Smelting Furnace

The Smelting Furnace is a base module used to refine raw resources into crafted materials. Once powered on, it automatically draws nuggets from attached storage and processes them one at a time, placing the finished output into one of its four lower slots. It continues until all smeltable resources have been refined, but it will pause if there is no free storage space for the finished item and resume as soon as space becomes available.

Smelting takes 15 seconds per ingot at full power, consuming 75 Units of power per ingot. The furnace is also required for the mission Smelteringly Hot, which asks the player to unlock and print a Smelting Furnace and then refine Aluminum from Laterite.

The Smelting Furnace accepts a limited set of volatile gases and chemicals very poorly: placing Hydrogen, Sulfur, Methane, or Hydrazine into it causes an explosion. For normal use, it is intended for ore processing, turning raw materials into their refined forms so they can be used in later crafting steps. Commonly, this means converting ores such as Laterite into Aluminum and similar materials into their corresponding smelted products.

A few practical notes are worth keeping in mind:

• It only works when powered.
• It draws feed material from connected storage automatically.
• It stops if the output slots or attached output storage are full.
• It resumes automatically when space becomes available again.
• It explodes if filled with Hydrogen, Sulfur, Methane, or Hydrazine, so those should never be inserted.

The Smelting Furnace has gone through more revisions during development than most other modules. It has had four versions, plus an automated pre-release version that itself used a different model. Earlier pre-alpha and pre-release smelter models also exist in the game’s history and media. In the current game, the Smelting Furnace remains one of the most important early-to-mid progression machines, since it converts ore into the metals needed for many other devices and constructions.