Photon Combiner

Photon combiner is a crafting component used mainly for Solar Sail production, and therefore for building a Dyson Shell and the associated swarm. It also serves as an input for some buildings and drones, but those uses are secondary; in normal play, the vast majority of demand comes from Solar Sail lines. For that reason, a small diversion from an existing Solar Sail production chain is often enough to cover building needs.

Its basic recipe is straightforward: it is made primarily from two Prisms and a small amount of Circuit Boards. Since Prisms are themselves made from Glass and raw Stone, the standard route involves several steps of smelting and processing before the final assembly. The main limitation is not the ingredient list but the crafting time: scaling to full belt output requires many assemblers, and a line using Mk1 assemblers needs 24 of them to saturate a belt. If the Prism feed is not reinforced, the input must be topped up midway; alternatively, a Mk2 belt can be used to raise Prism throughput.

There is also an alternate recipe that uses Grating Crystals directly instead of Prisms and Stone. This removes the need for the intermediate smelting chain and simplifies the input ratio to 1:1, which makes the production layout much cleaner. The Circuit Board requirement and the crafting time remain the same, so the number of assemblers needed does not change, but the overall footprint and energy use are reduced. For players who have access to Grating Crystals, this is the preferred way to compact Photon combiner production.

• Photon combiner demand is modest during early and midgame progression, and building supply can usually be handled by manually crafting or by a single assembler.
• Once large-scale Dyson Shell construction begins, Solar Sail consumption rises sharply, and Photon combiner production must scale with it.
• The increase is especially steep because Solar Sail demand grows with the square of the Dyson Shell radius, so expanding the shell quickly multiplies Photon combiner requirements.
• If Grating Crystals are available, switching to the alternate recipe greatly reduces the size of the production line and completely removes Stone from the process.
• Even with the alternate recipe, the production line still needs enough assembly capacity to cover the long crafting time.