for using Cascade melting is if you want to reposition volcanos, coregap or craters on a colony, this would only be necessary if you want to do something like cover them all with a single shield tower.
| From | To | Requires |
|---|---|---|
|
| 10 Ticks 20 Antimatter 10 Dilithium |
|
| 
| 18 Ticks 50 Antimatter 80 Sorium |
| 
| 13 Ticks 400 Deuterium 10 Photon Torpedoes 150 Plasma |
Plasma Converter Construction
This costs 180 Isolinear Chips and allows the construction of Plasma Converters which each produce 4 plasma each tick, from an economic point of view this is only required if you wish to produce plasma. However it is a prerequisite for disruptor weapon development so once you start military research it will probably become a priority.
Dual Accelerator Construction
This can be researched for 60 Isolinear Chips in 10 ticks and allows particle accelerators to be upgraded to dual particle accelerators. On antimatter production colonies this allows the same amount of antimatter to be produced with half the workers and half the colony fields used (but still 10 energy per antimatter), this slightly increases the efficiency of these colonies. However if you're not looking at producing large quantities of antimatter its not a priority.
Sorium Mining
Sorium Mining will let you build Sorium Mines needed for Ice Planet and Ice Asteroid plans I showed you. This costs 790 Isolinear Chips and takes a long 85 ticks. While Sorium is a valuable resource to trade there is very little use for it in the early stages of the game so this really isn't essential and therefore you might want to leave it until later!
On planets and asteroids you might find yourself short of room on the colony surface to accommodate all your key buildings. One solution might be converting Open Space to Dyson Segments (
--> 
) at the cost of 50 Plasteel, 100 Duranium and 100 Deuterium above your colony which act as platforms to build a variety of colony buildings on e.g. Hydroponic Dome (
).
To achieve this you will have to research:
- Adv. Orbital Construction
This needs 120 Isolinear Chips and requires 15 ticks. - Orbital Complex Structures
This needs 260 Isolinear Chips requiring 20 ticks. - Space Elevator Construction
This needs 240 Isolinear Chips and requires 20 ticks. To use Dyson sphere segments you must have an active Workbee SpacePort and Space Elevator. - Dyson Sphere Construction
This costs 200 Isolinear Chips and will finish in 20 cycles.
This research chain is NOT essential research in the short term and should be considered as something to research only when you really need it which might not be for a while! It is generally useful for increasing production on asteroid fields by making full use of the space.
