Unsurprisingly, building a space station is a serious investment, and owning one will cost you money.

In the early game, it is best to concentrate on ships. Earn and save up money with VIP contracts and careful trading. Swap your Solen for something with more cargo capacity for effective trading, most likely an Omen, and spend some of the profits on buying more small freighters to run trade routes in the background.

Generally, in order to make a smooth start to your station projects, you should have both:

• At least 80000 credits, 45000 for building the first station and 35000 reserve money
  
• Trade routes producing between them at least 200 credits per day

The trade route requirement is added because, as previously mentioned, stations cost money to run, not just to buy the resources they need, but also because actually using the station costs money too. Each station production cycle (see below) comsumes credits as well as resources, and the amount increases with the station's level (see below).

Of course, if the station produces a commodity, this can be sold to cover the running costs. However, it takes time for a station to become profitable, and some stations, such as telescopes, exist to unlock features for game progression and so cannot be profitable.

Therefore, in the early game it is essential that your trade routes are able to pay for your stations.

ALWAYS REMEMBER

The stations built and run by the NPC companies work in exactly the same way to yours. They are built, upgraded and run by AIs which are playing the game just like you do, against you and each other. This will present both opportunities and problems which I will leave to you to figure out from your own experiences as a player.

All stations are built in sectors, but you cannot simply place any station in any sector. There are limits depending upon the station's needs and the environment of each sector.

Some stations have strict limits on where they can be built:

• Mining stations need to be built in sectors with asteroids which contain the resource that the station mines.
  
  
• Solar 'power plants' need to be built in sectors with high light levels, in order to get enough energy from their solar panels to be able to run.
  
  
• Telescopes cannot be built in sectors which have a low light level or are dusty, as these conditions woud stop the telescope working properly.
  
  
• Gas pumps can only be built in sectors in geostationery orbit of Nema, since Nema is the only or main source of all the gases, and the giant tethers used to pump gas up from scoops floating amid Nema's clouds can only be dangled down from a stationery orbit or the scoop would be dragged in circles around Nema. Until endgame, this means The Spire is the only sector where gas pumps can be built.

Other stations can be built in any sector, but there are a few things to consider when choosing:

How long are the travel times from your chosen sector to other sectors which the station might need something from?

For instance, how long does it take to get from an ice mining sector to the sector where your power plant is located? Short travel times would be helpful, but are not essential.

Who else is in this sector?

If another company with stations in the sector becomes hostile, they may try to destroy or capture yours. Being good neighbours is essential unless you are certain you can beat them if war comes.

Therefore, it may be a good idea to settle in an unnocupied sector you can have all to yourself. This is very good for security as you have no neighbours, and usually if a sector is empty it means other companies do not know it exists, so if war comes they will not be able to attack stations and ships located there.

However there are some problems with this approach that you need to be aware of:

• Finding empty sectors is also difficult for you. The only one you will know about in the early game is First Light, which is not ideal for everything. Finding others requires a telescope, which means having to maintain at least one station in an occupied sector until you have found a suitable empty one to move to.
  
  
• If other companies cannot find the sector, they cannot trade with stations located there. You will have to supply all the resources to the stations yourself and haul the products away to sell elsewhere.
  
  
• There is not a wide enough variety of empty sectors to supply the conditions needed for every type of station, so you will need to buy some resources or build more stations in occupied sectors.
  
  
• Most empty sectors are located in distant orbits over the outer moons, far from civilisation. Travel times to and from them will be quite long.

Once you have enough money and found a suitable location, it is time to contruct the station. All stations require 40000 credits to construct.

Go to the sector info screen for the sector you want to build the station in, then click on the Build Station button at lower left. You will get a list of available station types. Pick one and click Confirm. If the station cannot be built in the chosen sector, you will not be able to click Confirm, and a message appears to the left of the button explaining why the station cannot be built there.

The station will then instantly appear in the sector in an 'under construction' form. This form is easily recognised as the station will appear golden in colour all over. Only completed stations will show their company colour scheme.

A Complex under construction. Its gold colour contrasts with the docked ship whose colour scheme it will share once completed.

There is no way to control precisely where in the sector the station will appear.

To complete the station, it must be supplied with certain resources which are inserted into temporary inventory slots. You can supply these resources yourself, or let another company sell them to the station. It is necessary to dock with the station to deposit the resources.

Once all the resources are supplied, finishing the station will take one day. It will then be ready to use.

There is a limit to how many stations you may have in one sector. This limit will be 5 until you unlock the Dense Sectors technology, which raises the limit to 10. Dense Sectors is an expensive level 5 technology.

If you are adding the station to a Complex you already have completed, the procedure is slightly different. You will need to order its construction by opening the Complex's info screen, where there will be a list of all the station attachment points on the Complex. Click on an empty attachment point in the list, and select the station to build.

Three things to note:

• Building or upgrading a station on a Complex will place the entire Complex back into an under construction state until the work on that one station is completed, preventing the rest of the Complex from working. Have all the needed resources ready before starting, to minimise disruption.
  
  
• Some stations can only be built on the central attachment points. This means at most you may have two of these types of station per complex, so should not use those attachment points for stations that can go on a different attachment point.
  
  
• A Complex and everything on it counts as one station for purposes of enforcing the stations per sector limit.

Every station in the game produces something, except for the Trade Hub, the Complex and the Habitat. The product can be a raw material, a manufactured item, a whole spaceship, or research points.

Each cycle begins with the station comsuming a given number of credits and a quantity of each input resource. The cycle ends with the station producing a certain amount of a product. If the product is items, the items will be placed in the output slot of its inventory.

A newly built station may seem to take quite a while to complete a cycle and not produce very much at all. Increasing the station's level will increase the output per cycle and reduce the time to complete a cycle, but consume a lot more money and resources in each cycle too.

If you need the station to stop production for some reason, such as if you cannot afford to pay the credits needed for the next production cycle, you can do that by opening up the station's info screen from the company or fleets overview screens, and pressing the pause button underneath the box which tells you what the station consumes and produces in each cycle. When you are ready to set the station going again, press the play button in the same place.

If the station is not producing anything:

• Check that every input slot of the station contains resources and each slot has enough of the resource for one production cycle. If a resource is missing or in too small an amount, the cycle will not start. In the Company or Fleets screens, the message 'Waiting for resources' will appear under the station's entry in the list.
  
  
• Check that you have enough credits to pay for one production cycle. The cycle will not start if there is not enough money. In the Company or Fleets screens, the message 'Waiting for credits' will appear under its entry in the list.
  
  
• Check that the station's output slot is not full. If there is nowhere to put one output cycle's worth of products, the cycle will not start.

The level of a station only defines the length and output of its production cycle, and the capacity of its inventory slots. The size and appearance of the station does not change.

All stations always start at Level 1 when they are first built. Upgrading a station works in the same way as building one, supply the required resources for the upgrade into the slots of the temporary inventory, then wait one day for the station to be ready for use again. Every upgrade costs the same as the initial cost to build the station.

Resources placed in the station before the upgrade cannot be added to or removed during the upgrade, but will be retained and become available again after the upgrade is finished. If the station's inventory contains resources that can be used in the upgrade, it will take them from the inventory to be used for the upgrade, so fewer resources need be supplied.

If the station is part of a Complex, resources from elsewhere in the complex can be used to upgrade the station.

It is not possible to downgrade a station, only to scrap it completely and then rebuild and re-upgrade it to a lower level than it was previously. This is expensive, difficult and time-consuming, so be very careful to not upgrade your stations to a higher level than you can currently support. Otherwise you will be forced to stop production and be left with a useless station because you cannot afford to pay enough credits or supply enough resources for each production cycle.

There are three exceptions to this rule, the Trade Hub, the Habitat and the Complex. These do not produce anything and so do not have any running costs.

All stations have ten possible levels, except the Complex, which cannot be upgraded.

Any station can be scrapped at any time using the scrap button in its info screen.

Stations attached to a Complex can be scrapped individually by selecting the Scrap option on their entry in the list of attached stations on the Complex's info screen.

Scrapping a station will release some of the Steel and Plastic used to make it, along with everything that was stored in the station's inventory. These will be deposited in the nearest available ship or station inventory owned by the player, provided that there is one with enough suitable inventory slots present in the sector. If not, those resources will be lost.

No money is produced or returned by scrapping a station.

Asteroid mining rigs are stations built onto chunks of asteroid found floating in convenient orbits. Of course this means that the sector needs to contain the right kind of asteroids. You need Dusty sectors to mine iron and silicon and Icy sectors to mine ice. There is a further restriction in that you cannot have both ore mines and ice mines in the same sector even if the sector is both dusty and icy, so there is no way to have all your mines in one sector. The third restriction is that their size restricts them to the central slots only when mounted on a complex, so there can only be two mines per complex.

Handily, the mines never run out of minerals.


The source of all water. This is one of very few stations that has it's own built in solar panels for power and so needs no fuel. Perhaps because it takes very little energy to melt ice. In fact it needs no input resources at all, which could make it a very good choice for a first mine, but beware that for game balance reasons it costs ten times as much to run as other mines.


The source of Iron Oxyde (misspelled; should be oxide), needed to make steel. Given how high the demand for steel will inevitably be, it pays to upgrade these as much as possible, especially as the running costs per level are actually quite modest. Make sure to increase fuel production capability in line with mine upgrades though as iron and silicon mines eat up fuel.


From here comes Silicon. Do not rush out and build one as soon as you can. The mine is a level 2 technology but there is no use for the silicon except making electronics which requires a Foundry, which is a level 5. There is therefore no reason to build one until foundries are being built. In one game a foolish NPC corporation built two silica mines years before anyone unlocked foundries and was then constantly issuing destocking contracts to try and get rid of the useless output.

Gases are extracted from Nema by cloudscoops dangling down from geostationary orbit on colossal tethers. Up around the counterweights at the top of the tethers, companies are free to built pumping stations to extract and compress the gas for their own use or to sell. For most of the game the Spire is the only cloudscoop tether and so the one and only sector where gas pumps can be built and gases obtained. Once you complete the Pendulum quest chain the second cloudscoop tether at Pendulum will become available.

All pumping stations require fuel to run.


Helium punps extract Helium-3, a specialist gas used in scientific research and fusion power generation. It may also have been intended by the developer that Helium-3 would be used as fuel for heavy ships, as the ingame descriptions of heavy ship engines indicate that they are fusion engines. However, ships consuming fuels was never actually implemented in the game.


These pumps do not extract the regular hydrogen that is contained in water, but the heavier dihydrogen, which is used mostly in steel manufacturing.


Methane is used in many industrial processes, so it is wise to invest in a lot of methane pumping capacity.

You cannot run electrical power lines across space. In theory, power stations located in appropriate orbits could use lasers to beam power across space to other stations. However, beam technology never seems to have got very far in the Helium Rain universe. In theory, space stations in the Nema system could all be powered directly by fitting them with large solar arrays. But this would make them much larger, more expensive and fragile, and limit where they can be built.

The standard compromise solution that all the corporations have agreed on is to use power stations to electrolyse Water into (presumably hydrazine) Fuel which can then be shipped to stations located anywhere and used in compact internal fuel cells to generate electricity on board.

It may also have been intended by the developer that light ships would be fuelled by Fuel as the ingame descriptions of light ship engines state that they are rocket engines. However, ships consuming resources was never actually implemented, perhaps because of the difficulty of making this mechanic work well and be balanced.


A mighty nuclear fusion reactor efficiently produces large amounts of fuel even in the dark, allowing you to produce fuel from Helium-3 and Water in any sector, though of course you are still dependent on one or two special sectors to supply the He3. As a level 5 station that needs a lot of Electronics to build, it will take a lot of time and effort to create.


This jack-shaped station can only be built in sectors with the Good Light quality as a lot of light is needed to power it. Being self-powered, they only need to be supplied with water to run. While sectors have day and night cycles to represent orbiting the planet and moons, night does not interrupt production. For most of the game, solar will be the only source of energy, so it is wise to develop a lot of solar power generation capacity.

Heavy Industrial stations carry out high energy processes to convert raw resources into processed resources and resources into products that other stations can use. The six types of heavy industrial station all use the same model, a fat cylinder with a band of radiator strips that glow when the station is producing, and two pairs of centrifuges at the ends. They all require Fuel to operate.

Being robust and self-contained, they can be built in any sector without limits. They can be placed in any slot on a Complex, allowing you to create huge space industrial parks with all the heavy industries conveniently together in one place.


The Arsenal produces Fleet Supplies from Steel, Plastic and Tools. Since Fleet Supplies are not regularly consumed, but used intermittently to repair and rearm ships after battles, you do not generally need very many or very high level arsenals, as the supplies will easily build up over time and you soon end up with more than you can possibly use.

Arsenals are one of three types of station where you can upgrade ships (or downgrade them) by swapping out the engines, RCS and weapons.


The Carbon Refinery makes Carbon from Methane by splitting the C from the H4. It seems the H is wasted.


Foundries are the source of Electronics, which are essential for high level stations. At the beginning of the game there are none, as they must be unlocked through research first, even by the NPC corporations. It is quite easy to be the first to do this and therefore establish a monopoly on electronics manufacturing and make good money from it.


Plastic plants obviously make plastic. Since all construction and upgrading work requires plastic, it is wise to invest heavily in plastic plants, especially when you consider that plastic is also needed to make tools. Steel, tools and plastic are the Big Three resources that you can never have enough of.


The source of steel, which gets used in everything. Invest heavily in steelworks, there is always a need for more steel.


Tool Factories make tools from steel and plastic. Tools are used in all construction and upgrading work so you need to make a lot of them. Of course this will drive steel and plastic production needs still higher.

The Complex is by far the biggest and most comprehensive station in Helium Rain.

By itself, a Complex is not very useful or interesting. It is simply a stack of cylinders with fourteen long arms pointing out of the ends.

However, stations can be built on attachment points at the ends of these arms. All stations attached to the Complex are together treated as a single station with a single shared inventory.

In effect, it is a highly customisable mega-station. Perfect for a home base.

Processing and manufacturing facilities on the station will pass resources directly to each other without any shipping, allowing an entire production chain to be run efficiently without any time or money spent on shipping, except for the delivery of some raw materials, since while you can attach mining stations to a Complex, no one sector will contain all the raw resources needed to produce everything.

End user stations such as Habitats can also be part of the Complex, and take the supplies they need directly from the shared inventory. Adding and upgrading a Trading Hub will increase the size of all inventory slots.

You can't pack your entire company's operations into a Complex, but you can come pretty close. Once they become available, there is no way that seperate stations can ever be economically the better solution.

The Complex is however a high level station requiring an expensive Level 5 research to unlock it. This presents the player with an interesting dilemma. Either hold off on building any stations other than a Research Station and perhaps a Telescope and grind money through Trade Routes and Contracts while waiting years to unlock the Complex (and then a while longer to unlock stations for it). Or go ahead and start unlocking and building lots of seperate stations knowing full well that when the Complex becomes available it will be time to scrap most of them and migrate their operations into the new Complex.

A Complex does not have levels and cannot be upgraded, nor can it store or produce anything by itself.

A big station which acts as a comfortable home for the families of ship crews and station workers. The two contra-rotating rings create artificial gravity for their inhabitants.

Habitats act as an end user for products and do not have a production cycle or any outputs.

Habitats will slowly consume Food, Fuel, Tools and Electronics. The rate of consumption is tied to the population of the sector the habitat is in as it is assumed everyone in the sector lives there or at least goes home there on leave.

As yet, the population system and the workings of habitats in general are not well explained. It is not clear, for example, what upgrading a habitat actually does.

The population of a habitat is seperate from the company that owns it. People living in the habitat buy input resources from the habitat owner. Therefore players can make money from habitats they own themselves. Fill up the input slots and over time the resources will trickle away and credits will trickle back to the player.

This means that it is possible to be completely independent of all other companies. With luck, the habitat inhabitants will pay for the entire supply chain feeding the habitat, so there is no need to sell any products to other companies in order to pay for the stations making them.

The Repair Outpost is a small end user station that consumes Fleet Supplies.


Kari Outpost is close to the Spire.

Since it is not actually necessary to use a station to repair ships, only a source of sufficient Fleet Supplies is needed, this station simply acts as another place where ships can be upgraded or downgraded by swapping out their engines and RCS.

The Research Station is a small structure housing a laboratory which carries out a wide variety of scientific research to produce Research Points which are used to unlock new technology.

While it is possible to get by without one as some contracts will give a few Research Points as a reward, a Research Station is essential to progress with technology development in any reasonable amount of time.

Each cycle, the station will consume Fuel, Tools and Helium-3 to produce Research Points. While upgrading it is very worthwhile due to the importance of Research Points and the huge amount of them you require, be very careful to not overdo it as each research cycle can cost as much as 10 times more than the production cycle for any other station of the same level.

Despina Shipyard is part of Blue Heart, and therefore much of the structure is inside Blue Heart out of sight.

The Shipyard builds all spaceships in the game.

Unlike other stations that produce things, the Shipyard does not have a fixed production cycle length. Instead, the time it takes to produce a ship depends on the cost of the ship, as well as the shipyard's level. Also, instead of automatically making a product, it only builds ships when ordered to by a company.

To produce ships, the Shipyard takes in Steel, Plastic, Tools and Fuel. Each ship requires a different amount to build it. Shipyards have multiple production lines, three for light ships and one for heavy ships. Given this fact and the shorter production times of light ships, a Shipyard of any level can pour out fighters and light freighters while a single heavy freighter or capital warship is being finished. Build times of 100 days or more even for corvettes are to be expected in a low level shipyard.

When a heavy ship is being built, you can see it inside the building cage in the middle of the shipyard. Since there are no construction state models, the ship will look almost complete.

Shipyards can also upgrade and downgrade existing ships with new engines, RCS and weapons.

Note that although Shipyards are level 4 stations, they require a lot of Electronics to build, so you cannot actually complete one until the level 5 station for manufacturing electronics is available. It will therefore take a lot of work to be able to break into the shipbuilding market, with the three starting NPC shipyards being all that is available for the first few years, thus constraining the rate at which fleets can grow.

The Telescope is a giant space telescope used to look for new sectors. It is the only station that can never be built on a Complex.

Each cycle it will consume Fuel and Helium-3, and reveal one new sector. The cycle is very long but can be reduced by upgrading the telescope.

At present, the telescope is only useful from early to mid game as it has no use once all the sectors are discovered. Therefore there is little reason to upgrade it a lot unless you are in a great hurry and have a lot of money to spare.

A Storage Hub seen up close during final approach.

The Storage Hub neither has a production cycle nor acts as an end user of resources. It is simply a big warehouse cylinder, with a large docking hub at one end where many ships can pick up and drop off goods at once.

The hub has fourteen inventory slots which cover most of the resource types in the game.

When you make a mistake and transport the wrong goods to the wrong place, it can be helpful to dump them on the nearest trade hub.

Hubs have a special role to play as part of a Complex. Adding a Trade Hub to a Complex will considerably increase the capacity of all the input and output slots of all the other stations in the Complex. It may also, depending on what other stations are attached, add more slots.