Dionysus Class Recycler

The Dionysus Class Recycler is one of only two ships in SFC2 that can pick up debris. Every ship destroyed in a battle drops 30 percent of its ore and crystal build cost into a field over the slot, and it stays there until somebody flies out and collects it. Without a recycler you cannot touch any of it.

It is the bigger and slower of the two. 20,000 of hold against the Zagreus's 5,000, and 2,000 base speed against 3,500. For almost everything you do, the Dionysus is the one to build.

It has a second job that catches new players out. In SFC2 the Fleet Save mission is a harvest mission with a different label on it, so you cannot fleet save at all unless a recycler is in the fleet. More on that below.

Building one

Dionysus are built on the Shipyard page. You need Shipyard 4, Jet Drive 6 and Shield Tech 2. One costs 10,000 ore, 6,000 crystal and 2,000 hydrogen.

The Base column is the ship as designed. The Current column is what your research has done to it. Weapons Tech adds 10 percent to attack per level, Shield Tech 10 percent to shield, Armor Tech 10 percent to hull and Jet Drive 10 percent to speed. The commander above is running Weapons 9, Shield 8, Armor 11 and Jet Drive 12, which turns 1 / 10 / 1,600 / 2,000 into 2 / 18 / 3,360 / 4,400.

Cargo capacity is the one number research never touches. 20,000 is 20,000 forever, so the only way to lift more debris is to own more recyclers.

The unlock chain is cheap. From a standing start the research and buildings come to roughly 45,600 ore, 36,000 crystal and 55,300 hydrogen, and most of that is Jet Drive 6 and Research Lab 6, which you want for other reasons anyway. This is an early ship, not a late one.

Dionysus or Zagreus

	Dionysus	Zagreus
Cost (ore / crystal / hydrogen)	10,000 / 6,000 / 2,000	5,000 / 3,000 / 1,000
Cargo capacity	20,000	5,000
Cost per 1,000 carried	900	1,800
Fuel per 1,000 carried	15	80
Base speed	2,000	3,500
Hull	1,600	800
Needs	Shipyard 4, Jet Drive 6, Shield Tech 2	Shipyard 2, Jet Drive 3, Energy Tech 3

Per unit of hold the Dionysus costs exactly half what the Zagreus does and burns a fifth of the fuel. Four Zagreus carry the same 20,000 as one Dionysus, and they cost 20,000 ore, 12,000 crystal and 4,000 hydrogen to do it against 10,000 / 6,000 / 2,000.

What the extra money buys is speed. The Zagreus is 75 percent faster, so a few are worth having when you expect to be racing somebody else to a field that has just formed. For clearing up after your own fights, build Dionysus.

If you own both, remember that the Auto button fills your fastest recyclers first, so it reaches for the Zagreus before it touches a Dionysus.

Sending one out

Three ways in: the recycle icon in the Actions column on the Galaxy page, the Harvest button at the bottom of a battle report, or picking Harvest on the Fleets page. All three land on the same form.

The Debris column shows what is sitting in each field. Hover the numbers and you get the exact amounts plus how many of each recycler it would take to lift the lot. For the field above that is 138 Dionysus, or 551 Zagreus.

The Harvest form lists your recyclers and nothing else. Auto works out the right number for the field you are aiming at and fills it in, capped by what you actually own and by the hydrogen on the planet.

Cargo ships do not help. Only recycler hold is counted when the field is picked up, so an Atlas or a Carmanor tagging along carries none of it. The only way to lift a bigger field is more recyclers.

A harvest uses one of your fleet slots like any other mission, and you can recall it while it is still in the air.

What comes back

Debris is only ever ore and crystal, never hydrogen. If the field is bigger than your hold, the game takes an equal amount of both first and then fills whatever room is left with whichever of the two there is more of. The run above had 1,275,000 of hold against a field of 1,969,800 ore and 783,000 crystal, so it came home with 637,500 of each and left the remainder in orbit.

The full 20,000 per ship goes on debris. Resources you loaded before takeoff do not eat into it, and neither does the hydrogen for the trip.

Two ways to come home empty:

Somebody beat you to it. A field belongs to nobody and the first fleet to arrive takes it, whoever created it.
Your planet used Move Planet in the last 24 hours. The recyclers still fly, they just collect nothing, and the field is left untouched for someone else. The report tells you that is what happened.

You can send recyclers to a slot with no debris on it at all, and they will fly out and come straight back. That is not a mistake in the design, it is the next section.

Fleet saving

Pick Fleet Save on the Fleets page and the form quietly submits as a harvest. That means the harvest rule applies to it, so you cannot fleet save without at least one recycler in the fleet. Try it without one and the game answers "Failed to dispatch fleet: A Recycler Ship is required for harvest".

This is why most players own a Dionysus long before they own a hundred of them. Everything goes at once: every ship on the planet, every resource in the store, out to any slot in the game. Nothing can touch a fleet while it is in the air, so an attacker who lands on your planet finds an empty rock.

The speed setting is the dial you actually use. The run above is a whole fleet plus 5.1 million of resources going one slot over at 30 percent. At full speed that flight is 45 minutes each way. At 30 percent it is 2 hours 29 minutes each way, so the fleet is gone for close to five hours. Set it so the fleet gets home after the attack has landed. There is more on the timing in Fleet / Resource Saving.

One Dionysus is enough to make the mission legal. It is also the slowest thing in the fleet, so it sets the pace for everything else. On a fleet save that is usually exactly what you want.

Travel time

The Dionysus starts at 2,000 speed and gains 10 percent per Jet Drive level. Unlike the Atlas it never swaps up to the Pulse Drive, so Jet Drive is the only thing that will ever make it quicker.

One way trips at the 100 percent speed setting:

Distance	Jet Drive 6 (3,200)	Jet Drive 10 (4,000)	Jet Drive 15 (5,000)	Jet Drive 20 (6,000)
Your own moon	3m 44s	3m 21s	3m 00s	2m 45s
1 slot away	51m 47s	46m 19s	41m 27s	37m 50s
14 slots away	53m 26s	47m 48s	42m 46s	39m 02s
1 system	1h 26m	1h 17m	1h 09m	1h 03m
5 systems	1h 31m	1h 22m	1h 13m	1h 07m
10 systems	1h 38m	1h 28m	1h 18m	1h 12m
25 systems	1h 56m	1h 43m	1h 33m	1h 24m
50 systems	2h 20m	2h 05m	1h 52m	1h 42m
100 systems	3h 00m	2h 41m	2h 24m	2h 11m
1 galaxy	3h 50m	3h 26m	3h 04m	2h 48m

Double those for the round trip, because a harvest always comes back. Dropping the speed setting stretches them in a straight line: 50 percent doubles the flight, 30 percent makes it a bit over three times as long, and 5 percent multiplies it by twenty.

Only the Zeus and the Hephaestus platform crawl along slower than this. A Dionysus in a mixed fleet sets the whole fleet's speed, so do not leave one sitting in an attack fleet you want back in a hurry.

Rapid fire

Rapid fire gives a unit a chance at another shot in the same round every time it hits something it has rapid fire against. The More Info button on the Shipyard page shows both lists.

The Dionysus rapid fires	Rating
Genesis Solar Satellite	x5
Helios Class Solar Satellite	x5
Hermes Class Probe	x5
Shadow Probe	x5

Rapid fires the Dionysus	Rating
Zeus Class	x250

The four things it rapid fires are two probes and two satellites, which is a polite way of saying it rapid fires nothing that matters. The list pointing the other way is one line long, and it is a bad one. A single Zeus gets up to 250 shots at your recyclers in one round.

In a fight

1,600 hull, 10 shield, 1 attack. Its own gun is worthless: a shot that lands for 1 percent or less of the target's shield rating does nothing at all, so a Dionysus cannot scratch anything with a shield rating of 100 or more even before the other side researches a thing.

Two rules keep it out of trouble:

A fleet on a harvest never fights. It arrives, loads up and turns around, no matter what is parked on that planet or how much defense is on the ground. The target is not told it is coming either, because only attacks and espionage show up as incoming.
A recycler in an attack fleet does fight, and it cannot collect the debris from that battle. Attack fleets come straight home. If you want the debris from a fight you started, send a second fleet after it.

Where recyclers actually die is parked at home. Here is 100 Dionysus caught on a planet by 60 Athena, run through the in-game Calculator with Weapons, Shield and Armor at 10 on both sides.

Four rounds, the attacker loses nothing, and 1.8 million of recyclers turns into 480,000 of debris for whoever brought a recycler along. That is the flat 30 percent every ship pays when it dies. The panel on the right is the Calculator working out how many recyclers the attacker should bring, which is the same sum the Galaxy tooltip does.

Evaluation

Advantages

One of only two ships that can collect debris, and after a big fight the debris is usually worth more than anything you could plunder off the planet.
Half the cost per unit of hold and a fifth of the fuel compared with the Zagreus.
Required for a fleet save. No recycler, no fleet save.
Harvest fleets cannot be attacked, cannot be intercepted and are never shown to the target.
Cheap to unlock and available early.

Disadvantages

Very slow, and it never gets an engine upgrade. 10 percent per Jet Drive level is all it will ever gain.
It sets the speed of any fleet it flies in.
Useless in combat. 1 attack bounces off anything with a shield rating of 100 or more, and the Zeus rapid fires it 250 times over.
Cargo ships cannot help it carry more. Lifting a bigger field means building more recyclers.
Left parked at home it is 18,000 resources of scrap waiting to be turned into somebody else's debris field.

Requirements

Capitol 2
Shipyard 4
Research Lab 6
Energy Tech 3
Jet Drive 6
Shield Tech 2
Dionysus Class Recycler