Refineries

The resources you harvest will have varying levels of quality. Some will be of good quality and others will be of very low quality. Each resource has an inherent quality potential but the actual quality of the resource will often be lower.

If you want to craft high quality items you need high quality resources too. Refining is the process of creating over-maxed quality resources from a bunch of crappy lower quality resources. There are three buildings involved with refining raw resources: the refinery for minerals, the organic processing plant for, well, organic stuff and the nuclear enrichment plant for energy.

The way refining works is that you mass-add lots of raw resources of varying quality to a refining processor (each refining building uses a different kind but they all work the same). Then when you process the raw resources you will get back refined resources that are a little bit over max quality (Usually max+3). When you look at a refining processor you will notice a line saying the amount of material quality equivalent. This is the sum of the quality of all raw resources added to the processor and it determines the amount of refined resources you will get back.

For example, assume you have one hundred inert metals of 5 quality. The material quality equivalent will be 500 (100 inert metal * 5 quality each). When you process the raw inert metal you will get back individual pieces of 33 quality. So with a material quality equivalent of 500 this means we have the equivalent of 500 / 33 = 15 + 5 / 33 pieces of refined inert metal. Because the processor cannot make a 5 / 33 piece of inert metal, 5 material quality equivalent will remain in the furnace.

When you refine resources, the furnace (or reactor or resequencer) will be configured to that resource. You cannot refine other resources on it until you reset it. When you reset a processor that still has a bit of material quality equivalent left, the game will ask you if you are sure about this as it will destroy the material inside. This might lead you to believe that you need to first get everything out from the processor before you can mass-add new stuff to it but this is not true. The warning only applies for any raw material that might be left (usually a bit of raw material equivalent left over from a previous resource). Any already refined resources in the processor will be completely safe. This means that you can focus on harvesting raw resources and refining them without having to worry with getting all the refined stuff out every time you need to reset the furnace.