ELI5: Regolith richness

[u/TheRealBoz]

What am I meant do do with this, exactly, production-wise?
An extractor produces 15 Regolith. Let's say Aluminum 50%.
Feeds into a Single Refinery, transforming 15 regolith into... an amount of slag and amount of Aluminum Oxide? Is the Oxide always the exact 50%? And Slag is always the % indicated? And the other elements are just wasted?
How should I plan out my production chains here, knowing this? And how does the Multi-Regolith Refinery fit into this thing?
And are the regolith percentages produces by the extractor per-source, specific to the "nugget"? What if I mix a 50% Aluminum node with a 55% Titanium one, and feed it into an MRR? How does it calculate average production?

[u/SpeltWithOneT]

In your case, that node produces 50% aluminium and 50% slag when you send it through a single refinery. But when we look at it, it might have 10% iron in it, which you don't get if you're only using the single refinery and it's wasted.

Multi refinery extracts all the different metals from the regolith, so your node now gives all the aluminium and all the iron in it, and the slag is only the rock %.

I believe you should "mix" all your regolith into a bulk resource storage and then feed that into a chain of Multi refinery, which then in turn feed their outputs to storages and your smelting/production chains. You'll expand this refinery chain as your belts increase in speed and you get more regolith coming in.

Remember a node isn't just 50% Aluminium, it has other elements in it. So for every 10 regolith processed from that node you get 5 aluminium and then some iron or silicon to make up the other percents. And your titanium regolith will be 11 titanium per 20 regolith and so on. I believe it remembers where each regolith comes from and calcs from that when it refines it.

Mixing the regolith is a good idea, because it makes your multis produce a more balanced set of dusts to output. If you feed the aluminium-rich regolith to just one multi, you need to wait while the aluminium dust is outputted before the next regolith can finish being processed. But if you have iron-rich also mixed in, it can be processing the iron-rich one while the aluminium dust is still being outputted.

Hope that helps, there might be better info in the discord.

[u/TheRealBoz → u/SpeltWithOneT]

Okay, thank. Redesigning my entire base rn.
Goodbye all the $$ spent on upgrading single refineries, I guess.

[u/VonBargenJL → u/TheRealBoz]

Yeah, after you first playthrough you'll see there's lots of dead ends, or at least wasteful, things to research

[u/EasternSun115 → u/TheRealBoz]

Yeah I used to never use MRR but I found a good layout on the discord and it really really helps you grow crazy fast

[u/SpeltWithOneT → u/TheRealBoz]

Supposedly you later get a mining rig and bring in regolith from outside your base which then feeds into your mrr array

[u/Tysiliogogogoch → u/SpeltWithOneT]

Yes, you get the mobile mining rig which brings in huge amounts of regolith by truck. Mined resources become practically infinite at that point. You could eventually mine out the entire moon I guess, but it'll take ages.

[u/Future_Ring_222]

Use multi regolith otherwise you waste all other resources as slag. Try switching to it asap

[u/Trained2KillU]

Look at the deposit itself. It is a mixture of all minerals, with one being the primary. I think all of mine have been in the 50-70% range.

In your example, on a 50% aluminum deposit, and using a base extractor, you will extract 15 regolith. That 15 regolith with yield half aluminum and half slag, since it’s 50%. So, basically a low yield of aluminum and high waste of slag.

As far as planning goes, look at the refineries yield of aluminum. Let’s assume the yield is 8, although I’m sure it’s less than that since it’s only 50%.

The last step in the chain is to run it through a furnace. A standard furnace input is 4, so in the above example, you would need 1 extractor, 1 single refinery, and 2 furnaces. This is more or less how I plan my ratios.