Crusher

Crusher is a space platform building used to process asteroid chunks. It is the machine that turns the raw asteroid materials collected in space into useful resources, and it also supports reprocessing and advanced processing once the relevant technologies are researched. Its recipes cover the three asteroid types: metallic, carbonic, and oxide.

The basic crushing recipes convert chunks into resources while returning the original chunk as a by-product, so the input is not fully consumed. Metallic asteroid crushing produces iron ore, carbonic asteroid crushing produces carbon, and oxide asteroid crushing produces ice. After Asteroid reprocessing is researched, the crusher can instead reprocess chunks into all three chunk types, allowing asteroid material to be redistributed between types. Advanced asteroid processing unlocks more valuable crushing recipes: metallic chunks can be crushed into iron ore and copper ore, carbonic chunks into carbon and sulfur, and oxide chunks into ice and calcite.

The crusher can be connected to a circuit network and have its recipe selected automatically. It accepts recipe signals as well as item signals for asteroid chunks or items produced by supported recipes, but signals for unresearched recipes are ignored. When multiple signals are present, recipe selection follows a fixed priority order: recipe-specific signals first, then item signals; within recipe type, crushing has priority over reprocessing, which has priority over advanced crushing; within asteroid type, metallic has priority over carbonic, which has priority over oxide; then default item order; and finally lower-quality signals are preferred over higher-quality ones. In practice, this means a belt or network carrying different asteroid types will switch the crusher to the highest-priority valid recipe, such as metallic crushing over oxide crushing. Reprocessing recipes cannot be selected by item signals because their outputs overlap with the crushing recipes.

The crusher is especially important in quality-focused space setups. The three asteroid reprocessing recipes have an 80% return rate, which makes them far more efficient for quality cycling than a recycler, which returns 25%. A common approach is to keep all asteroids in reprocessing until they reach legendary quality, then use the resulting chunks for higher-tier crafting. When planning ratios, oxide reprocessing needs about half as many crushers as metallic or carbonic reprocessing at the same quality level because its recipe is twice as fast.

• The choice of space route does not matter in the long run for quality reprocessing, because repeated cycling quickly balances asteroid ratios.
• Higher-quality modules increase the number of crushers needed for later quality tiers.
• With two normal quality modules in each crusher, the example ratio is 100 crushers for normal chunks, 6.67 for uncommon, 1.11 for rare, and 0.19 for epic.
• With two legendary quality module 3s in each crusher, the example ratio is 100 crushers for normal chunks, 29.84 for uncommon, 11.89 for rare, and 4.47 for epic.

This makes the crusher one of the central machines for both space resource refining and late-game quality production.