Dyson Sphere Program: Dark Fog Achievements Guide (WIP)

Hey there,

Some of the achievements were quite tricky to figure out so I thought I would share my findings, and while at it, might as well write guide for all of them. I’m still in the process of completing some of these my self, so this is still work in progress and for some achievements best I can do is share how I think they should be approached, but once I get them I will update the guide.

> Activate Supernova.

The easiest Achievement just build a turret, open it’s menu and press the Supernova Button.

> Collect 1m 10m and 100m soil piles from Dark Fog

While the first one you should be able to get by just playing the game normally and fighting the Dark Fog here and there, for the other two is best to build a farm. Farm is a base that you build on a very infected planet (10+ Dark Fog planetary bases), that will be able to defend it’s self against waves the Dark Fog will send. I used this great blueprint [www.dysonsphereblueprints.com], it also collects all the items you need to research all the hidden technologies, so it will help you with that achievement as well.

Once you place the base and make sure it is supplied with all the ammo it needs, you can leave it and it will collect soil for you at decent pace, this can still be to slow for you though so what you can do is place this base really close to a dark fog one, this will make it send units after you non-stop and that results in way more soil / m.

> Land on a planet that is 8000m or closer to a Dark Fog Hive.

Quite easy to get, once you have universe exploration on level 4 it’s very easy to just go through all the planetary system in your star cluster and find one where a Dark Fog hive is orbiting close to one of the planets.

> Find Dark Fog Communicator.

This took me 100 hours to get, why? Because I turned off space navigation and this prevents you from seeing the communicator when it randomly appears somewhere in the sky. When you don’t turn of your space navigation, it really isn’t hard to spot it, just make sure pin it when you do spot it so you can visit it when you research space flight.

You can control your space navigation under the Detail Display (H) menu. When the dark fog communicator does appear it looks like this.

All you then need to do is visit it and interact with it.

> Neutralize 100, 1000 & 10000 Dark Fog space units.

Just make sure to automate your space fleet units, and this shouldn’t be that hard to get, most Hives I fought with all had over 1000 units so in theory I would only need to attack 10 of them.

> Neutralize a Relay Station before it lands on a planet.

I can think of 3 ways of doing this, but I only really tested one.

First, the most annoying one, you can stalk a Hive and wait for it to send out a relay station then attack it with your fleet.

Second option, involves the fact that Missile Turrets and Plasma Turrets can both be set to attack upper air (relay stations) and space, one of these settings should make it possible for them to attack the relay station before it lands so if you cover your planet with enough of them you should get the achievement sooner or latter.

Last, and this is the one I did, is to activate your space fleet when you are landed on a planet. You can do this by pressing Z to enter a combat mode and on your right switch the menu to space and click on your fleets to activate them. Doing so will make them orbit the planet and attack anything that approaches, if you allow them to attack relay station they will destroy any that are already on the planet and any that will try to land on it.

> Planetary Shield’s coverage reaches 100% over a planet.

The shields snap to each other quite nicely so it’s easy to cover the whole planet, all you need is enough power, approximately 520 MW, and 22-30 planetary shields generators. If you are lazy to place them your self you can use some of the available blueprints, for example this[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com] one but there are others if you search for them.

To easily se what area is covered and which you are missing you can press M and make the shield visible.

> Have Icarus destroyed by Dark Fog at Passive Dark Fog aggressiveness.

Pretty straight forward, start a new game, set the Dark Fog aggressiveness to passive, locate the planetary base on your starting planet and walk over to it to die.

Just make sure not to set the aggressiveness to dummy as that prevents the Dark Fog from even attacking you.

> Bullet consumption reaches 360/min on any planet.

This one I found hard to get on the default difficulty, in the end surrounding my Dark Fog farm in turrets and letting the bases on that planet level up got it for me in the end. Better way would probably be surrounding one planetary base from all sides with turrets, if they are close enough (but not so close as to destroy the buildings), the base will constantly produce units trying to destroy your turrets resulting in endless stream of enemies to use your bullets on.

Definitely only use the copper bullets as you want it to take as many bullets as possible to kill one enemy.

> Icarus’ Replicator speed reaches 400%.

For this all you need to do is fill all your fuel chamber slots with Mk.III Proliferated Energy Sharps, that drop from lv. 3+ dark fog units. Then you need to actively burning one and crafting something at the same time.

> Be simultaneously assaulted by 12 Planetary Bases on a planet.

The trick here is to not attack the units in the raids so it never ends, but also preventing them from destroying anything. You can do this by just spamming Battlefield Analysis Base everywhere. You also need to be consuming energy on that planet so the bases threat grows. In theory this should work but it is quite slow, you can speed it up by flying around and attacking the planetary bases. This will make their threat to go up as well, just make sure you don’t destroy units in the raids.

On harder difficulties, especially with the energy threat growth multiplier on 1000%, I image this is quite easy to get by just landing on a planet and crafting something or building few smelters.

> Unlock all secret technologies.

There are 4 secret technologies in the game at this moment. For them to even show on your technology research tree you need to hold in your inventory special item that only drops from Dark Fog units of certain levels and to research them you need to have Dark Fog Matrix in you inventory, and research the technology manually (Use items in inventory)

Bellow you can see what items drop at what level. What you are looking at is Dark Fog Drop Filter, you can access it in the game, but these secret items won’t be visible for you until you pick on of them up.

All the technologies are:

Re-composing Assembler
You need to pick up Matter Re-combinator that drops from lv.15+ units.

Self-Evolving Lab
You need to pick up Silicon-based Neuron that drops from lv.18+ units.

Negentropy Smelter
You need to pick up Negentropy Singularity that drops from lv.21+ units.

Strange Annihilation Fuel Rod
You need to pick up Core Element that drops from lv.24+ units.

The easiest way to get all of these is once again building a farm and let it do it’s thing, but to speed it up you can manually attack bases units over and over again witch will lead to that base gaining levels way quicker.

> Have 40 Laser Towers shoot the same target at Difficulty 1.0 or above.

What you need to do is, find a base and destroy all it’s buildings, but do not destroy or send away the relay station (don’t put foundation over the hole). If you don’t send the relay station away it will very soon build a new core building, we can exploit this and place 40 laser towers around the place where we know this building will be build. When it’s inevitably constructs all the laser towers will attack it at the same time giving you the achievement.

> Implosion Cannon neutralizes 40 enemies or more with 1 shot.

Planetary bases spawn 3 types of units. One of them called Ranger has a special behavior where they stack in one place above the player when attacking them, this can be used to stack 40 units in one space and then lead them to a Implosion Cannon that will kill them all with one shot. It might take few tries but it isn’t hard to do.

To make this easier your character should have all it’s attacks disabled so it doesn’t kill any of the units.

> Lure Lancers to destroy a Planetary Base.

Since I’m not sure how the targeting of the hive raids works I recommend doing this in a planetary system where you don’t have anything build, so that you are the only target for the lancers.

Getting this achievement consists 2 parts. Ones is actually triggering attack from the hive. The fastest way to do that is to attack and destroy a relay station, only one or two should do the trick. The second part consists of making the lancer actually destroy the base. Unless you have high level Hive, the lancers don’t do that much damage so you have to help them.

Find a Dark Fog planetary base and destroy everything except the core building, if you do destroy it by accident all you need to do it wait a while and the relay station will rebuild it. When you only have your core building, you want to trigger an attack from the Hive in that system, and manually damage it so that it has only few hit-points left, then stand as close to it as you can, and wait for the lancer to attack you, this will make them also hit the base and destroy it, giving you the achievement.

In case they don’t seem to do any damage to the building it is possible your shield is protecting it so you have to move a way a bit.

> Base radius of Icarus’ Energy Shield reaches 25m.

You need to research lv.25 Energy Shield. This is very expensive on universe matrices, just the last upgrade costs 420k of them.

From here, there will only be achievements that I personally didn’t do and I can only guess how to approach them, so keep that in mind when reading rest of the guide. I will be updating them as I get to them in my playthrough.

> Land on a planet occupied by over 20 Planetary Bases.

Actually quite hard, it seems that on default difficulty settings only about 15 bases can be found on any planet in any system, and that is only if the system contains more that one hive. For this reason I would encourage you, if you are starting a new game, to go to the settings and changing the Max Density to 2x or 3x. It will make your game a bit harder but this should ensure that Black Hole or Neutron Star systems should have enough hives and bases for you to be able to get this achievement.

I personally am still working on my 1TW Dyson Sphere so I’m letting one hive level up as much as I can to see if it can plant more Bases on the planet in the system but I’m skeptical it will work.

These two should be possible to get at the same time. Basically you want to speed-run to a point where you can research missile turrets and automate gun turrets with bullet production. When you have enough turrets and bullets and few missile turrets and some ammo for them, you want to attack the base closes to you, destroy the buildings, then place down missile turrets and set them to attack relay station to destroy it. This should count as defeating planetary base as well as trigger attack from the Hive.

I recommend setting the combat threat multiplier to 1000% as otherwise destroying only one relay station might not be enough to trigger the attack.

> Complete the mission without any buildings destroyed at Difficulty 1.0 or above.

Reload a save when you loose a building. I’m not sure if you even get notified that you lost one before you research the Auto Reconstruction Marking, so make sure to get that one as soon as possible so you know that you lost a building and can reload.

Best way would to play for this achievement is to be pro-active and attack any hive and base you find so they don’t get a chance to send a raid.

When you go to your combat section, and change the time period to Total, you can see all the buildings you ever lost to the dark fog. This is good way to make sure you didn’t lose any and that the run is still valid.

This achievement doesn’t get disabled when you use metadata so one possible strategy could be to start a game and buy all the technologies you need to win the game right a way.

> Complete the mission without any Dark Fog buildings neutralized at Difficulty 1.0 or above.

Reload the save when ever you accidentally destroy a building. This might be hard to notice but in the combat section, when you switch time to Total, you can see all the units, including buildings that you destroyed, so making sure there aren’t ever any here and there should make the run safe.

I have no idea if relay stations count, if they do, then this might be really difficult as they will slowly cover all your planets without you having any chance to really prevent it.

This achievement doesn’t get disabled when you use metadata so one possible strategy could be to start a game and buy all the technologies you need to win the game right a way.

> Complete the mission without building any Turrets at Difficulty 1.0 or above.

This should be very easy, just use your ground forces, they are very strong and easy to automate, you can also put them in to the Battlefield Analysis Base to use for defense.

This achievement doesn’t get disabled when you use metadata so one possible strategy could be to start a game and buy all the technologies you need to win the game right a way.

> Icarus neutralizes over 1,000 Dark Fog units within 1 minute.

This is definitely easier done on a planet that in space. You should have full ground squadron expansion researched and as much damage for your fleet as possible, then you need to find planet with as many planetary basses as you can find and just fly from one to other. Make sure to always move on before your units start attacking the buildings as that takes way to long and is better to attack another base with full group of units.

The achievement will show you your best attempt so you will know how close you are to achieving it.

> Keep Icarus’ energy shield’s power consumption at 1GW while resisting damage for over 1 minute.

From what I can tell, this achievement might be the hardest to get. If you look bellow at my screenshot, the red number is what you need to get to 1GW and keep it there for whole minute.

The red number is the amount of damage you are resisting at the moment, and to sustain it for a whole minute will require a lot of things. First you need to get the best fuel in the game Strange Annihilation Fuel Rod and have it proliferated with MK.III. The better the fuel you are using the more energy you can replenish at the same time.

Next you will need to upgrade your energy circuits as this also increases how much power you can gain from your fuel per second. You will in theory need at leas 1GW of Charge, so you can get all the energy you lost, but that is what goes to your shield, not the amount that goes to your core power, and once your core power starts to drop so will the charge.

At this moment I am not sure how much charge and probably core power I will need to get the achievement but from my current testing Energy Circuit lv.18 isn’t enough and just getting to that level already costed me about 1m of universe matrices.

And when you do have all of that, you need to aggro just the right amount of enemies so you are resisting the damage you need to resist but also not to much to lose to them.