Hard Drive



The Hard Drive is an item resembling a heavy-duty carrying case that can be found inside the Dropship around Crash Sites which can be located by using Object Scanner after Radio Signal Scanning has been researched.

It can be researched in the M.A.M. and results in a choice of one of 3 alternate blueprints, chosen from the pool below. See Below

There are 89 Crash Sites. This means a total of 89 Hard Drives could theoretically be obtained. 4 of them however require materials not currently available in early access.

2 Hard drives will be used for the character Inventory expansions, leaving 87 for alternate recipes.

Alternate Recipes
Alternate recipes generally require different input materials than the original, shuffling the balance between raw material consumption, space, power, simplicity and availability of material.

The set of blueprints to choose from is determined randomly at the beginning of the scan. Because of this, the player can keep re-rolling to get the desired blueprint by saving the game before researching a hard drive, then loading the save and wait for another 10 minutes if the choices are undesirable.

The recipes that show up depending on the current unlocked original recipes. For example, researching Quickwire in the Caterium chain opens up alternate recipes that involve it.

However, some alternate recipes also seem to require that previous alternate recipes are unlocked in order to appear as one of the three random options presented at the time the scan is complete. It is enough to have these prerequisites unlocked at the M.A.M.. This means that if a player builds a factory that requires certain alternate recipes that they have not yet unlocked, they may need to find more hard drives than they anticipated in order to unlock the prerequisites blocking their intended alternate recipes. (This page is incomplete regarding these requirements and regarding the complete list of alternate recipes which require other alternate recipes in order to be shown after the scan is complete. Please help improve this page by indicating on the "discussion" tab which alternate recipes do not appear as one of the three random options until another alternate recipe was unlocked and which alternate recipes they require).

Note: Alternate Recipe: Uranium Cell appears to require at least Turbofuel. Turbofuel requires Compacted Coal.

Important Notes

 * The Hard Drive research is repeatable.
 * If you research a Hard Drive, and there is nothing more to unlock, the Hard Drive will return to your inventory. "The analysis of Hard Drive is completed! No new research is available. Try again later after further progress. Your Hard Drive has been returned to you. "

Good alternate recipes

 * "Steel Ingot", "Encased Industrial Beam", "Modular Frame", and "Heavy Modular Frame" recipes are a good combo.


 * "Stitched Iron Plate", "Heavy Modular Frame", "Rotor" combined with any alternate recipe for Computer.
 * These remove the need of having Screws, simplifying your production lines


 * "Stitched Iron Plate" and "Iron Wire" recipes are a good combo.
 * when combined they use even fewer iron ingots than the other Alternative "Reinforced Iron Plate" recipe. (6 and 2/9ths of an iron ingot per plate instead of 8).


 * "Iron Wire" is the best alternate recipe for wire, consuming the lowest amount of ore.


 * "Caterium Wire" consumes the same amount of ore as normal Wire recipe, so it's not recommended to use it (as copper is mostly useless).


 * "Iron Ingot" and "Quickwire" make use of copper
 * Copper is an otherwise useless resource after using "Iron Wire"


 * "Circuit Board", "Crystal Computer", "High-Speed Connector" and "Crystal Oscillator" are the best recipes for producing electronics


 * "Uranium Cell" and "Nuclear Fuel Rod" are good recipes to save on Uranium Ore when making Nuclear Fuel Rods


 * "Silica" should be used where possible


 * "Steel Ingot" and "Enriched Steel Ingot" should be used for steel production.


 * The former is preferred, as it uses less resources.
 * On the other hand, if you are struggling with coal, the later recipe can be used to decrease coal costs.


 * "Heat Sink" removes the need for oil from the recipe and decreases the usage of other resources as well.

Most of the recipes that aren't listed here are good as well, except for the recipes listed below in the "Bad alternate recipes" list.

Note: while most of the recipes listed here are "good" in general, a player needs to check if a recipe is actually good for them (if they have enough resources and if they can use the resources for the production line). There is no way to objectively classify a recipe as "best".

Bad alternate recipes

 * "Rubber Cable".
 * This consumes rubber which requires an oil refinery without saving much copper ore. Its only upside is its extremely high output rate of 75/minute, vs. the normal recipe's 15/minute.  It's a recipe tailored to very large factory processes where rubber is already available.


 * "Biomass Coal", and "Wood Coal".
 * This serve little purpose unless you really enjoy cutting down forests and manually feeding them to your coal power plants.
 * However Biomass Coal may be used to convert alien carapaces to some extra coal, although it's not recommended in production lines, as it requires manual input.


 * "Screw", and "Steel Screw".
 * These recipes are useless once you have the alternate recipes: "Stitched Iron Plate", "Heavy Modular Frame", "Rotor" and any recipe for Computer.


 * "Reinforced Iron Plate" recipe is good, however "Stitched Iron Plate" is a better alternative.


 * "Concrete" uses quartz, which is much rarer resource. You shouldn't have issues with finding enough limestone.


 * "Motor" and "Beacon" use rarer resources (caterium and quartz, also oil if the alternate "Crystal Oscillator" is used)


 * This recipe only saves on iron. Which you don't usually want to do since iron is abundant.


 * ''"Plastic"' recipe is the only recipe in the game, which is literally useless.


 * With all the other recipes, you would think that there is at least some argument for using them. But there is really no reason to use this recipe.
 * It will only cost you more oil, more machines, more power, and more space to produce plastic.


 * "Stator" uses Quickwire instead of normal Wire, which will only make things more complex.


 * "Quickwire Circuit Board" and "Quickwire Computer"s use caterium, which is usually needed elsewhere.
 * These should be replaced with "Circuit Board" and "Crystal Computer" respectively.

Note: while most of the recipes listed here are "bad" in general, there may be cases, where usage of those recipes can be justified. But in general, these recipes should be avoided.