Expanding your Ore Refining

***(PICTURES TO BE ADDED WHEN I CAN BE ASSED!)***

Automating your ore refinery is one of the first steps you take when you get set up in your new base. It saves time and effort and makes your life a hell of a lot easier.

If you haven't automated your ore refinery yet, it's recommended you check Getting Started first, then return to this guide.

**So, now that you've set up a simple automated ore refinery, what's next?**

Well, Mekanism adds these quaint little blocks called 'Factories'. There's three tiers of factories: Basic, Advanced and Elite. Factories are, simply put, machines with more slots in them which can process each of these slots at the same time. The basic tier has three slots, the advanced tier has five slots, and the elite tier has seven. (For the nerds, the factories' power usage scales with every slot added.)

Turning on auto-sort (The large 'S' on the left side of the interface) will cause the factory to automatically fill and balance every slot when you put items into it. Putting five items into one slot of an advanced factory with auto-sort on will cause the machine to place one item in every slot instead, processing all five at the same time.

**Keep in mind that you don't *need* factories to do this. If you can't or don't want to make factories, simply using the standard machines will also triple the ore yield, just with one processing slot per machine!**

To expand your 2x ore refinery you will need:

* A Smelting Factory
* An Enriching Factory

Simply place the enriching factory next to the smelting factory and configure the ports so that the former outputs into the latter's input (Be sure to enable auto-eject on both!). Then simply put some ores into the enriching factory and watch it work its magic.

**Now you've improved the speed at which your refinery processes ores at a 2x yield, but what about a 3x yield?**

To do this, you will need:

* A Smelting Factory
* An Enriching Factory
* A Crushing Factory
* A Purification Factory
* An Electrolytic Separator
* A constant water supply (I personally use an acqueous accumulator with mechanical pipes.)
* Two gas bottles of any size. (One is optional, but recommended as a buffer.)

**Now how do we set this up?**

First, the factories. You want to line them up in this order: Purification -> Crushing -> Enriching -> Smelting. How you do this is up to you, just make sure that the machines' in- and outputs are all configured correctly, and that auto-eject is enabled on them all.

Next up is the water/oxygen source. In this example I will be using the Acqueous Accumulator, but you can use whatever pump/supply you find to work best for you, so long as there's a steady supply of water running into the Electrolytic Separator.

Example setup (Accumulator):

1. Fill a 3x3x1 hole with water source blocks.
2. Place the accumulator in the center.
3. Use mechanical pipes/fluiducts to extract water from the top of the accumulator. (If you're using mechanical pipes you will have to use a Configurator and set it to 'pull' for it to extract the water.)
4. (This is where the accumulator-specific example ends.) Next, connect the mechanical pipes to the top of your Electrolytic Separator. Leave the side ports empty and use the front port for connecting it to your power system.
5. Your Separator will begin producing Hydrogen and Oxygen (2:1) at a steady rate, making quite the noise in the process. Place a gas tank on either side, and set the one filling up with Hydrogen to either dump excess or dump everything, depending on your attitude. If you want, you can just use a sole Hydrogen gas tank and no Oxygen one.
6. Connect a pressurized pipe to your Oxygen gas tank (Or to the Oxygen port if you don't have a tank) and feed it into your Purificating Factory. Set the side you connect it to as an 'Extra' port (Purple), and you should see the Oxygen filling the bar underneath the processing slots.
7. If everything is set up correctly, then congratulations! You've just tripled your ore yield!

**So how does it work?**

The Purificating Factory uses Oxygen to purify ores into 3 mineral clumps.

Next, the Crushing Factory crushes these clumps into dirty mineral dust.

Then the Enriching Factory turns the dirty dust into normal mineral dust.

Lastly, the Smelting Factory smelts the dust into ingots as per usual.

So as you can see, this setup triples your yield per ore.

Be aware that having all machines running at the same time can be quite draining to your power supply, so make sure that you have enough power to handle a full processing load!