Dyson Sphere Program

Dyson Sphere Program

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Dark Fog Achievements
By Llyfr
Guide on how to obtain new Dark Fog Achievements.
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About
Hey there,

Some of the achievements were quite tricky to figure out so I thought I would share my findings, and while at it, might as well write guide for all of them. I'm still in the process of completing some of these my self, so this is still work in progress and for some achievements best I can do is share how I think they should be approached, but once I get them I will update the guide.

Also I can't spell if my life depended on it in my native language let alone in english, so if you see some grammar mistakes feel free to pm about them, and I will fix them.
Super Nova!
> Activate Supernova.

The easiest Achievement just build a turret, open it's menu and press the Supernova Button.
Dust To Dust I II & III
> Collect 1m 10m and 100m soil piles from Dark Fog

While the first one you should be able to get by just playing the game normally and fighting the Dark Fog here and there, for the other two is best to build a farm. Farm is a base that you build on a very infected planet (10+ Dark Fog planetary bases), that will be able to defend it's self against waves the Dark Fog will send. I used this great blueprint [www.dysonsphereblueprints.com], it also collects all the items you need to research all the hidden technologies, so it will help you with that achievement as well.

Once you place the base and make sure it is supplied with all the ammo it needs, you can leave it and it will collect soil for you at decent pace, this can still be to slow for you though so what you can do is place this base really close to a dark fog one, this will make it send units after you non-stop and that results in way more soil / m.
Right Under My Nose
> Land on a planet that is 8000m or closer to a Dark Fog Hive.

Quite easy to get, once you have universe exploration on level 4 it's very easy to just go through all the planetary system in your star cluster and find one where a Dark Fog hive is orbiting close to one of the planets.
Gotcha
> Find Dark Fog Communicator.

This took me 100 hours to get, why? Because I turned off space navigation and this prevents you from seeing the communicator when it randomly appears somewhere in the sky. When you don't turn of your space navigation, it really isn't hard to spot it, just make sure pin it when you do spot it so you can visit it when you research space flight.

You can control your space navigation under the Detail Display (H) menu. When the dark fog communicator does appear it looks like this.



All you then need to do is visit it and interact with it.
Happy Hunting I, II & III
> Neutralize 100, 1000 & 10000 Dark Fog space units.

Just make sure to automate your space fleet units, and this shouldn't be that hard to get, most Hives I fought with all had over 1000 units so in theory I would only need to attack 10 of them.


You Shall Not Pass!
> Neutralize a Relay Station before it lands on a planet.

I can think of 3 ways of doing this, but I only really tested one.

First, the most annoying one, you can stalk a Hive and wait for it to send out a relay station then attack it with your fleet.

Second option, involves the fact that Missile Turrets and Plasma Turrets can both be set to attack upper air (relay stations) and space, one of these settings should make it possible for them to attack the relay station before it lands so if you cover your planet with enough of them you should get the achievement sooner or latter.

Last, and this is the one I did, is to activate your space fleet when you are landed on a planet. You can do this by pressing Z to enter a combat mode and on your right switch the menu to space and click on your fleets to activate them. Doing so will make them orbit the planet and attack anything that approaches, if you allow them to attack relay station they will destroy any that are already on the planet and any that will try to land on it.
A.T Field
> Planetary Shield's coverage reaches 100% over a planet.

The shields snap to each other quite nicely so it's easy to cover the whole planet, all you need is enough power, approximately 520 MW, and 22-30 planetary shields generators. If you are lazy to place them your self you can use some of the available blueprints, for example this[www.dysonsphereblueprints.com] one but there are others if you search for them.

To easily se what area is covered and which you are missing you can press M and make the shield visible.
You Started It
> Have Icarus destroyed by Dark Fog at Passive Dark Fog aggressiveness.

Pretty straight forward, start a new game, set the Dark Fog aggressiveness to passive, locate the planetary base on your starting planet and walk over to it to die.

Just make sure not to set the aggressiveness to dummy as that prevents the Dark Fog from even attacking you.
Bullet Storm
> Bullet consumption reaches 360/min on any planet.

You can get this without having to fire single bullet, all you need it so consume them, so by producing titanium bullets that consume copper ones, at enough rate you will get this achievement.

Thanks to Zwerg06 for sharing this knowledge in the comments
It's on Fire
> Icarus' Replicator speed reaches 400%.

For this all you need to do is fill all your fuel chamber slots with Mk.III Proliferated Energy Sharps, that drop from lv. 3+ dark fog units. Then you need to actively burning one and crafting something at the same time.

Global Offense
> Be simultaneously assaulted by 12 Planetary Bases on a planet.

The trick here is to not attack the units in the raids so it never ends, but also preventing them from destroying anything. You can do this by just spamming Battlefield Analysis Base everywhere. You also need to be consuming energy on that planet so the bases threat grows. In theory this should work but it is quite slow, you can speed it up by flying around and attacking the planetary bases. This will make their threat to go up as well, just make sure you don't destroy units in the raids.

On harder difficulties, especially with the energy threat growth multiplier on 1000%, I image this is quite easy to get by just landing on a planet and crafting something or building few smelters.
All Calculated
> Unlock all secret technologies.

There are 4 secret technologies in the game at this moment. For them to even show on your technology research tree you need to hold in your inventory special item that only drops from Dark Fog units of certain levels and to research them you need to have Dark Fog Matrix in you inventory, and research the technology manually (Use items in inventory)

Bellow you can see what items drop at what level. What you are looking at is Dark Fog Drop Filter, you can access it in the game, but these secret items won't be visible for you until you pick on of them up.



All the technologies are:

Re-composing Assembler
You need to pick up Matter Re-combinator that drops from lv.15+ units.



Self-Evolving Lab
You need to pick up Silicon-based Neuron that drops from lv.18+ units.



Negentropy Smelter
You need to pick up Negentropy Singularity that drops from lv.21+ units.



Strange Annihilation Fuel Rod
You need to pick up Core Element that drops from lv.24+ units.




The easiest way to get all of these is once again building a farm and let it do it's thing, but to speed it up you can manually attack bases units over and over again witch will lead to that base gaining levels way quicker.
In the Spotlight
> Have 40 Laser Towers shoot the same target at Difficulty 1.0 or above.

What you need to do is, find a base and destroy all it's buildings, but do not destroy or send away the relay station (don't put foundation over the hole). If you don't send the relay station away it will very soon build a new core building, we can exploit this and place 40 laser towers around the place where we know this building will be build. When it's inevitably constructs all the laser towers will attack it at the same time giving you the achievement.



POPCORN!
> Implosion Cannon neutralizes 40 enemies or more with 1 shot.

Planetary bases spawn 3 types of units. One of them called Ranger has a special behavior where they stack in one place above the player when attacking them, this can be used to stack 40 units in one space and then lead them to a Implosion Cannon that will kill them all with one shot. It might take few tries but it isn't hard to do.

To make this easier your character should have all it's attacks disabled so it doesn't kill any of the units.
Shoot Oneself in the Foot
> Lure Lancers to destroy a Planetary Base.

Since I'm not sure how the targeting of the hive raids works I recommend doing this in a planetary system where you don't have anything build, so that you are the only target for the lancers.

Getting this achievement consists 2 parts. Ones is actually triggering attack from the hive. The fastest way to do that is to attack and destroy a relay station, only one or two should do the trick. The second part consists of making the lancer actually destroy the base. Unless you have high level Hive, the lancers don't do that much damage so you have to help them.

Find a Dark Fog planetary base and destroy everything except the core building, if you do destroy it by accident all you need to do it wait a while and the relay station will rebuild it. When you only have your core building, you want to trigger an attack from the Hive in that system, and manually damage it so that it has only few hit-points left, then stand as close to it as you can, and wait for the lancer to attack you, this will make them also hit the base and destroy it, giving you the achievement.

In case they don't seem to do any damage to the building it is possible your shield is protecting it so you have to move a way a bit.
Invincible
> Base radius of Icarus' Energy Shield reaches 25m.

You need to research lv.25 Energy Shield. This is very expensive on universe matrices, just the last upgrade costs 420k of them.
Monster Kill
> Icarus neutralizes over 1,000 Dark Fog units within 1 minute.

Find a planet with as many planetary bases as you can find, make sure to have decent shield level and full ground squadron. While your units will do a lot of damage, you can do most by your self, I used the Antimatter Capsule to manually target large clusters of units. The ammunition is designed destroy space units so it does a lot of damage over a large area and it's not hard to destroy most units in a base with a one shot. Just make sure to always be moving to the next base, don't stay at just one trying to destroy it's buildings as that is quite the waste of time. Just remember that minute is way longer that you think, if you still fail you can check the achievement progress to see how close you got.
Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken
> Keep Icarus' energy shield's power consumption at 1GW while resisting damage for over 1 minute.

This is the hardest achievement from the dark fog and maybe even in the entire game depending on how much you hate speed-running. You will need massive factory so you can research all the technologies, as well as getting your hands on lv. 25 drop from Dark Fog so you can research and create the best fuel source in the game.


The red number is the amount of damage you are resisting at the moment, and to sustain it for a whole minute will require a lot of things. First you need to get the best fuel in the game Strange Annihilation Fuel Rod and have it proliferated with MK.III. The better the fuel you are using the more energy you can replenish at the same time.

To be able to sustain the consumption on 1GW for a whole minutes I had to research:

lv. 21 Mecha Core
lv. 28 Energy Circuit
lv. 25 Energy Shield

It's kind of a balancing act, the most useful technology is definitely the Energy Circuit as that increases that speed at which you can consume your fuel, but the level 28 already costs 1m universe matrices. Having more levels in Mecha Core means you will loose your recharge slower and having higher Energy Shield level gives you extra energy to the shield that you can lose giving you more time before you run out.

What is very important for this achievement is understanding that you can change your shield recharge speed, when you hover above your shield information you will see one, two or three arrows indicating in what mode you are at the moment and by pressing them you will switch between them. The more energy you are using to recharge your shield the less is going to your core and because your core will depleted faster so will drop the recharge speed. I had it for most of my minute on the two arrows settings, only switching to the highest level when I only had 1/3 of my shield left.

It's also very hard to get consisted damage, when I got in to situations where I received exactly 1GW, sooner or latter it doped bellow the value, so it's important to get to a situation where the max damage you are resisting is about 1.3GW as to account fo the breaks in the enemy attacks that will cause this value to drop. Best place to do this is to sit between two or three planetary bases. But if you have one that is high level it might be enough to just jump in to middle of one (with your attacks and drones disabled so you don't destroy it obviously)

Anyway good luck with this one, you could get a way with getting it with bit lower level technologies, but it will require more luck and work on your part. If anybody knows how to get this with way less effort please share it with us in the comments.
Achievements I didn't completed yet.
From here, there will only be achievements that I personally didn't do and I can only guess how to approach them, so keep that in mind when reading rest of the guide. I will be updating them as I get to them in my playthrough.



Wrong Place
> Land on a planet occupied by over 20 Planetary Bases.

Actually quite hard, it seems that on default difficulty settings only about 15 bases can be found on any planet in any system, and that is only if the system contains more that one hive. For this reason I would encourage you, if you are starting a new game, to go to the settings and changing the Max Density to 2x or 3x. It will make your game a bit harder but this should ensure that Black Hole or Neutron Star systems should have enough hives and bases for you to be able to get this achievement.

I personally am still working on my 1TW Dyson Sphere so I'm letting one hive level up as much as I can to see if it can plant more Bases on the planet in the system but I'm skeptical it will work.
Strangle in the cradle & Won't Lie Low
> Wipe out a Dark Fog Planetary Base within 1 hour at Difficulty 1.0 or above.
> Attract an attack from a space unit within 1 hour at Difficulty 1.0 or above.

These two should be possible to get at the same time. Basically you want to speed-run to a point where you can research missile turrets and automate gun turrets with bullet production. When you have enough turrets and bullets and few missile turrets and some ammo for them, you want to attack the base closes to you, destroy the buildings, then place down missile turrets and set them to attack relay station to destroy it. This should count as defeating planetary base as well as trigger attack from the Hive.

Note from CharmHole: you also need to fill the hole left behind by the base which requires 300 foundations.

I recommend setting the combat threat multiplier to 1000% as otherwise destroying only one relay station might not be enough to trigger the attack.
A Penny Saved, War has Changed and Peace & Love
> Complete the mission without any buildings destroyed at Difficulty 1.0 or above.
> Complete the mission without building any Turrets at Difficulty 1.0 or above.
> Complete the mission without any Dark Fog buildings neutralized at Difficulty 1.0 or above

You can achieve a difficulty 1.0 by setting all options to max and aggressiveness to passive.



Now all you need to do is play the game in peace as usual and completing the mission. Just stay out the dark fog way as even on passive they can still attack you if you attack them first. If you accidentally fail one of the conditions, you can always reload a save.

This run is also probably a good time to get the achievement "Wrong Place" as the maxed density will make it very likely that planet around a black hole will be overflowing with dark fog bases.

Thanks to Zwerg06 for sharing this knowledge in the comments
10 Comments
GThoro 16 Mar @ 5:08am 
@Llyfr just did Won't Lie Low at 3rd attempt and got some observations that might help others. It was impossible for me to get it on default DF settings as the hive wasn't ready to send the attack. All on max, except power multiplier at 1% (no pressure while building), DF level ~2 (higher may be harder to hold position) and the setting that controls how many bases are at start, leave that at 1 (once you attack all bases will engage and it will be harder to hold position). No need for foundations, just get around 20 gauss and 5 missiles, with about 500 and 100 ammo each. Set missile turrets to attack relay (you can build this turrets so their range does NOT overlap with any part of DF base, it will still be able to reach relay) and other guns to guard it. Then wait for relay to be destroyed.

I was ready at around 40 minutes, and if you got what I listed above it should take about 5 minutes to get the achievement.

https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3445668724
Llyfr  [author] 18 Jan @ 11:57am 
@Nebork it's been a while since I played but I remember having issues with the threat not raising equally. The bases on a new planet are always low leve if I remember correctly so it was pretty easy to just fly around and attack their structures and then just ignore the raids.
Nebork 18 Jan @ 3:43am 
Great guide, I got quite some inspiration on the remaining achievements.

For the Global Offense achievement, wouldn't it be possible to go to a new planet with 12+ bases (see Wrong Place) and just build something to consume energy? For example an artificial sun with some defense. All bases should start at 0% threat and rise equally. Thus 12 attacks are triggered simultaneously, given no bases are attacked/provoked.
Llyfr  [author] 7 Jan @ 3:56am 
@CharmHole thanks for the feedback, I will try to update it soon. :)
CharmHole 6 Jan @ 10:29pm 
THANKS FOR THE GUIDE!!

Note: Strangle In The Cradle will only count if you blow up the base, the flying relay above the base AND fill in the hole with 300 foundation. Please update accordingly and check my profile cause I just got this and I'm proud of it.

Personal notes:
- Pause Time in the Tech Tree to save precious seconds
- Make New Manual Saves when you feel comfy OR start to feel burdened
- It's only an hour so it's fun to try
- Starting area matters, you'll need close access to plenty of iron/copper/stone/coal
- Always Be Fabricating with Icarus
- Just like the Beat the game in 25 or 10 hours achievements, if you have metadata from a finished playthrough you can quickbuy research to easily get this one though I didn't do this.
- :betsy:
Fish & Chips 20 Oct, 2024 @ 12:18pm 
The "won't lie low" achievement is very difficult to pull off, but I got it.

My approach was making 1 missile turret and a bunch of regular turrets to protect the missile turret.
The missile turret placed not that far from a relay and aiming at the outer atmosphere (relay).
Only damage to relay seems to generate threat from a hive, but you also don't want to destroy the relay, so just pelt it with 1 missile turret.

There is a threat problem to consider...
On passive, no threat is generated, on 1 difficulty higher, while threat is enough to make a hive assemble a strike force, it is constantly cancelled due to threat decay, despite constant pelting of missiles.
It has to be normal or even higher difficulty, I did it on highest difficulty.

It's basically a survival - suicide run, good luck.
Fritou 19 Apr, 2024 @ 9:50am 
Hi there, nice guide, saved me much time.

I think I found something worthy of interest so I'll try to contribute :
I got the infamous UUU (unbowed, unbent, unbroken) with only circuit lvl 20, core lvl 22, shield lvl 25.
The idea is to build a compact area of signal towers and T2 tesla, aggro enough bad guys, and hide in the center of it for extra power generation !
here is an example (can be optimized prolly): https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/profiles/76561198027215611/screenshot/2473114504609965663/

I personally died right after triggering UUU, so if it's still too short for you, get an extra circuit or core lvl.
Hope it will save you guys some grind, GL :)
Old Man Gamer (OMG) 28 Jan, 2024 @ 2:20am 
Excellent guide. I had a couple that I was stumped on. Shoot Oneself in the Foot, for instance. It would seem that my shields were prohibiting progress and I just needed to back off a little.
Llyfr  [author] 24 Jan, 2024 @ 1:20am 
lmao, never would have thought about just using the bullets in crafting. I will add it to the guide soon, thanks :D
Zwerg06 22 Jan, 2024 @ 12:06pm 
Nice guide.
Two notes:
1. You can get Bullet Storm without firing a single bullet by consuming bullets producing titanium ammo.
2. A Penny Saved, Peace & Love and War has Changed can be unlocked with aggressiveness to passive, so you will never be attacked and all other settings to max gives a 1.0 difficulty. 😉