Prefer componentized material refining over refinery buildings

[RoboPhred]

Playing around with the game, a large part of my enjoyment is coming from making setups to change and mix materials through heat and cooling.  It would be great if this could be supported more, especially over having buildings that simply take in element X and produce element Y out of it.

 

For example, it would be great to have a gameplay mechanic where metals are refined not by having dups drop them off into a building that refines them, but by having to make insulated chambers (or individual buildings) to melt, mix, and re-cool the material.  In this way, the resulting materials will be based on passing them through a series of player-constructed furnaces, condensers, and mixers, rather than on what button you press in a refinery's recipe list.

 

Mixing two ores to get alloys would be a bit problematic in the current incarnation of fluid physics, so either each ore would be melted separately and mixed in a third chamber using valves, or a specific building could come in at this point that mixes 2 piped inputs.

 

To make this feasible, we would need:

 

A means of moving solids / ores around

Could be conveyors or pneumatic tubes.  Would need inputs that are assigned item filters, which the dups will deliver to.  This would effectively be a storage container that outputs to the conveyor/tubes.  Also needs output hoppers that just drop the item.

 

Effective means of heating a large area to ore melting levels, and controlling its temperature:

If done as a series of buildings, this would just be a building that accepts ores and emits their liquid equivalent.

For the more fun, insulated tiles industrial furnace method, a variant of the space heater that produces large amount of heat would fit this.  At the moment, the liquid tepidizer can be used for this due to the bug where it will heat up the area outside of water for the first 5 seconds, allowing it to be rapidly toggled for gratuitous heating.  Controlling the temperature can be done with the thermal switch, so long as it can be built out of something that survives the heat at the level it gets set to.  This would be a bit difficult, as the ores it would be producing are probably the ones it will itself be made out of.  Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise as it means early furnaces have to be controlled manually until you produce alloys that can survive the heat, giving the game a non-research progression.

 

A means of cooling the liquid down into ores, and optionally automatically collecting ores in an area:

Building style, this would just be simple conversion of liquid input to ore conveyor output.  Styled after die-cast molding.

This would be more complex to pull off without a building, as larger amounts of liquids can cool into large chunks rather than into ore form.  Even if an external cooling process was used, dups would either have to run into the room to sweep the ores, or a building would be needed to capture the dropped ores and push them into the conveyor system.

[ShamPeiN]

i would love conveyor belts/tubes maybe mining wheelbarrows

 too much resources fit into storage, mined tiles should use more space and refinement to make them useful

maybe storing tanks which would be considered building units , round edged rectangular shape narrow walls, allowing to build inside them as upgrades , made of some rare or refined material, with better insulation. this containers would produce byproducts needing to clean them, some upgrades with research would give them insulation, cooling, self cleaning. i would like portable/extendable buildings more.