Harvest

A harvest is a fleet mission. You send recyclers out to a debris field, they load up the ore and crystal floating over the slot, and they fly it home. Recyclers are the only ships that can pick debris up, and a harvest is the only mission that collects it.

Finding a field

The Galaxy page has a Debris column. Any slot with a field shows what is in it, and a recycle icon appears in the Actions column on that row. Hover the icon and it tells you how many of each recycler it would take to carry the lot.

A field has to hold at least 300 ore and crystal between them before it shows up at all. Anything smaller is still there, it just cannot be seen or collected until another battle tops it up. Debris does not expire and it belongs to nobody, so the first fleet to land on it takes it. Where debris comes from in the first place is covered on the debris page.

Sending the recyclers

Three ways in, and all of them open the same screen:

• The recycle icon on the Galaxy page.
• The orange Harvest button at the bottom of a battle, spy or harvest report.
• Picking Harvest on the Fleets page and putting the coordinates in yourself.

Auto is the button to use. It works out how many recyclers the field needs, fills the fleet from your fastest ones first, and trims it back if you do not have the hydrogen to fly it. If the field is bigger than everything you own it sends the lot and you make a second trip.

Other things worth knowing about this screen:

• The ship list only shows recyclers. The Fleet Save button under it opens up the rest of your ships.
• The Capacity line in the Summary is the room you have left for cargo once fuel is paid for. It is not a limit on how much debris you can lift, so ignore it when you are only harvesting.
• A harvest takes a fleet slot like any other mission, and the fuel comes off the planet the moment you dispatch.
• A greyed out icon in the Galaxy view means either no recyclers on the planet you are looking from, or no free fleet slots. Hover it and it says which.

Only recyclers carry debris

There are two of them.

	Dionysus Class Recycler	Zagreus Class Recycler
Cargo capacity	20,000	5,000
Base speed	2,000	3,500
Fuel	300	400
Cost	10,000 ore 6,000 crystal 2,000 hydrogen	5,000 ore 3,000 crystal 1,000 hydrogen
Needs	Shipyard 4 Jet Drive 6 Shield Tech 2	Shipyard 2 Jet Drive 3 Energy Tech 3

Cargo ships do not help. Only recycler cargo space is counted when the field is picked up, so an Atlas or a Hercules along for the ride adds nothing and just slows the fleet down. Same for warships. That is worth remembering when you use Fleet Save to send everything out at once.

The Dionysus is the one to build. One of them carries 20,000 for 10,000 ore, 6,000 crystal, 2,000 hydrogen and 300 fuel. The four Zagreus it takes to match that carry the same 20,000 for 20,000 ore, 12,000 crystal, 4,000 hydrogen and 1,600 fuel. The Zagreus is 75 percent faster, so it is only worth building if you are regularly racing somebody else to a field.

The round trip

There is no combat on a harvest. Your recyclers arrive, load up and leave, whatever is parked on the planet below and whatever defenses are sitting on it.

The Fleets page shows both legs, the run out and the run back, so you can see when the resources will actually land.

You get two messages out of it. The first turns up the moment the fleet reaches the field and tells you what it picked up. The second turns up when the fleet lands at home and the resources go onto the planet.

You can call a harvest back while it is still on the way out, with the Cancel button on the Fleets page. It turns round where it is and takes as long to get home as it has already been flying. Once it has collected and started back you cannot stop it.

When you cannot carry it all

Whatever you cannot lift stays in orbit for the next fleet. The pickup is balanced. It takes an equal amount of ore and crystal first, up to whatever the smaller of the two piles holds, then fills the space that is left with the bigger one.

Say a field has 1,332,300 ore and 145,500 crystal and you only send 500,000 of cargo space. You get all 145,500 crystal, a matching 145,500 ore, and the last 209,000 of space goes to ore. That is 354,500 ore and 145,500 crystal home, and 977,800 ore still floating there.

Coming home with nothing

The report comes back saying No Resources Collected. Three reasons for it:

• Somebody got there first. Debris belongs to whoever lands on it first, so anything worth having attracts company. A field a long way from home is often gone before you arrive.
• There was nothing there. A harvest can be aimed at any slot, empty ones included, so it is easy to send one at a field that has already been cleared.
• The planet you launched from used Move Planet in the last 24 hours. The fleet flies, arrives, and collects nothing. The field is left untouched for somebody else and the report tells you why.

Recyclers and fleet saving

Because a harvest can be pointed at any slot and always brings itself home, it doubles as the way you get your fleet off a planet before an attack lands. The Fleet Save button on the harvest screen opens up the rest of your ships so you can send everything in one go, and the Fleet Save mission on the Fleets page is this same mission underneath. Either way it still needs at least one recycler in the fleet. See fleet saving for how to time it.