Hard Drive



The Hard Drive is an item resembling a heavy duty carrying case that can be found inside Crash Sites.

It currently 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 86 Crash Sites. This means a total of 86 Hard Drives could theoretically be obtained. 8 however require materials not currently available in early access.

2 Hard drives will be used for character Inventory expansions, leaving 84 for alternate recipes.

Alternate Recipes
Alternate recipes generally cost only about two thirds of the original recipe, both in time and required material, but often require different input materials than the original.

The set of blueprints to choose from is picked randomly at the time the scan has completed. Because of this, the player can keep re-rolling to get a desired blueprint by saving the game before opening the M.A.M. UI to check the analyze results, then loading the save if the choices are undesirable.

The recipes that show up depend on the current tier and what other Milestones have been unlocked. For example, researching Caterium opens up multiple new possible 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. This means that if a player builds a factory that requires certain alternate recipes which they have not yet unlocked, they may need to find more hard drives than the amount they anticipated in order to unlock their intended alternate recipes. Two examples (but not all) of these are the alternate recipes for Silica and High-Speed Connectors. (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 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.
 * Researching a Hard Drive alone does not unlock new recipes. The player is required to complete the necessary Milestones at The HUB. It is a 2-step process.
 * 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" and any alternate recipe for Computer 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" (6 and 2/9ths of an iron ingot per plate instead of 8).
 * "Iron Wire" is the best alternate recipe for wire, consuming 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, which is 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. Enriched variant is preffered, as it uses the lowest amounts of coal, replacing some of the coal with sulfur (which isn't really needed much in other places).
 * "Heat Sink" removes the need of oil from the recipe and decreases 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 him (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", consumes rubber which requires an oil refinery without saving much copper ore.
 * "Biomass Coal", and "Wood Coal", 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 carpaces to some extra coal, although it's not recommended in production lines, as it requires manual input.
 * "Screw", and "Steel Screw" are useless once you have these 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 usually have issues with finding enough limestone.
 * "Motor" and "Beacon" use rarer resources (oil and coal, if combined with "Crystal Oscillator", then also caterium and quartz), while saving on iron. That is something you don't usually want to do, as iron is abundant.
 * "Plastic" recipe is the only recipe in the game, which is literally useless. With all the other recipes, there is always at least some argument for them to use. But there is literally no reason to use "Plastic". It needs more oil, more machines, more power and more space to produce plastic.
 * "Stator" uses Quickwire instead of normal Wire, which is not something you want to do
 * "Quickwire Circuit Board" and "Quickwire Computer" should be replaced with "Circuit Board" and "Crystal Computer" respectively due to their excess usage of caterium. Caterium is usually needed elsewhere.

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.