How do I refine a metal ore?

[Abt9]

Is there a particularly good way to refine a metal ore? Rock Crusher & Smooth Hatches are the easiest, but I dislike the inefficiency of Rock Crusher. (And obviously I'm yet to get smooth hatches)

But then, I don't have an infrastructure for water cooling yet - so Metal Refinery is also hard.

So I want to ask, is there clever ways to refine metals? I just hate having to build infrastructure, my dupes hate going into the carbon dioxide pocket to build those things, and when they do, they build a single block. and go back to hiatus...

[Lacost]

Refine only gold and you won't have any troubles with heat. Place your metal refinery in the cold biome and use water as a coolant. It will take a long time until it reaches the boiling point if you only refine gold. The melting ice will also give you some additional cooling. You can easily smelt tons of gold with this simple setup.

 

However, once you go into steel production you really need a powerful cooling system since this environmental cooling won't cut it anymore.

[SharraShimada]

Its rather simple: Use oil for cooling the refinery, and use the output hot oil to make petroleum of it. The result will always be 75°C petroleum, even if the oil was several 100°C hot.

[angrybovine]

For early material hoarding, you can refine a small amount of copper or Iron with the Granulator which "discovers" the substance so then the Printing Pod will include those when it randomly selects stuff to print (cycle 24 and later) . 

As far as as copper is concerned, you will get more refined copper from Printing 2T copper ore and then refining it in Granulator.

This also works for glass, lime, steel, and plastic.  Just make a small amount early and from cycle 48 on they come up as printables. 

For plastic, I think if you can get to a ruin with plastic ladders and deconstruct a length of ladder works for discovering the substance (besides glossy dreko farming).

 

[Yunru]

I just drop it on a volcano personally (provided you have one on your map).

[Sasza22]

47 minutes ago, angrybovine said:

As far as as copper is concerned, you will get more refined copper from Printing 2T copper ore and then refining it in Granulator.

This also works for glass, lime, steel, and plastic.  Just make a small amount early and from cycle 48 on they come up as printables. 

If you are unlucky you might not get either of those by cycle 200 though. Hapened to me before. I wouldn`t rely on that as a metal source.

48 minutes ago, angrybovine said:

I think if you can get to a ruin with plastic ladders and deconstruct a length of ladder

Last time i checked you couldn`t deconstruct ruin ladders.

As mentioned above using the smelter for gold only works early on. It raises the temperature of water by around 5^oC so that should be easily managable. Later once you get a more robust system and oil for coolant you can refine iron and make steel.

[angrybovine]

34 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

If you are unlucky you might not get either of those by cycle 200 though. Hapened to me before. I wouldn`t rely on that as a metal source.

You def can't rely on that as a metal source; it's just something nice to print when you don't really need anything else.

[beowulf2010]

Generally speaking, my refined metal progress goes like this. 

Rock crusher to refine enough iron pre to get a few smart batteries. 1 for a quad coal generator setup I use, a couple for powering my base, and 1 for my first metal refinery. 

My first iron refineries then use polluted water randomly found around the world and just dumps waste coolant too hot to be reused into an ice biome to start melting it. (I never dig out ice unless I have to) 

Then, once I have exosuits, I build a new refinery plant down in the oil biome for both iron and steel. Until enough steel is made for a double steam turbine coolant cooling plant and enough gold for 40+ radiant pipes, I just dump the hot crude back into the huge pools of crude that come in every map. 

[Neotuck]

I always start with smooth hatches because I rush hatch ranching early so I can rely on coal power into mid game before setting up a proper oil boiler system. 

I always save one ranch for a mix of sage and smooth hatches (you can mix the two as they won't eat the food of the other) and it's overkill to have a full 8 of ether

Plus it's always cute to watch them poop gold

[hypoeffort]

On 2019-05-02 at 4:44 AM, SharraShimada said:

Its rather simple: Use oil for cooling the refinery, and use the output hot oil to make petroleum of it. The result will always be 75°C petroleum, even if the oil was several 100°C hot.

Now does the oil refinery take less energy when you do that I wonder.  Isn't the natural way to convert petrol around 600?   So if you get it halfway there in a refinery does it draw less power?

[Abt9]

Nvm, one or two cycles later I finished the polluted water chamber. Now I can just put it into the metal refinery and sieve it away.

Purrfect cooling solution!

Didn't know heat deletion was so easy.

[JohnFrancis]

@Abt9Don't throw away that heat you can recycle it in a steam turbine, fill the refinery's up with petroleum. Run the heated petroleum through radiant pipes under a steam turbine. The excess heat will power the steam turbine helping you pay for the power cost of running the metal refinery. The hotter the metal you make the less power it ends up costing you to make it. if you cool your steam turbines correctly you can run your refinery's 24/7.

 

[Abt9]

1 hour ago, JohnFrancis said:

Don't throw away that heat you can recycle it in a steam turbine,

Which require the whole setup to be done, let alone the research. Hmmm

[JohnFrancis]

18 hours ago, Abt9 said:

Which require the whole setup to be done, let alone the research. Hmmm

I would first do a bit of getto cooling with crude oil passing through two metal refinery's before being destroyed in a Petroleum refinery. But that would be a short term solution, just to get up the resources to install a permanent refinement solution.

[Saturnus]

You can also just make a ghetto set up. This set up has done 42t of iron and 60t of steel as well as 100t of ceramics so far, and the polluted water coolant in the biome next to the set up hasn't even reached 0C yet so there's plenty of cooling left.

It's just pumping in polluted water coolant from the bottom of an ice biome and ejecting it at the top. 2-3 ice biomes used this way will basically mean you don't ever need a complicated set up for steel making as you don't need to make that much steel really.

 

[Abt9]

Yeah. Although I've found that heat is easy with easy heat deletion. Energy is my current bottleneck, and the it is already cycle 250 =/

I guess I should forget about space.

 

Btw, oil boiling setup is possible with glass forge, right? I'm thinking of not using oil refinery.

EDIT: Screw that, glass forge takes too much power.

[fifty_ducks]

Just build a metal refinery with 2 Coal Generators and Smart Battery, and take the local polluted water from the slime biomes as coolant and dump it somewhere, like a looted cold biome. It's not a permanent solution but it works if you just want metal fast. The benefit of not doing a loop is that, well, it's easy to build and you don't stare at the screen for 30 minutes.

[FiannaTiger]

As fifty_ducks said just slap down 2 coal generators and 1 smart battery, you'll have to build the rock crusher to make lime anyhow.  You'll need a kiln as well.  The majority of heat comes from the coolant, I've done super getto by making about 2 tons of steel and just dumping the oil back into the oil biome... it was 213c but in a huge tank of 70-80c oil that won't even cause a blip.  If you have any polluted water source (slime biome) that's under 40c then use it and a water sieve and then you'll delete all the heat and have 40c water.