Zagreus Class Recycler

The Zagreus 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 sits there until somebody flies out and collects it. Without a recycler you cannot touch any of it.

The Zagreus is the small, fast, cheap one. 5,000 of hold against the Dionysus's 20,000, and 3,500 base speed against 2,000.

What makes it worth knowing about is when you can get it. The only thing it needs is Shipyard 2, and every new commander starts with Shipyard 3 already standing. The Jet Drive 3 and Energy Tech 3 on the requirement list are handed out free at signup as well. So the Zagreus is buildable on day one, before you have researched a single thing.

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. The Zagreus is the cheapest way to make that legal. More on that below.

Building one

Zagreus are built on the Shipyard page. One costs 5,000 ore, 3,000 crystal and 1,000 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 Jet Drive 10, Shield 8 and Armor 11, which turns 3,500 / 5 / 800 into 7,000 / 9 / 1,680.

Cargo capacity is the one number research never touches. 5,000 is 5,000 forever, so the only way to lift more debris is to own more recyclers.

Build time comes off the ore and crystal cost, which means a Zagreus is always exactly half a Dionysus. At the Shipyard 3 you start with, that is 24 minutes each. At Shipyard 7 it is 12 minutes, and every Foundry level halves it again.

You can also win them out of the Lucky Draw, one, three or five at a time. They come up a little more often than Dionysus do.

Zagreus or Dionysus

	Zagreus	Dionysus
Cost (ore / crystal / hydrogen)	5,000 / 3,000 / 1,000	10,000 / 6,000 / 2,000
Cargo capacity	5,000	20,000
Cost per 1,000 carried	1,800	900
Fuel per 1,000 carried	80	15
Base speed	3,500	2,000
Hull	800	1,600
Build time at Shipyard 3	24m	48m
Needs	Shipyard 2	Shipyard 4, Jet Drive 6, Shield Tech 2

Per unit of hold the Zagreus costs twice what the Dionysus does and burns more than five times 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.

Here is the same job done both ways. A 100,000 debris field one system over, both fleets at Jet Drive 6:

	20 Zagreus	5 Dionysus
Cost of the fleet	100,000 / 60,000 / 20,000	50,000 / 30,000 / 10,000
Flight, one way	1h 05m	1h 26m
Hydrogen for the trip	2,556	480

So the Zagreus gets there 21 minutes sooner, for twice the build cost and five times the fuel. Note how little the speed actually buys: travel time goes with the square root of speed, so being 75 percent faster only takes about 24 percent off the clock.

For clearing up after your own fights, build Dionysus. Build Zagreus when you want a recycler now, when you are racing somebody else to a field that has just formed, or when you only want one on the planet so that Fleet Save works.

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 Harvest form lists your recyclers and nothing else. Auto works out how many the field needs and fills them in, capped by what you own and by the hydrogen on the planet, and it fills your fastest recyclers first. If you own both, Auto empties your Zagreus rack before it touches a Dionysus. Above, a 330,000 field pulled in all 60 Zagreus and then 2 Dionysus to cover the rest.

Watch the Duration line when it does that. A fleet moves at the speed of its slowest ship, so those 2 Dionysus turned a 35 minute flight into a 46 minute one. They also cut the fuel bill, from 2,798 down to 2,227, because fuel is charged against the speed the fleet actually flies at. Slower is cheaper.

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.

The Capacity figure on the form has the trip's hydrogen taken off the top. That is only a readout for the outbound leg. On arrival the fleet collects against the full 5,000 per ship, so fuel never eats into what you bring home.

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 sent 60 Zagreus, 300,000 of hold, at a field holding 220,000 ore and 110,000 crystal. It took 110,000 of each, filled the last 80,000 with ore, and left 30,000 ore in orbit for somebody else.

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. 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. 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".

At 5,000 ore, 3,000 crystal and 1,000 hydrogen with nothing to research first, a Zagreus is the cheapest ticket to a legal fleet save in the game. If you are only ever going to own one recycler, own this one, and keep it on the planet rather than out working.

Which recycler you use does change the fleet. The recycler you send sets a floor under the fleet's speed, and 3,500 is a much higher floor than the Dionysus's 2,000. A fleet of 500 Athena, 200 Poseidon and 100 Atlas going one system over at Jet Drive 10 flies in 58 minutes with a Zagreus in it and 1 hour 17 minutes with a Dionysus. The quicker trip costs about 7,600 more hydrogen.

On a fleet save that is usually the wrong way round. You want the fleet to be gone until the attack has landed, and the speed dial does that for free. There is more on the timing in Fleet / Resource Saving.

Travel time

The Zagreus starts at 3,500 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 3 (4,550)	Jet Drive 6 (5,600)	Jet Drive 10 (7,000)	Jet Drive 15 (8,750)
Your own moon	3m 09s	2m 51s	2m 33s	2m 18s
1 slot away	43m 26s	39m 10s	35m 02s	31m 21s
14 slots away	44m 49s	40m 25s	36m 09s	32m 21s
1 system	1h 12m	1h 05m	58m 22s	52m 13s
5 systems	1h 17m	1h 09m	1h 02m	55m 39s
10 systems	1h 22m	1h 14m	1h 06m	59m 40s
25 systems	1h 37m	1h 27m	1h 18m	1h 10m
50 systems	1h 58m	1h 46m	1h 35m	1h 25m
100 systems	2h 31m	2h 16m	2h 01m	1h 49m
1 galaxy	3h 13m	2h 54m	2h 36m	2h 19m

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.

In a mixed fleet the Zagreus is quicker than a Dionysus, a Gaia colony ship, a Zeus and a Hephaestus platform, and slower than everything else in the game. Leave one in an attack fleet and it holds the whole fleet down to 3,500.

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, and the unlock requirements underneath them.

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

Rapid fires the Zagreus	Rating
Zeus Class	x500

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 the worst one in the game. A single Zeus gets up to 500 shots at your Zagreus in a single round, twice the rate it gets against a Dionysus.

In a fight

800 hull, 5 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 Zagreus 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 a single Zeus against 100 Zagreus, run through the in-game Calculator with Weapons, Shield and Armor at 10 on both sides.

Three rounds, one attacking ship, no losses. 900,000 of recyclers turns into 240,000 of debris for whoever brought a recycler along, and hands the attacker 900 points of ship damage. That 240,000 is the flat 30 percent every ship pays when it dies: 1,500 ore and 900 crystal per Zagreus.

Evaluation

Advantages

Buildable on day one. Shipyard 2 is the only real requirement, and you start above it.
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.
The cheapest way to make a fleet save legal. No recycler, no fleet save.
75 percent faster than a Dionysus, which matters when two people are racing for the same field.
Harvest fleets cannot be attacked, cannot be intercepted and are never shown to the target.
Half the build time of a Dionysus, and it turns up in the Lucky Draw.

Disadvantages

Twice the cost per unit of hold and more than five times the fuel. As a workhorse it is simply the worse buy.
Only 5,000 of hold, so clearing a real battlefield takes hundreds of them.
Slow in absolute terms, and it never gets an engine upgrade. 10 percent per Jet Drive level is all it will ever gain.
Useless in combat. 1 attack bounces off anything with a shield rating of 100 or more, and the Zeus rapid fires it 500 times over.
Cargo ships cannot help it carry more. Lifting a bigger field means building more recyclers.
Left parked at home it is 9,000 resources of scrap waiting to become somebody else's debris field.

Requirements

Capitol 2
Shipyard 2
Energy Tech 3
Jet Drive 3
Zagreus Class Recycler

Every line on that list is already met the moment you sign up, which is why the More Info modal only shows you Shipyard 2.