Somersloops, Mercer Spheres and SAM: What Each One Is For

These three get lumped together as “the alien stuff” and they have nothing to do with each other mechanically. Sorting out which does what saves a lot of aimless collecting.

The short version

Material	World total	What it does
Somersloop	106	Production amplification, and Alien Power Augmenters
Mercer Sphere	298	Dimensional Depot Uploaders and their upgrades
SAM	mined, not collected	Alien Technology research chain in the MAM

The first thing to notice is that Somersloops are genuinely scarce — 106 in the entire world, none of which respawn — while Mercer Spheres are nearly three times as common. That difference should shape how you treat each.

Somersloops: the scarce one

Somersloops go into machines to double output, at the cost of power rising with the square of the fill ratio. A fully slooped Manufacturer produces twice as much for four times the power.

They are also the input for Alien Power Augmenters, which is a separate late-game use competing for the same finite supply.

With 106 in existence, this is a real budget rather than a formality. The decision that matters is where you put them, and the answer follows from the power maths: sloop the machines where you are constrained by space or by node count, not the ones where you could simply build another machine.

A second Constructor costs 4 MW and some plates. Slooping one costs a finite alien artefact and quadruples its power draw. The sloop is worth it when you physically cannot place the second Constructor.

The overclock calculator on this site shows the exact power figures for any building and sloop combination, including the point where the trade stops being worth it.

Mercer Spheres: spend them on the Depot

Mercer Spheres exist to build and upgrade Dimensional Depot Uploaders, which let you upload items and withdraw them from your personal inventory anywhere in the world.

298 exist, and 98 unlock every related MAM research node. That is the number worth remembering, because it means you do not need to hoard them: once you have collected around a hundred, the research is done and the rest go into building more uploaders.

The Depot is one of the larger quality-of-life changes in the game. It removes the trip back to base for building materials, which is a constant tax on every construction project. Prioritising Mercer Spheres early pays back across the entire playthrough.

SAM: not a collectible at all

This is the one people mix up. SAM is an ore. It sits in resource nodes on the map and you extract it with a Miner like any other resource, automatically and continuously.

It feeds the Alien Technology research chain in the MAM, and processes into Reanimated SAM at a Constructor — 4 SAM into 1 Reanimated SAM, 120/min in and 30/min out.

So SAM does not need hunting. It needs a miner and a belt, like iron.

Where the collectibles hide

Somersloops and Mercer Spheres are found in the same kinds of places, and the list is specific enough to be useful:

• Inside cracked boulders (which need a Nobelisk Detonator to open)
• Around Gas Pillars, which need a Gas Mask
• Near Uranium Deposits, which need a Hazmat Suit
• Around Spore Flowers

Notice the pattern: most of them are behind a piece of equipment. A collecting trip before you have the Gas Mask and Hazmat Suit will skip a large share of what is out there, which is why deliberate hunting works better mid-game than early.

When to hunt deliberately

Opportunistic collection is right early — pick up what you pass. Deliberate expeditions make sense at one specific point: after you have a Hoverpack or Jetpack, a Gas Mask and a Hazmat Suit, and before you have finished the MAM chains that need them.

In that window you can reach everything, and the artefacts convert directly into capability. Before it, you will be locked out of a large fraction of the locations; after it, the remaining ones have less to buy.

Multiplayer

All three are properties of the save. A Somersloop your partner collected is gone for everyone, and the MAM research they unlock applies to the whole world.

That makes collection a genuinely good task to divide up: one person hunting while others build is efficient, where two people covering the same cliff is not.

Where to spend your first Somersloops

With 106 in the world and a real cost to each, the question of which machines get them is worth thinking about once rather than deciding ad hoc.

The reasoning is always the same: a sloop doubles one machine’s output; a second machine also doubles output. The sloop wins only when the second machine is impossible or expensive for some other reason.

Cases where it genuinely wins:

A machine fed by a single node you cannot duplicate. If a recipe chain is limited by one impure node and you have power to spare, doubling the machine’s output from the same input is the only way to get more.

Buildings with large footprints in constrained space. A Manufacturer takes considerable room. On a platform you have already built out, four sloops in one Manufacturer beat finding space for a second.

Very late chains with expensive machines. When the building itself costs heavy components, doubling an existing one is cheaper than constructing another.

Cases where it loses:

Anything early with open ground around it. Constructors and Smelters are cheap and small. Build another one.

Anything where power is already tight. Quadrupling a machine’s draw on a marginal grid trades one problem for a worse one.

Alien Power Augmenters

The other Somersloop use, and it competes for the same finite supply.

An Alien Power Augmenter provides a flat power boost to your grid, and can be fed additional Somersloops for a percentage bonus on top. That makes it a direct alternative to spending the same artefacts on production amplification.

The comparison is not close for most players: sloops in machines produce goods, sloops in an augmenter produce power, and power is the easier of the two to make more of. Coal and fuel are abundant; alien artefacts are capped at 106. Unless you are specifically short of grid capacity and long on everything else, production amplification is the better use.

Common mistakes

Treating SAM like a collectible. It is an ore. Put a miner on it.

Hoarding Mercer Spheres. 98 unlocks all the research. The rest are for building uploaders.

Slooping machines you could simply duplicate. Power rises with the square of the fill ratio. Build wide first.

Hunting before you have the equipment. Gas Pillars and Uranium Deposits need a Gas Mask and Hazmat Suit respectively, and a large share of the artefacts are in exactly those places.

Assuming they respawn. None of the three collectibles do. SAM nodes, being nodes, never deplete.