The Bioreactor is Hull Rupture's converter that turns humans into fuel goo, and the joke of the Despot's economy is that the crew is both the workforce and the fuel supply. It is a module kit you have to buy before you own one; once it is built, select it and press Auto, and it sends two humans on its own — and when only one human is left in the queue, it automatically sends another.
The Hull Rupture Bioreactor guide: what it converts
Humans into fuel goo. That is the whole function: a converter that eats workforce to make a resource, sitting next to modules that eat workforce to make other resources, all competing for the same people.
This is why the Bioreactor is a decision rather than a building. Turning a human into fuel is strictly worse than staffing that human into a producer, unless you have more humans than you can use — which is exactly the situation it is designed for.
How to run it without clicking
Auto sits between the minus and plus workforce buttons on the selected converter's panel, so you select the built Bioreactor and use the workforce controls rather than hunting for a separate menu.
The shipped behaviour in the demo: Auto sends two humans to the Bioreactor, and once only one human remains in the queue it automatically sends another. So you set it once and it keeps pulling, and the feature was still labelled experimental with the developers watching how much micromanagement it removes.
The full game plans the same automation for the Bioreactor and all other resource converters.
Why the game added it
When the playtest closed, the developers named the Bioreactor as one of two obvious problems to fix, and their phrasing is worth reading closely: repeatedly stuffing puny humans into a giant meat furnace should probably require fewer clicks, and Despot's efficiency department was already experimenting with solutions ranging from quality-of-life improvements to highly unethical automation.
That experiment shipped as converter Auto in the September 2026 demo update.
The workforce it costs
Every human the Bioreactor consumes is a human not staffing production and not defending the Airlock. Leave Auto running only while the rest of the ship can spare the workforce — the human workforce guide lays out the three sinks you are splitting your crew between and why converters keep taking priority by accident.
Where it comes from
The Bioreactor is sold as a module kit in the shop and appears in the module kit list as a converter, so a run usually needs to buy it before it can automate anything. The post-battle shop guide covers how the themed boxes work, since converters come out of the same pool as everything else you buy between waves.