Resource

Resources are what everything in SFC2 costs. Buildings, mines, ships, defenses, missiles and research are all paid for in ore, crystal and hydrogen, and hydrogen doubles as the fuel your fleets burn to fly anywhere.

Most players call them "res", or "OCH" after the three of them. Whatever the planet you are looking at is holding right now is shown in the top right of every page, with a Trade link under it.

Every planet keeps its own separate pile. Ore sitting on one planet does nothing for a build queued on another, so you either move it there with a transport or build where the resources already are. Credits are a separate currency and cannot be spent on resources directly.

The three resources

Ore

The bulk material. Most things in the game cost more ore than crystal or hydrogen, and at the same level the Ore Mine out-produces the other two, so ore is the resource you always have most of. It is also the one that hits its storage ceiling first.

Crystal

Used in electronics, which in SFC2 means most research and the better ships and defenses. The Crystal Mine makes about two thirds of what an Ore Mine of the same level makes, and one crystal is worth 1.5 ore at the Trade Merchant.

Hydrogen

The scarcest of the three, and the only one that gets spent just by playing. Every fleet you send burns hydrogen as fuel, an Oracle scan costs 5,000 hydrogen off the moon it sits on, and a Nuclear Power Plant burns hydrogen every hour to make energy. It comes from the Hydrogen Synthesizer, which produces the least of the three mines and produces more on cold planets than on hot ones. One hydrogen is worth 2.5 ore at the Merchant.

Where resources come from

Mines. Your three mines run every hour of every day and are where nearly everything comes from in the long run.
The free trickle. A brand new colony with no mines built at all still makes 40 ore and 20 crystal an hour. It is not much, but it never stops and it uses no energy. There is no free hydrogen.
Plunder. Win an attack on an NPC or another player and you carry home a share of what was sitting on the planet, limited by the cargo space that survived the fight.
Debris. Ships destroyed in battle leave a debris field that recyclers can harvest.
Quests and missions. Both pay out in resources, and quest rewards ignore your storage cap.
Lucky Draw. Ore, crystal and hydrogen packs are on the board.
The Trade Merchant. Not new resources, but it turns one kind into another when you are short.

Production and energy

Everything to do with production lives on the Buildings page. The three mines sit at the top of the list, and the sidebar tells you what the planet makes an hour, how much energy it has, and how full its storage is.

Four things change what a mine actually delivers:

Energy. Mines need energy, and if the planet is not making enough, all three are cut by the same percentage. A planet running at 96% energy makes 96% of its ore, 96% of its crystal and 96% of its hydrogen, and each short mine picks up an "Insufficient Energy" warning. Energy comes from the Solar Array, the Nuclear Power Plant and Helios and Genesis satellites parked on the planet.
Capacity. The dropdown on each mine sets it anywhere from 0% to 100% in steps of 5. Turning a mine down cuts its output and its energy draw together, which is the usual way to free up energy for the other two.
Temperature. Only the Hydrogen Synthesizer cares. Slots further out in a solar system are colder and give more hydrogen per level.
Full storage. A mine that has hit its ceiling stops. See below.

Production is also cut or stopped outright in three cases. Vacation mode halts it completely for as long as you are away. PVE Mode cuts you to 75% of normal, or 50% once you pass 50,000 RSP, or 25% past 100,000. And moons and deployed Hephaestus platforms have no mines at all, so they produce nothing, not even the free trickle.

To see the whole empire at once, open Overview, switch to All Planets and pick the Resources tab. It lists what every planet is holding and what every planet makes an hour, with totals at the bottom.

Storage

Every planet starts with room for 100,000 of each resource. Each resource then has its own storage building with its own level: the Ore Warehouse, the Crystal Warehouse and Hydrogen Storage. Levelling one does nothing for the other two.

All three follow the same curve:

Capacity = 100,000 + 50,000 × (round up(1.6^Level) - 1)

Level	Capacity
0	100,000
1	150,000
2	200,000
3	300,000
4	400,000
5	600,000
6	900,000
7	1,400,000
8	2,200,000
9	3,500,000
10	5,550,000

There is no level cap. The three storage pages carry the costs and the longer tables.

When a resource reaches its ceiling the mine for that resource stops. Not slows down, stops, and the free trickle stops with it. The number in the top right turns red and the Storage panel on the Buildings page picks up a "Capacity Exceeded" warning. The other two mines carry on as normal, and your other planets are not affected.

Nothing you already have is lost when this happens. Plunder you bring home, quest and mission rewards and incoming transports all ignore the ceiling and can push you well past it, and none of it disappears. The mine simply sits idle until you are back under. Spend it, ship it off the planet, or buy another storage level.

Two exceptions. A moon is stuck at 100,000 of each forever, because storage buildings cannot be built on moons. A deployed Hephaestus platform holds up to 1,000,000,000 of each.

Keeping resources safe

The pile sitting on your planet is the reason people attack you. Lose a battle over your own planet and the winner takes 50% of what is there, or 55% if the two of you are in a declared war, and again only as much as their surviving cargo can carry.

Two things help. The Resource Den hides a pool of resources that cannot be plundered at all: 30,000 at level 1, plus another 7,500 for every level after that. That pool is shared across all three resources, not 30,000 of each, and it is taken off the top before the attacker's share is worked out. The other option is resource saving, which loads everything into a cargo fleet and flies it out of reach until the attack is over.

Trading one resource for another

The Trade link under your resource totals opens the Trade Merchant, which swaps one resource for another on the planet you are on. The rates are fixed and never move:

Resource	Worth in ore
Ore	1
Crystal	1.5
Hydrogen	2.5

So 150,000 ore buys 100,000 crystal, and 100,000 hydrogen buys 250,000 ore.

Every trade costs 5,000 credits, whatever size it is. The amount you get back from one trade is capped at the full storage capacity of the planet receiving it, whatever is already stored, and the fee is charged in full either way, so one big trade beats several small ones.

There is no player-to-player trading screen in SFC2. If you want to hand resources to somebody else, load them into cargo ships and send a transport to their planet.

Resources Spent Points

Resources Spent Points (RSP) are the game's measure of how big you are. Add up the ore, crystal and hydrogen cost of everything you currently own, counting all three resources as equal, and divide by 1,000. That covers buildings, mines, power plants, research, ships both at home and in flight, and defenses.

RSP is the main board on the Leaders page, and your overall rank is RSP plus Destroyed Ship Points. It also decides who is allowed to attack you under newbie protection, and how hard the PVE Mode production penalty bites.

Despite the name it counts what you have, not what you have ever spent. Lose a fleet and your RSP drops with it.

Converted resources

Converted resources is player shorthand rather than a game screen. It means valuing all three at what the Merchant would give you in ore, so one crystal counts as 1.5 and one hydrogen as 2.5. It is a handy way to compare two mines, or two ships, on a single number. The game never shows a converted figure of its own; the Overview page reports the three hourly rates separately.