Desynced — the progression path: every tech, what it costs, what it unlocks

Desynced has 117 research technologies, and the game never shows you the bill in one place. This guide is that bill: every tech in the order you meet it, with the number of research cycles it demands, the materials each cycle consumes, the time it takes on an Uplink, what it unlocks, and the traps that stall a first run — the silica wall, the Robotics Datacube chicken-and-egg, and the research that quietly can't be finished because the Uplink has nowhere to put the ingredients.

Written for Desynced 1.0 (1.0 launched 5 March 2026). The figures come from the Desynced Wiki's Cargo tables, which are imports of the game's own data files, cross-checked against the wiki's rendered technology pages and the 1.0 patch notes.

How research actually works

Research is unlocked the first time you equip an Uplink, which also triggers the "Research Uplink" technology and reveals the robot tree.

An Uplink is a Medium component: 1 Circuit Board + 5 Metal Bar at an Assembler, 4 seconds, and it draws 100 Power while working. Every technology is a recipe with three numbers attached:

• Cycles — how many times the recipe must run. The wiki renders this as "Total Requirements"; it is the tech's progressCount in the game data.
• Materials per cycle — the items one cycle eats.
• Seconds per cycle — at an Uplink (research speed 1).

Total materials = cycles × per-cycle amounts. Total time on one Uplink = cycles × seconds. The wiki's own technology pages confirm this arithmetic: Basic Power shows 3 Crystal Chunk → Basic Power per cycle and "Total Requirements: 30 Crystal Chunk, 10 Basic Power" against 10 cycles.

Three things change the time:

Multiple Uplinks are the real speed-up. Each Uplink reserves a separate segment of the current research goal, so four Uplinks finish a tech roughly four times faster (at four times the 100 W draw and four times the material consumption rate). If every remaining segment of the queued tech is already reserved, an Uplink starts reserving segments from the next tech in the queue.

The time base is the tick: 0.2 seconds, 5 ticks per second, and all work rounds up to whole ticks.

The tree at a glance

Every researchable tech in the game, by tree. Five more data rows (the free starting technology, the three "basic" trees' entry nodes and Research Uplink) plus the five Discovery techs have no research recipe — they are granted by events and missions.

2,795 research cycles means 8,740 individual items fed to Uplinks, and at one Uplink it is 191 hours of solid research. Desynced is not finished by one Uplink — plan for four to eight by the mid-game.

The opening: one Scout, one Command Center bot

A new game gives you the Command Center bot — two Medium sockets, eight inventory slots, and an internal Deployer that consumes itself and the bot to build the stationary Command Center — plus one Scout (one Small socket, three Internal sockets, four inventory slots; you may get more from Explorables) and a set of preloaded components.

The starting technology (the wiki lists it twice, as C0rrup7ed D4tabas3 and as New Starter Tech — same id, t_robot_tech_basic) unlocks the whole ground floor: Metal Ore, Crystal Chunk, Silica Sand, Metal Bar, Metal Plate, Circuit Board, Foundation Plate, Miner, Laser Mining Tool, Fabricator, Assembler, Uplink, Small Turret, Deconstructor, Foundation, Wall, Runner, Worker, Scout Radar, Robot Factory, Building 1x1 (1S) and Storage Block (8).

Deploy the Command Center near Metal Ore and Crystal Chunk — the starting power grid only reaches so far, and both must be inside it. Silica Sand is the third resource, and it is not optional; see the traps.

It is also viable to never deploy: the Command Center bot has the two Medium sockets that matter (Assembler, Uplink), at the cost of four storage slots and one Internal socket. A nomadic start can clear a plateau before your base has anything to lose.

The first research target is not the basic tree

The wiki's imported data puts Artificial Intelligence in front of all three openings:

Robot Discovery (story) → Artificial Intelligence → Basic Power / Basic Signals / Basic Structures

Artificial Intelligence costs 1 Circuit Board per cycle for 40 cycles at 200 seconds a cycle: 40 Circuit Boards and 8,000 seconds (2 h 13 min) on one Uplink. That is the first real production goal, and 40 Circuit Boards is 200 Crystal Chunk and 240 Metal Ore's worth of Metal Plate. Build the second and third Uplink before you build the fourth worker.

The three basic techs themselves are cheap — 30 Crystal Chunk, 30 Metal Plate and 5 Circuit Boards respectively:

The bug escalation decision

Bug Hives and Bug Holes scale their swarms off how far you have progressed and how much you have built nearby — not off elapsed time. That produces the opening's one real fork:

• Play as intended: deploy, mine, research, then find silica and exterminate the bugs with Worker/Dashbot-grade bots (one Small socket each, one Small Turret).
• Clear a plateau first: put a Small Turret in one of the Command Center bot's two Medium sockets. A smaller component in a larger socket is overclocked +50% — the turret recharges half again as fast — and you have no base to defend yet. The cost is a bigger difficulty jump later, because hives scale with your tech.

Either way you will need silica from more than one plateau, so the combat comes regardless.

The Basic tree (95 cycles) — down to the Re-simulator

Behaviors is the tech that makes the game work, not a luxury: the Behavior Controller, Shared Storage and the Portable Radar/Beacon chain are what let bots run a logistics network instead of being ordered around one job at a time. Nanobots right after gives you the Repair Kit and Portable Transporter.

Gateway Technology is the wall. Only 5 cycles, but each needs a Robotics Datacube — an item that does not exist in your base yet.

The Robotics Datacube problem

The Robotics Datacube is the first of the five research materials, and the tech that lets you manufacture it (Gateway Technology) requires one to finish. So the first handful must be looted:

• Robot Explorables (ruins in your starting faction's territory) award Robotics Datacubes plus materials and components. They run one of two puzzles, Nine Clicks or Circuit.
• Old Drop Ships appear commonly in the desert biome, need no puzzle at all, and drop manufactured materials — Metal Bars, Metal Plates, Reinforced Plates, Energized Plates, High Density Structures, Crystal Powder, Wires, Cables and Laterite Ore.

Once Gateway Technology is done, the pipeline is:

A Robotics Datacube is therefore 6 Crystal Chunk, 2 Silica Sand, 3 Energized Plate and 3 Wire deep, and 60 seconds at a Robotics Assembler (Robotics Assembler = 5 Circuit Board + 1 Fabricator + 10 Reinforced Plate, 4 s at an Assembler, 150 W). Overclocking shrinks that 60 s — a Robotics Assembler in a Large socket with efficiency modules runs 1.7× or faster.

The second half of the Advanced tree and nearly everything past it takes Datacubes. Across the whole tree the research demand is 405 Robotics Datacubes, 560 Robotics Research, 420 Human Research, 370 Alien Research, 330 Virus Research and 310 Blight Research. The wiki's own community guide calls it "nearly 400 Science Datacubes just for research requirements" — the data agrees, and that is why silica is the resource that ends runs.

The Re-simulator

Gateway Technology unlocks the Re-simulator: a building with four Internal sockets, four inventory slots, two Garage slots and an integrated Re-simulator Core. It has no non-Internal sockets, and it holds up to 100 each of Robot, Virus and Blight Datacubes — the wiki warns explicitly not to let all three reach full, and the stability meter next to it is the reason.

Recipe: 50 Circuit Board + 50 Crystal Powder + 50 High-Density Frame + 50 Silicon (the wiki's data lists the building twice, with construction times of 30 s and 60 s).

The Re-simulator has no menu. Load a valid combination and it runs automatically. The codex gives you one recipe; the rest are found on Sign Posts in Explorables:

The three Simulation Cores add whole tech trees, and each is the reward for a mission: the Human Simulation Core opens Human tech output (Human Discovery mission), the Virus Simulation Core adds the wormhole function and Virus tech (Anomaly Base), the Blight Simulation Core opens Blight tech (Human Evolution).

Those Blight recipes are the real prize: Crystal Chunk + 1 Blight Datacube = Blight Crystal Chunk means the rarest ore in the game is manufacturable. Blight Crystal Chunks feed Blight Plasma (5 chunks + 20 Blight Gas), the CPU (5 chunks + 1 Microprocessor + 1 Phase Leaf) and every Datacube conversion in the Blight tree.

The Re-simulator also measures World Stability. Killing bugs and researching Blight tech pushes the bar right (more Curious Bot events); hacking tools, Infected Circuit Boards and Virus research push it left (longer, more frequent Blight storms). Stability is not a score — it is a difficulty dial you are turning on purpose.

The Advanced tree (200 cycles)

Deployer (Advanced Logistics) is the logistics unlock most players miss: it packs a building or bot — with its components and register settings intact — so you can relocate a refinery to a new ore field instead of rebuilding it, or drop a prepared outpost from a bot. It cannot pick up anything with a Deployer on it, anything holding items inside a component, or the Re-simulator.

Supercomputing is where the tree stops being linear: Data Analyzer turns Datacubes into the five Research items, and Robotics Research feeds nearly every late tech.

The Robots tree (170 cycles)

Two of the seven Robot techs are gated behind a material the game's own data marks unobtainable, which is why the Particle Forge and Fusion Generator show up as research you cannot actually complete in 1.0. Treat the Robotics Datacube economy — not these two — as the endgame of the Robot tree.

The side trees

Humanity + Human (740 cycles)

Human tech does not start from the robot tree. It starts with Human Discovery: a wrecked Human Explorer at the edge of a Blight field, repairable for 10 Circuit Boards + 10 Reinforced Plates, which leads to the AI Research Center and the Human Simulation Core.

The Humanity tree (10 techs, 390 cycles) is the industrial one: Mass Storage (50 cycles of 1 Concrete Slab, 60 s each) hands you Steel Block, Human Refinery, Human Warehouse and Reactor Fuel Rods; Human Production adds Ceramic Tiles and Composite Mesh; Human Industrial adds the Human Command Center and Human Lander; Human Armour adds the Vehicle Factory and Tank Turret.

The Human tree (11 techs, 350 cycles) is science and space:

Satellites is the tech that ends the game — it is the prerequisite for the AMAC and therefore for repairing the Mothership. It is also 20 cycles of four Engines at 600 seconds each: 3.3 hours on one Uplink and 80 Engines. Start its material chain early.

Human Datacubes are the other Human bottleneck: 1 Blight Crystal Chunk + 5 Laterite Ore each, produced only in a Human Factory (80 s) or the AI Research Center / Multimodal AI Center — none of which exist until Human tech is running. Late-run Human research is 160 Human Datacubes.

Alien + Energetics (600 cycles)

Alien tech opens with Alien Discovery (Obsidian Bricks and Obsidian Chunks become visible) and then Alien Technology — 60 cycles of 1 Obsidian Brick at 100 s, the longest single "entry" tech in the game at 1.7 hours on one Uplink. Everything Alien needs Alien Research, made in an Alien Factory from 1 Alien Datacube + 1 Datacube Matrix.

The Alien tree (12 techs, 400 cycles) runs Obsidian Manipulation → Energy Folding → Exoskeletons, and Energy Form → Anomaly Heart → Energy Manipulation → Anomaly Technology, with Phasing → Teleportation on the side. It also contains the recipe for the Alien Factory itself (Energy Form, 40 cycles of 1 Anomaly Particle at 120 s).

The Energetics tree (9 techs, 200 cycles) is where the alien production buildings live. Paragenic Crucible, Plasma Wellspring and The Nexasphere all require Anomaly Technology + Alien Technology (Basic), and between them unlock the Formation Crucible (makes Alien units), the Nexaspire (a Large-socket researcher at rate 0.3, the fastest research component you can build) and the Reforming Pool (which makes Alien Artifacts, Shaped Obsidian, Energized Artifacts, Crystalized Obsidian and Research Artifacts).

Note the Alien research chain bottoms out in MultiCube, and one Alien tech — Resimulation, 40 cycles of 2 MultiCubes — is marked unobtainable in the data.

Blight (250 cycles)

Blight tech is about surviving the Blight and then exploiting it. Blight Research (30 cycles of 5 Blight Gas, 100 s) unlocks Blight Bar, Blight Plasma and the Internal Blight Container; Blight Visibility then makes Obsidian Chunks visible; Plasma Concentration (20 cycles of 2 Blight Gas + 3 Blight Plasma) is the shortest path to Blight Datacube and the Blight Turret/Wall.

The valuable end of the tree:

• Blight Power (10 cycles of 4 Blight Datacube + 4 Blight Gas, 40 s/cycle — 7 minutes total on one Uplink) unlocks the Blight Power Generator, the best stationary power source in the game by the wiki's own cost table: 73 miner-seconds per 100 W against 1,103 for a Wind Turbine and 1,770 for a Solar Panel. It costs three trees, though: Blight + Robotics + Alien.
• Simulation Control (30 cycles of 4 Blight Research at 600 s — 5 hours on one Uplink) is the biggest single ask in the tree; it unlocks the Blight Control Tower, Blight Datakey and the Blight Simulation Core.
• Blight Terraformer → Basic Terraformer → Purifying Terraformer is the line that pushes the Blight back, and requires 4 Laterite Ore + 4 Obsidian Chunk per cycle at 300 s.

Virus (280 cycles)

Virus is the combat half of the bug war, and it is entered from Virus Discovery (Bug Chitin, Infected Circuit Boards and Blight Crystal Chunks become available). Virus Research itself is cheap — 10 cycles of 1 Infected Circuit Board.

From there: Hive (20 cycles, 1 Infected Circuit Board) unlocks the Robot Hive and the Virus Datacube; Virus Crypto → Virus Infection → Bug Attacks is the turret/ray line; Virus Cure (25 cycles of 2 Infected Circuit Boards, 100 s) opens Virus Protection, Anti-Virus, Total Protection and Virus Vaccine; Virus Waveform → Bug Possession is the possession line, with the Component Recycler and Blight Destabilizer.

Virus Wipe (30 cycles of 2 Virus Research + 1 Virus Source Code at 600 s — 5 hours) is the payoff: the Artificial Virus Core, Virus Datakey and Virus Simulation Core. The Artificial Virus Core is the mission reward from Anomaly Base and it is what lets the Re-simulator run the wormhole.

Virus research is also the thing you do deliberately, because it drives World Stability negative and lengthens Blight storms.

Hybrid + Simulator (280 cycles)

Hybrid techs cost two or three trees' worth of Research items in a single cycle, so they are the last thing a run researches, not the first:

The Simulator is the final boss of the tech tree: 50 cycles at 2,000 seconds each is 27.8 hours on a single Uplink, plus 50 Multi-frames and 50 MultiCubes — and a MultiCube is one each of all five Research items, which is itself 560 Robotics Research, 420 Human Research and the rest. Nothing else in the game is close. If you are planning an endgame build, plan five to ten Uplinks and the Research pipeline to feed them before you queue it.

The story spine: missions, and what each one gates

Primary mission: repair the Mothership. This is the win condition. It begins when you finish Satellites research — that lets a Long-range Radar select "Mothership" as a detection target and get its coordinates. You then build an AMAC (3x2, one Large socket with a fixed Satellite Launcher, two Internal sockets, four inventory slots), load a Satellite and launch it; orbital-repair materials are pushed automatically from the AMAC's inventory into the Satellite just before liftoff. The Satellite is not consumed — it stays in orbit, can be selected from the unit list, and one Satellite can complete the whole reconstruction, so an Internal Storage component in the AMAC (five Satellite slots versus four AMAC slots) is worth the materials.

Since 1.0 removed package items, the AMAC and Spaceport produce satellites directly.

Secondary missions, with the tech they gate:

The Silica Discovery mission is the one to do early, before deploying your Command Center: the bug garrison around the abandoned base is sized for a fresh faction, and the same fight against a researched, built-up base is a squadron-scale battle.

Power, in the order the trees hand it to you

Early power is Crystal Power (Small component, 10 Crystal Chunk + 5 Metal Bar, 4 s at an Assembler) and it costs 1 Crystal Chunk per 100 W per 60 seconds — cheap in resources, ruinous in crystal over hours.

Then the three components of a working grid, all from Power Transference and Expanded Power: Solar Cell (2 Circuit Board + 10 Crystal Chunk; 50 W in daylight, 2:00–22:00, +50% in spring and summer), Small Battery (1 Circuit Board + 10 Crystal Chunk) and Wind Turbine (3 Circuit Board + 6 Energized Plate + 5 Wire; 50 W in valleys, doubled on plateaus, shut down entirely by Blight storms).

The solar/battery arithmetic the wiki spells out: night runs 21:30 to 2:20, i.e. 0.2 of the day, and days are 500, 1000 or 1500 seconds depending on your day-length setting, so

batteries needed ≥ solar_generated × 0.8 × 0.2 × day_length / battery_capacity

Storage and generation figures worth knowing:

Grid reach is by field, not by wire: the Small Power Field covers radius 8, the Medium Power Field radius 15, and both pass unlimited power; the Power Transmitter has unlimited range but only 100 W of bandwidth, and it is the only way to power a remote outpost that is not on a field.

The endgame answer is the Blight Power Generator (Blight Power, 10 cycles) at 73 miner-seconds per 100 W, then Large Wind Turbine on a plateau (913) and Solar Panel + Large Battery (1,770). Note the quirk the wiki documents in 1.0: variable generators only generate while the grid is drawing from storage, so you still need constant generation or bots on remote duty never recharge.

Traps that cost a new player their first ten hours

1. Silica Sand is the real progression currency, and it is guarded. The tree demands 405 Robotics Datacubes, and a Robotics Datacube is 2 Crystal Powder — i.e. 2 Silica Sand — before anything else. Silica sits on plateaus, in bug territory, on a resource you cannot substitute.
2. Silica Discovery is easiest before you deploy. Bug hive strength scales with your tech progress and the number of bots/buildings nearby. Clear the plateau while your faction is small, not after Supercomputing.
3. Robotics Datacubes cannot be made until you have researched the tech that needs them. Loot Robot Explorables and Desert Drop Ships first, or Gateway Technology stalls at 4/5 cycles.
4. A stuck research is usually a storage problem. An Uplink cannot reserve a research segment if it cannot physically hold a required item — Blight Extraction is the documented example. Add Internal Storage or move the Uplink to a different platform.
5. One Uplink does not finish 2,795 cycles. Every cycle of every tech is a separate job at 3 to 2,000 seconds. Four Uplinks is the practical minimum by mid-game; The Simulator alone is 27.8 hours of one Uplink's life.
6. Workers only carry one stack. A Worker has one inventory slot — 20 Metal Ore per trip — and if it is connected to the logistics network it will stop mining the moment anything else needs hauling, forever. Either lock its Store register or untick "carry out orders" for dedicated miners.
7. Overclocking is free throughput and easy to forget. Any smaller component in a bigger socket gets +50% (S in M, S in L, M in L — all the same bonus), plus +20% for an Internal Efficiency Module and +50% for a Small Efficiency Module, additive, doubling power draw at +100%. It applies to work components only: miners, producers, turrets, radars — not generators.
8. A Miner in a Medium socket mines Crystal Chunk in 3.4 s instead of 5.0 s (tick rounding), and costs 25 W instead of 15 W. Rounding is always up, because work happens in whole 0.2-second ticks.
9. Do not run a big solar grid without batteries for 20% of the day. Solar Cells stop at 21:30 and are down until 2:20 — 0.2 of a 500/1,000/1,500-second day. Use the battery formula above; on short days the battery's discharge rate can be the binding constraint, not its capacity.
10. Wind on a plateau, solar in a valley is backwards. Wind Turbines double on plateaus; Solar Cells are unaffected by terrain but get +50% in spring and summer, and behave differently inside the Blight (where they generate full power at night).
11. The Blight's own power answer is a three-tree project. Blight Power Generator needs Blight, Robotics and Alien research, and Blight requires Blight Datacubes, which need Blight Plasma, which needs Blight Crystal Chunks or a Refinery.
12. Do not fill all three Datacube types in the Re-simulator. Capacity is 100 each of Robot, Virus and Blight, and the wiki warns against leaving all three full; the stability meter beside it moves with what you research, not what you store.
13. The Re-simulator has no selection menu. It runs the first valid recipe in its inventory automatically. If a bot upgrade you did not want appears, something else was in the inventory.
14. Two Robot techs are unfinishable in 1.0. Particle Forge and Fusion Generator each want 10 "MultiCube — CURRENTLY NOT OBTAINABLE" per cycle, and the Alien tech Resimulation wants 2 the same way. The data says so; do not queue them expecting progress.
15. Datacube production is a chicken-and-egg of its own. Human, Blight and Virus Datacubes need buildings (Human Factory, Refinery, Robot Hive, Multimodal AI Center) from the trees those Datacubes research. Expect to loot and mission your way into the first of each.
16. Alien technology's entry tech is 60 cycles at 100 seconds — 1.7 hours and 60 Obsidian Bricks on one Uplink, before you can research anything else Alien. If you want Alien content, build the Uplinks first.
17. Building names were renamed in 1.0.18104. All "Building 2x1" became "Building 1x2" and "Building 3x2 (2M2S)" became "Building 2x3 (2M2S)" to match their default rotation. Every wiki page, older guide and mod written before that build uses the rotated names, and the data tables here still do.
18. Long-range Radar and Radar Array no longer auto-scan (1.0). You must point them at what you want, including the Mothership — the coordinates only appear once Satellites research is done.
19. Deployers cannot pick up everything. Anything with a Deployer equipped, anything holding items inside a component (drones in a Drone Port, Blight Extraction in a container), and the Re-simulator. Plan relocations around that, rather than deconstructing a building you wanted to keep.
20. World Stability is a difficulty setting you are turning. Killing bugs and researching Blight pushes events one way (more Curious Bots); hacking tools, Infected Circuit Boards and Virus research push the other (longer, more frequent Blight storms). There is no way to research Virus and Blight heavily without changing the world you play in.

A note on the numbers

Everything above comes from the wiki's Cargo tables, which mirror the game's data files. Two caveats worth carrying into the guide:

• Where the wiki's hand-written community guides disagree with the Cargo tables, this guide follows the tables, with one exception: the community cost tables ("Frame Costs", "Power and Energy Costs", "Miner Costs") are all stamped version 0.1.11954 and are early-access figures. The power comparisons quoted above (73 miner-seconds per 100 W for Blight Power, and so on) come from those tables and should be treated as order-of-magnitude, not current. Where this guide needed a current cost it used the data tables instead.
• The data lists a few technologies twice under different categories with different costs — "Ultra-Tech Framework" appears in both Robots and Hybrid, "Fusion Generator"/"Fusion Power", "Automation"/"Hybrid Automation", "Power Cell"/"Advanced Hybridization" and "Particle Forge"/"Anomaly Transformation" share internal ids, and the Re-simulator building appears at 30 s and 60 s. Those are import artefacts, not two separate technologies.

Sources

• Desynced Wiki Cargo tables (imports of the game's own data), all tables: component (290 rows), entity (153), item (104), tech (117), techUnlock (420), techCategory — https://wiki.desyncedgame.com/Special:CargoTables
• Desynced Wiki rendered technology pages, e.g. https://wiki.desyncedgame.com/Technology/Basic_Power and https://wiki.desyncedgame.com/Technology/Blight_Research (used to verify the cycles/materials/time model), and Module:TechRecipe https://wiki.desyncedgame.com/Module:TechRecipe for the research-time formula
• Wiki mechanics pages: Research, Uplink, Overclock, Time, Power, Storage and Logistics, Solar Cell, Re-simulator, Deployer, Command Center, Command Center (Bot), AMC/Satellite, Mothership, Missions: https://wiki.desyncedgame.com/Research , /Uplink , /Overclock , /Time , /Power , /Storage_and_Logistics , /Solar_Cell , /Re-simulator , /Deployer , /Command_Center , /Mothership , /Missions
• Wiki guide pages: Guides/What to do before deploying your base, Guides/Hey, the Scouts mine!, Guides/Frame Costs, Guides/Power and Energy Costs, Guides/Miner Costs, Guides/Calaeris' Guide to Mining, Re-simulator/Recipes: https://wiki.desyncedgame.com/Guides
• Mission pages: Mission:AI Base, Mission:Anomaly Base, Mission:Human Discovery, Mission:Human Evolution, Mission:Big Tree, Mission:Silica Discovery
• Steam announcements for Desynced (app 1450900), including "Desynced 1.0 is Out Now!" (5 March 2026), "1.0 Release Date Announcement" (12 February 2026), "Desynced Development Roadmap & Patch Notes" (28 August 2026) and the experimental patch notes to 1.0.18210 (11 September 2026): https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1450900
• Steam store page for the release date and developer/publisher: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1450900/Desynced/

Game version: Desynced 1.0, main branch build 1.0.18154 as of the 28 August 2026 roadmap post; the experimental branch was at 1.0.18210 (11 September 2026) when this was written. Technology data as imported by the Desynced Wiki.