Automated Smelter & Refinery Design - From Raw Ore to Ready Ingots

Your Smelter Line Is the Hidden Bottleneck

You look at your iron plate buffer and wonder why it is always half-empty. Your miners are running. Your assemblers are idle. The problem is not enough ore - it is how your smelters are arranged.

A single smelter processes 30 ore per minute. Without a balanced input belt, three smelters struggle to fill the same gap that one properly-fed smelter could. Here is the layout that scales.

Quick-Fix: The 2-to-1 Belt Balancer

Drop a 2-to-1 belt balancer before your smelter input. If two miner belts feed one smelter line, use a splitter array to balance both lanes equally. Ore starvation on one side cuts throughput by 50% immediately.

Fix time: 30 seconds. Throughput gain: 1.8x on existing smelters.

Smelter Array Scaling Rules

Each smelter consumes 30 kW. A single belt can feed 15 ore/sec. Beyond that, split to a second input belt.

Three Refinery Layouts

1. Linear Chain (Early Game)

Smelters in a straight line with one input belt and one output belt. Simple, cheap, but bottlenecks at the far end.

2. Parallel Arrays (Mid Game)

Two rows of smelters facing each other. Shared output belt doubles throughput without doubling belt length.

3. Stacked Modules (Late Game)

Multiple smelter layers stacked vertically using elevators. Each layer is a complete parallel array. Requires Superalloy unlocked.

Real Scenario: Copper Plate Starvation at Station Level 6

My circuit assemblers kept stalling. Copper plate production showed 160/min but assemblers needed 210/min. One belt fed 6 smelters but only 4 were getting ore.

The fix: Split the ore input into two belts before the smelter line. Each belt feeds 3 smelters evenly. Copper plate output jumped to 240/min. Circuit production went from 60% to 100% in under 5 minutes.

FAQ

Q: Should I smelt on-site or at base?

Always smelt on-site if the ore patch has 4+ miners. Transport ingots instead of ore - they stack twice as dense in cargo drones.

Q: How do I know when to add more smelters?

Watch the smelter input buffer. If it stays below 50% while miners are full, add more smelters. If miners are empty, add more miners.

Q: Do refinery upgrades stack?

Yes. Speed modules in refineries stack multiplicatively with belt upgrades. One speed upgrade + one belt upgrade = 2.2x throughput, not 2x.

External Resources

• Outworld Station on Steam
• r/OutworldStationGame on Reddit
• Resource Guide - Ore locations and quality tiers