Refining
Stations turn raw ore into components on their own schedule — you deliver the feedstock and collect the product.
Raw ore is worth credits, but not its full share — not until it’s been through a refinery. That’s the leg of the chain that turns a middling ore run into a real payday, and the reason a hold full of ore is worth escorting.
What it isn’t is something you do. A refinery is a machine somebody else owns and runs. You feed it.
A refinery is a licence, not a building
There’s no such thing as a factory that’s a different kind of thing from a refinery. They’re the same machine. What separates them is the licence — the one recipe that station is permitted to run.
One station, one licence. A yard that refines ferrite refines ferrite and nothing else, and if you want circuit boards you go find the station that makes circuit boards. That’s not an artificial limit. It’s the reason ore has to travel at all, and the reason there’s a haul between every pair of stations worth ambushing.
What comes out of what
Every ladder mineral has its own recipe, and the ratios are per recipe — there’s no single universal conversion rate.
| Recipe | Takes | Makes |
|---|---|---|
| Refine Ferrite | 2 Ferrite | 1 Alloy Plate |
| Refine Silica | 2 Silica | 1 Circuit Board |
| Refine Ice | 2 Ice | 1 Battery |
| Refine Titanium | 2 Titanium | 1 Armor Plating |
| Refine Iridium | 2 Iridium | 1 Weapon Core |
| Refine Voidite | 2 Voidite | 1 Fold Capacitor |
| Assemble Power Cell | 1 Battery + 1 Circuit Board + 1 Hard Ferrite | 2 Power Cells |
Note where the Power Cell comes from. It isn’t refined out of anything — it’s assembled, from three components that come off three different ore lines. Every station in the galaxy burns Power Cells to keep its lights on, which means the good everything depends on can’t be made anywhere that isn’t fed by three separate supply routes. That’s deliberate.
Gem and every salvage commodity have no recipe at all. They’re rarity procs and scrap, not feedstock.
Byproducts are rolls, not promises
Most refining recipes sometimes throw off something extra. Sometimes — these are odds per batch, not guarantees:
| Recipe | Sometimes also | Odds |
|---|---|---|
| Refine Ferrite | Hard Ferrite | 25% |
| Refine Silica | Mullite | 25% |
| Refine Titanium | Titanium Sponge | 20% |
| Refine Iridium | Osmiridium | 15% |
| Refine Voidite | Unobtanium | 10% |
Refine Ice throws off nothing. What it makes is the Battery, every time.
Hard Ferrite is the one to care about. It comes only from refining Ferrite — the cheapest, most common ore on the ladder — and the Power Cell needs it. So a played-out T1 belt is never actually played out: the tier ladder never obsoletes its own bottom rung, because the top of the chain still eats it.
A run takes time
Feed a refinery and it doesn’t answer instantly. Every recipe has a cycle length, and one batch takes that long. An ore cycle is quick; assembling a power cell takes longer; building a whole drone hull is the longest job on the board.
That’s what makes a refinery a machine rather than a vending slot. It has a rate, so it can fall behind — a mine that outproduces the refinery it feeds will back up, and the only fix is another refinery, not a bigger one. Bottlenecks are the point; they’re what makes one station worth defending more than the station next to it.
Two consequences worth knowing:
- The inputs are spent when the run STARTS. If a station goes dark mid-cycle, the ore that went in doesn’t come back out. An interrupted run is a real loss, which is why nobody starts a batch they can’t finish.
- A run needs somewhere to put the result. A station whose hold is already full sits on its finished batch until something hauls the backlog away. Nothing is destroyed. Nothing moves either.
It works while you’re somewhere else
A refinery is not waiting for you to arrive. It runs on its own schedule, in systems you’ve never visited, burning through whatever’s in its hold and stacking up product while you’re three jumps away doing something else.
So does everything around it: mines fill their holds, stations burn down their power reserve, deliveries land. The economy doesn’t hold its breath when you leave the room.
The exception is darkness. A station with no Power Cells left, or one that’s been vented open by sustained fire, does no work at all — its line stops and its in-progress batch just sits there. It doesn’t recover by waiting. It recovers when somebody delivers cells.
The ore comes to it
A refinery doesn’t only wait, either. It knows what its line eats, and if a station in the same system is sitting on that ore, it sends its own freight bot out to fetch it — dock, load, fly home, unload, and go again once the hoppers run low. Nobody places an order. The recipe is the order.
That changes what a mine does with its ore. A pit that used to sell everything at the nearest counter now holds back whatever a local refinery is short of, and ships out only the genuine surplus for credits. Feed the chain first, sell what’s left — which means the ore road inside a system is busy in a way it never used to be, and busy roads are where things get taken.
The bot flying it is a Drudge: a hold with an engine bolted on. No guns, no shield, slower than anything that might want it. It carries no transponder either, so a gate won’t count it as a traveler — a Drudge lives and dies inside the one system it was built for.
What it does have is a radio. Shoot one and it calls its flag, once, and keeps flying while you take it apart. Whether anyone comes is a different question — see When the Belt Fights Back.
Your part: you deliver, you don’t operate
Dock at any station that keeps a hold and your cargo rows grow a DEPOSIT button beside SELL. That’s the whole of your involvement with refining.
Depositing is exactly the same act as one of their haulers arriving with a load. The ore goes into their hold, and from that moment the station treats it like any other input it received — queued behind whatever’s already running, converted on its own clock. You don’t press anything to make it happen and there’s no way to make it happen faster.
What you get back you collect, or buy, later — like anyone else.
A few things follow from that:
- A full station refuses the drop. The line above your cargo shows what the station’s hold is holding and whether it’s FULL. If only part of your load fits, only that part leaves your hold — the rest stays with you. Nothing evaporates.
- A trade station can’t take a deposit at all. It buys; it doesn’t warehouse. That’s what SELL is for.
- Wanting components fast means owning the bottleneck, not skipping it. If a chain isn’t producing what you need, the answer is to fix the chain — feed it, defend it, or build your own — rather than to do the refining yourself. There is no yourself to do it with.
The galaxy does not wait for you
None of this needs you in the system — or anywhere near it. A quarry you have never visited keeps digging, its refinery keeps cracking what the quarry sends, and when a station two gates away posts a call for what they’re sitting on, a freight run answers it whether or not anyone is watching the lanes it crosses.
Fly through a working cluster and you’ll see the trucks doing it: dock runs, market runs, the long haul to a gate. Leave, and the same runs keep happening — you just stop seeing the hulls. The only thing your absence changes is risk: nobody can ambush a freight run in a system nobody is in. The goods arrive either way.