Hydrogen Storage sets how much hydrogen a planet is allowed to hold. Every planet starts with room for 100,000 hydrogen and no tank at all. Each level of the tank raises that ceiling, and when the ceiling is reached the Hydrogen Synthesizer stops.
You build and upgrade it on the Buildings page. It has no building or tech requirements, so it is available from your first day.
What it does
One thing: it raises the hydrogen cap on the planet it is built on. It does not speed anything up, it produces nothing, it uses no energy, and it does not protect a single unit of hydrogen from being taken.
The cap is per planet and per resource. The Ore Warehouse and the Crystal Warehouse do the same job for the other two resources, and each one has its own level. Raising your Hydrogen Storage does nothing for ore.
It is also the dearest of the three. All three tanks start at 2,000 ore, but the Ore Warehouse asks for no crystal, the Crystal Warehouse asks for 1,000, and Hydrogen Storage asks for 2,000. Level for level you pay twice as much crystal for hydrogen room as you do for crystal room.
When the tank fills up
The synthesizer stops. Not slows down, stops. Ore and crystal each get a small free trickle every hour whatever you have built, but hydrogen gets nothing of the sort, so a full tank means zero hydrogen out of that planet.
It can be worse than zero. A Nuclear Power Plant burns hydrogen every hour, and that burn is taken off the pile after the cap has already been applied. So on a planet with a reactor, a full tank does not sit still, it drains at the reactor's rate until it drops under the cap and the synthesizer kicks back in. On the planet in these shots that is 3,324 an hour made, 520 an hour burned, and while the tank is full it is 0 made and 520 burned.
Two places in the game tell you. The hydrogen figure in the top right turns red once you are at or over the cap, and the Storage panel on the Buildings page picks up a "Capacity Exceeded" warning.
You can end up over the cap, not just at it. Plunder, mission rewards, the Lucky Draw and incoming transports all ignore the cap. Nothing is lost when that happens. The synthesizer just sits idle until you are back under.
Three ways to get moving again: spend the hydrogen, move it off the planet with a transport or a resource save, or buy another tank level.
Costs and capacities
The cost doubles every level:
Ore = 2,000 × 2Level - 1
Crystal = 2,000 × 2Level - 1
Capacity grows by a factor of 1.6 a level, rounded up:
Capacity = 50,000 × (round up(1.6Level) + 1)
Which is the same as counting up from the 100,000 a bare planet already has:
Capacity = 100,000 + 50,000 × (round up(1.6Level) - 1)
Table
| Level | Ore cost | Crystal cost | Capacity | Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | - | - | 100,000 | - |
| 1 | 2,000 | 2,000 | 150,000 | +50,000 |
| 2 | 4,000 | 4,000 | 200,000 | +50,000 |
| 3 | 8,000 | 8,000 | 300,000 | +100,000 |
| 4 | 16,000 | 16,000 | 400,000 | +100,000 |
| 5 | 32,000 | 32,000 | 600,000 | +200,000 |
| 6 | 64,000 | 64,000 | 900,000 | +300,000 |
| 7 | 128,000 | 128,000 | 1,400,000 | +500,000 |
| 8 | 256,000 | 256,000 | 2,200,000 | +800,000 |
| 9 | 512,000 | 512,000 | 3,500,000 | +1,300,000 |
| 10 | 1,024,000 | 1,024,000 | 5,550,000 | +2,050,000 |
| 11 | 2,048,000 | 2,048,000 | 8,850,000 | +3,300,000 |
| 12 | 4,096,000 | 4,096,000 | 14,150,000 | +5,300,000 |
| 13 | 8,192,000 | 8,192,000 | 22,600,000 | +8,450,000 |
| 14 | 16,384,000 | 16,384,000 | 36,100,000 | +13,500,000 |
| 15 | 32,768,000 | 32,768,000 | 57,700,000 | +21,600,000 |
| 16 | 65,536,000 | 65,536,000 | 92,300,000 | +34,600,000 |
| 17 | 131,072,000 | 131,072,000 | 147,650,000 | +55,350,000 |
| 18 | 262,144,000 | 262,144,000 | 236,200,000 | +88,550,000 |
| 19 | 524,288,000 | 524,288,000 | 377,850,000 | +141,650,000 |
| 20 | 1,048,576,000 | 1,048,576,000 | 604,550,000 | +226,700,000 |
There is no level cap. The formulas keep going as far as you want to take them. In practice the fields on the planet run out long before the maths does.
Where it stops paying
Cost doubles every level, which is 100% more each time, while capacity only grows about 60% a level. Those two curves cross, and because hydrogen room is the most expensive kind they cross a level earlier than they do for crystal:
- Up to level 10, an upgrade costs less ore and crystal than the extra room it buys. Level 10 is 2,048,000 for 2,050,000 more room, so it only just makes it.
- From level 11 on it costs more. Level 11 is 4,096,000 for 3,300,000 more room.
- By level 15 one upgrade costs more than the whole tank can hold. That is 65,536,000 spent for a 57,700,000 ceiling.
That is not an argument for stopping at 10. Late game you will happily pay over the odds to hold a fleet's worth of fuel in one place. It is an argument for building the level when you need it and not before.
Hydrogen is the one you actually spend
Ore and crystal go into buildings, ships and research and then sit there. Hydrogen does that too, but it is also the fuel, and fuel comes off the top.
Every fleet you send burns hydrogen out of the launching planet at the moment it leaves. The game takes the fuel first and then loads cargo, so if you tell a fleet to carry hydrogen and there is not enough on the planet to cover both, the cargo is trimmed down and the flight still goes. You never get stranded by loading too much, but you can get a lot less hydrogen delivered than you asked for.
The practical effect is that a hydrogen tank on your main fleet planet is worth more than the same tank on a quiet colony. It is the buffer that lets you launch without waiting on the synthesizer.
Building it
Each level takes one field, the same as every other building, so a level 12 tank is 12 fields that are not growing anything.
Build time depends on the planet:
Hours = (Ore + Crystal) ÷ (5,000 × (Capitol level + 1) × 2Foundry level)
A planet only builds one thing at a time, so a long tank upgrade blocks every other building and mine on that planet until it finishes. You can cancel a running upgrade and get the whole cost back, or pay credits to finish it early. Anything with under five minutes left finishes for free.
Tearing down a level costs a third of what that level cost to build and takes a third of the time, and you pay that, there is no refund. What you get back is the field.
The More Info button on the tank gives you the next few levels and what they cost, plus the teardown price for the level you are on.
The Trade Merchant limit
The tank also caps what the Trade Merchant will hand you. The most hydrogen a single trade can give you is your hydrogen capacity. Hydrogen already on the planet does not count against it. With a level 6 tank holding 900,000, the biggest trade you can make for hydrogen is 900,000, whether you have 400,000 hydrogen on hand or a full tank. Ask for more and the merchant caps the deal at that amount.
Going the other way there is no limit at all. You can trade away every unit of hydrogen on the planet whatever your tank level is. Trading is capped on the receiving side only.
A full tank does not block a trade. The hydrogen is added on top of what is there, even past the cap.
Hydrogen is the priciest resource at the merchant. The rates are fixed and there is no spread, so one hydrogen costs 2.5 ore or about 1.67 crystal and sells for exactly the same. Trade 1,000 ore and you get 400 hydrogen back. Every trade also costs 5,000 credits whatever the size, so small trades are mostly fee.
Storage is not protection
Everything sitting on a planet is a target. An attack that wins takes up to 50% of the ore, crystal and hydrogen on the planet, 55% if the two of you are at war, limited by the cargo space the attacker brought with them. A bigger tank means a bigger pile to take. On its own it makes you a better target, not a safer one.
The building that hides resources is the Resource Den. It shields a fixed amount spread across all three resources and what it shields cannot be plundered. The two buildings do different jobs and you want both.
Resources in flight are not on the planet, so anything sitting in a fleet's cargo on a resource save or a harvest cannot be plundered either. That is still the cheapest storage in the game if you are only trying to survive the night.
Moons and platforms
You cannot build Hydrogen Storage on a moon. Moons only take the Lunar Base, Capitol, Oracle, Jump Gate and Lunar Dock, so every moon is stuck at the base 100,000 hydrogen cap forever. That does not destroy anything. Ship a million hydrogen to a moon and it sits there quite happily, because moons have no mines and nothing is trying to top the pile up. It does mean one Trade Merchant trade on a moon gives you at most 100,000 hydrogen.
A deployed Hephaestus platform has no Buildings page at all. It carries a flat 1,000,000,000 of each resource instead.
Comments
No comments yet.
Sign in to leave a comment.