Guides:Smelting

This guide is a high-level summary of the processes you need to make plates. The processes change as your technology changes, and tracing it out can be a little frustrating for the new player, so I thought I'd share what I have...

You can divide your metal-making processes into two stages. The first stage makes ores, the second stage smelts them in a furnace to make plates.

## Making Ores

### Tier 0:

Electrolyser -> Ore Crusher -> Liquefier -> Crystalizer -> [Furnace]

> At the start of the game, you'll be building electrolysers to electrolyse water which creates hydrogen, oxygen and slag. hydrogen and oxygen should be vented through flare stacks. The slag gets crushed and liquefied to make mineralized water, then crystalized to make saphirite and stiratite ores, which then go into furnaces to make iron and copper respectively. You'll get about 50% more copper than iron from this.
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### Tier 1:

Electrolyser -> Liquefier -> Filtration Unit -> Crystallizer -> [Furnace]

> The Crystallizer lets you choose which ore you get, so if you want more iron, for example, you can use Crystallizers to get more Saphirite.
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### Tier 2:

Electrolyser -> Liquefier -> Filtration Unit -> Crystallizer -> Crusher -> Ore Sorter -> [Furnace]

> Byproducts get introduced here. The crusher crushes the ore, but it also produces some crushed stone, which you can use to make stone, mineralized water, slag slurry, and other things. The ore sorter will produce metal 2 ores and some slag. This tier also opens up manganese. Manganese can be used in the furnace stage to improve yields of other metals.
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### Tier 3:

Electrolyser -> Liquefier -> Filtration Unit -> Crystallizer -> Crusher -> Hydro-refiner -> Ore Sorter -> [Furnace]

> The hydro-refiner introduces geodes as a byproduct, as well as opening up aluminum, silver, and zinc ores.
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### Tier 4:

Electrolyser -> Liquefier -> Filtration Unit -> Crystallizer -> Crusher -> Hydro-refiner -> Ore Sorter -> [Furnace]

> This tier looks the same as the previous one, but there are 2 important differences: 1) you'll be mixing several crushed ores or several hydro-refined ores together, and 2) you'll use a catalyst in the sorter. At this stage, you have direct control of which metal ore you get so you won't need to sort the output onto different belts to go to the furnaces, if you don't want to.
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### Tier 5 and Beyond!

There's more, but I haven't played that far yet.

## Furnaces:

In the following, I don't cover details about added consumables such as fuel for the blast furnace, oxygen gas to make steel, sodium hydroxide to make aluminium. These are left as exercises to the reader.

### Tier 0:

When you start, you have 2 basic furnaces. The stone furnace is identical to the vanilla game. The other is the filtering stone furnace. Stone furnaces figure out what to do based on what you put into them. filtering furnaces take away the "smarts", so you have to choose a recipe, which makes it a bit easier to handle sushi belts before you have filter-inserters or basic splitter.

### Tier 0.1 (Steel):

Ore -> Furnace -> Furnace -> Assembler

> This really isn't a whole tier. It's just that you have 2 extra steps to make steel: first, you put the iron plates into a furnace, making "Glowing Hot Iron plates", then second, you put those into an assembler and get steel out. This process makes 1 steel plate for ever 8 iron ores you give it.
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### Tier 1:

Ore -> Blast Furnace -> induction furnace -> Casting Machine

> The blasting furnace makes ingots, the induction furnace melts ingots to make molten metal, which is piped to the casting machine to be made into plates.The blast furnace needs both electricity and fuel.
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### Tier 1.1:

Ore -> Blast Furnace -> Induction Furnace -> Casting Machine -> Furnace -> Assembler

> This is the same general idea as with tier 0.1, but uses the more efficient blast and induction furnaces. This process makes 1 steel plate for every 3 iron ores you give it.
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### Tier 1.2:

Ore -> Blast Furnace -> Blast Furnace -> Induction Furnace -> Casting Machine

> This is an improved path for making steel once you have blast furnaces. This process makes 1 steel for every 4 iron ores you give it.
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### Tier 2:

Ore -> Ore processor -> Blast Furnace -> Induction Furnace -> Casting Machine

> This tier improves the material efficiency of your furnace by reducing the number of ores needed to make an ingot.
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### Tier 2.1:

Ore -> Ore processor -> Blast Furnace -> Blast Furnace -> Induction Furnace -> Casting Machine

> Improved steel manufacturing. This process makes 1.5 steel for every 4 iron ores you give it.
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> A similar pipeline is used to make Aluminium. Instead of an ore processor, you'll need a powder mixture.
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### Tier 2.2:

 Ore -> Ore processor -> Blast Furnace ->/

> You're going to need to make bronze, brass, invar (an advanced steel), and solder. These are made by mixing 2 ingot together (copper+tin, copper+zinc, and steel+nickel respectively)
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