Metal Refinery

The Metal Refinery is a mid-game industrial building used to convert metal ore into refined metal with 100% efficiency. Unlike the Rock Crusher, it does not waste half the input as sand, and it is also the only building used to produce Steel, which requires Lime, Refined Carbon, and Iron as additional ingredients. Refined metals produced here are essential for advanced electronics, automation, higher-tier wires, and many late-game buildings.

A Metal Refinery requires liquid intake and output pipes, a duplicant to operate it, and 1.2 kW of power. Each refining task processes 100 kg of metal at a time and takes 40 seconds by default, though the time can be reduced by the operator’s Machinery attribute. It also needs 400 kg of coolant to run, while storing up to 800 kg and temporarily accepting another 400 kg while a task is queued. The building outputs the refined metal onto the floor at 40 °C and returns 400 kg of coolant at a higher temperature. In the process, it generates 16 kDTU/s of heat, and the coolant receives 80% of the heat that would be needed to heat the refined metal from 40 °C to its melting point.

Because the refinery’s coolant loop is the main heat source and heat sink in a metal-processing setup, coolant choice matters. The building can technically operate with only 400 kg of coolant, but in practice a buffer of 800–1200 kg is recommended so the refinery can keep running continuously. The coolant must also be able to tolerate the temperature rise generated by the chosen metal recipe; for example, water and polluted water are poor choices for high-heat metals because they are too easy to bring to a phase change. Crude Oil is often the earliest practical coolant for serious heat management, while super coolant offers far greater headroom. If the output coolant reaches a phase change during discharge, it can damage the output pipe; if that happens, the refinery will continue working and store the hot coolant internally, but it will no longer be able to empty the output line until the pipe is repaired.

The refinery is especially valuable for heat engineering. Since it can raise coolant to very high temperatures without breaking itself, players can use it as a controlled heater for other processes, including refining Crude Oil into Petroleum by heat. In practice, a refinery loop can be paired with a Steam Turbine setup, or with an Aquatuner if the coolant must be brought back down before reuse. Even a single refinery can produce enough heat to support a Steam Turbine, and it can become power-positive when refining aluminum, niobium, iron, or steel with a sufficiently skilled operator.

• Refined metal is required for advanced automation components, conductive wiring, heavi-watt conductive wiring, many high-end buildings, and decorative metal tiles and metal blocks.
• The refinery’s throughput is limited by liquid pipes, so efficiency bonuses that shorten crafting time can make coolant flow the bottleneck.
• A light source and a skilled duplicant both improve efficiency; without them, the refinery’s energy cost is heavy.
• Germy coolant is inconvenient, since each completed task can contaminate the refinery with surface germs and require disinfection.
• Metal volcanoes can sometimes supply enough refined metal that ordinary ore refining becomes unnecessary, but ore is still needed for certain important builds and is not always abundant.