Smelter

The Smelter is a building used to process mined ores and stone into refined materials. It is a basic production structure in the early industrial chain, and its recipes include Iron Ingots, Copper Ingots, Magnets, Stone, and other smelting products.

Smelters can be fed and emptied on all sides, with up to three Sorters attached to each face. This makes them flexible to place in compact production blocks or along conveyor lines. In most recipes, a Smelter processes one ore per second, so one belt can generally supply as many Smelters as its items-per-second throughput allows. For example, a Mk.II belt with 12 items per second can support 12 Smelters in a single line for recipes that consume one item per second.

Smelters are fast compared with many other early buildings, but they also draw relatively high power. As a result, building too many at once can strain the power grid, while building too few creates a bottleneck for the rest of the factory. Their number should be balanced against the throughput of downstream production.

There are also upgraded Smelters for later-stage play:

• Arc Smelter: 360 kW power consumption, 12.0 kW standby power, 1x production speed
• Plane Smelter: 1.44 MW power consumption, 48.0 kW standby power, 2x production speed
• Negentropy Smelter: 2.88 MW power consumption, 96.0 kW standby power, 3x production speed

The Plane Smelter offers double speed at four times the power cost of the standard model, so it is most practical once power generation is more than comfortable. The Negentropy Smelter is even more demanding, and one of its construction materials requires defeating a level 21 or higher Dark Fog enemy. It is classified as a COSMO structure in-game, and is intended for advanced post-game progression.