Refining Resources

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The bigger and more complicated brother of You Require More Vespene Gas. In a game with this trope there will probably be a lot of resources... Probably some that are "basic" and some that are more "advanced", the "basic" resources will then be used to create the "advanced" ones, which are usually needed for more advanced units or a considerable economic boost. At the extreme end of the scale, you can find games that focus on little else, such as most Factory Building Games.

Examples

• Achron has a strange variant of this trope. All three factions can convert QP (Quark-gluon Plasma) into LC (Liquid Crystal), which is tantamount to converting the more "advanced" / rare resource into the more "basic" / common one... inefficiently to boot. This has less to do with game balance and more to do with realism, since it stands to reason that a player should be able to convert a more refined version of a resource into a less-refined variant in case of an emergency.
• Against the Storm: Your villagers can collect basic foods and resources from resource nodes, but these need to be refined or cooked to provide better foods, building materials, service consumables and trade goods.
• Anno Domini. The iron cycle is rather similar to the Outpost example, with wood or charcoal added for fuel. Alcohol can be made directly from wine or with a still from sugar. Food can be made from fish, deer, cows (with a butcher) or grain (with a windmill and then a baker). And so on. There's some nice diagrams in the manual.
• The Battle Cats:
  • Aku Catfruit Seeds are dropped from a stage called "Growing Evil". You need five Aku Catfruit Seeds to make one Aku Catfruit, and you often need three Aku Catfruits for a particular unit's true form. Unlike other Catfruit, where whole fruits can drop from their growing stages, Growing Evil only drops seeds.
  • The same goes for Elder Catfruit. There’s a stage called Growing Strange whose second stages drop Elder Catfruit Seeds. Five seeds make one fruit and a certain number of fruits are needed for a true form.
  • Behemoth Stones are dropped from particular stages, ten are needed for one Behemoth Gem and certain units require Behemoth Gems of a certain color to evolve.
  • Materials drop at random from certain stages. Z-Materials are obtained from fusing five regular materials, and Z-Materials are needed to upgrade the foundation and style of the cat base to provide protection against certain status effects or enemies.
• In the original Capitalism you need so many expensive resources that full vertical integration of car or consumer electronics production chains is halfway impossible. As an example, if you want to own the chain of production from raw resources to a car, you need to start with an iron mine, an aluminum mine, and a cattle farm. You'll need factories to process the raw iron into steel, the aluminum into aluminum sheets, and the cows into leather. Then more processing to turn the steel into engines and the aluminum into car bodies. Then a third factory to turn all three into cars. Oh, what's that? Cars have computers and electronics now? Guess you're going to need to invest in a silicon mine to harvest silicon to turn into computer chips.
• City-Building Series:
  • A key feature of Pharaoh, which has a large number of different resources representing both raw and processed materials; which ones you collect/export and which you must import depends on the local natural resources of the map you're playing. The processed goods are the ones your citizens want, of course, and each one has a specific industrial building dedicated to producing it from the appropriate raw material. It's also possible (and recommended by the game) to make a profitable industry out of refining resources; importing flax, building weavers and exporting linen, for example.
  • Zeus: Master of Olympus follows in the same vein with a Greek flavor: copper is mined to make weapons and statues, wood is needed to make ships, chariots and build temples, etc.
  • Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom:
    • The game's resources actually evolve along with the timeline: at first tax records are kept on wooden slats, but once paper is invented (made from hemp) that's all they'll use. Weapons are made from copper, then iron, then steel (requires wood and iron). Bronzeware (copper and ceramics, which requires clay) are replaced by Lacquerware (lacquer and wood).
    • In addition, the game lets you choose the type of tribute you receive from conquered cities, so you can now export refined goods without actually making them yourself.
    • While previous games only required multiple food types for elite housing, it's now a requirement for all types, upgrading food from Bland all the way to Delicious.
• In Colobot, titanium ore needs to be refined into titanium blocks before it can be used for building. Also, uranium ore can be refined into atomic energy cells.
• Practically everything in the Cultures series is treated as a resource, and most resources can be refined at least three times (I.E.: quarrystone→masonry→marble.)
• Deadlock has quite a number of resources, including things like art (which has an effect on settlement morale). In addition, basic construction resources can be further refined (iron into steel and endurium into triidium). Although not a required step, refining makes more efficient use of your resources and makes shipping them to other settlements cheaper.
• Don't Starve has grass, logs, reeds, and rocks, which can be refined into rope, boards, papyrus (paper), and cut stone respectively using a Science Machine or Alchemy Engine. The Prestihatitator and Shadow Manipulator allow blue and red gems to be refined into purple gems and dark flower petals to be refined into nightmare fuel.
• Dungeons of Dredmor uses this with its Item Crafting system. For example, copper and zinc ingots can be smelted out of chunks of their respective ores, then smelted together into brass. The brass is then crafted into Brass Mechanisms, which are either used as-is or used to make more advanced components like Spring-loaded Power Cores for use in high-end Clock Punk equipment.
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • Let's assume a long-winded example: Pig Tail/Rope Reed Seeds (Farm plot) → Pig Tail/Rope Reed (Farmer's Workshop) → Thread (Loom) → Cloth (Clothier's Workshop) → Bag; Wood (Wood Furnace) → Ash (Ashery) → Potash (Kiln) → Pearlash; Wood (Wood Furnace) → Charcoal; Bag (Glass Furnace) → Sand-filled Bag; Sand-filled Bag, Pearlash, Charcoal (Glass Furnace) → Clear Glass.
  • And that's ignoring the complex process to create the axe used to cut the tree to get the wood in the first place (requiring coke (made from lignite); an anvil (made from iron and coke); and a metal bar. All these have to be dug up with picks (made in the same process as axes), and the metal has to be refined at a smelter. Yikes. Needless to say, a pick, an anvil, and axe rank very high on what resources to bring with you when you start a new fortress.
  • Most examples are somewhat less extreme, however. Nearly all the basic metals are relatively simple: Wood (Wood Furnace) → Charcoal, Charcoal and Ore (Smelter) → Metal bars, Metal bars and Charcoal (Forge) → Metal weapons, tools, furniture etc. And you can leave out the charcoal entirely if you have access to a handy magma vent, though that has its own logistical issues. It's also possible to trade for any resources you can't produce yourself; cloth in particular is easier to import if you use a lot of it.
• EVE Online. Dear god, EVE. A list of all the various production processes would be a page of its own. Things are only going to get worse when Planetary Interaction goes live...
  • You get what you ask for. Brace yourself. EVE Online's production system provides three basic modes of production, and then combines them into a long production chain that may require up to five to six steps, depending on the end product. Of course, the maker also has to haul resources and end products now and then either by oneself or by commissioning courier contracts. Minerals don't have feet (or in EVE, engines), y'know.
  • Gathering. You gather the raw materials required for intermediary/end products. Activities such as Mining(basic minerals), Moon Mining(moon minerals), Gas Harvresting(Booster/Wormhole Gas), Salvaging(Rig components), Planetary Interaction fall into this category. This is often delegated to specialized miners/gatherers so that the guys running the production chain can concentrate on factory operation and logistics.
  • Assembly. You gather basic resources and assemble them into an intermediate/end product. The assembly process requires a blueprint of the product, which may be an original(infinite uses) or copy(expires after a certain amount of uses). Assembled products can often be disassembled into component parts. The assembly process can be conducted both in stations and mobile starbases(POS).
  • Reaction. You put the basic resources into a reaction facility and receive an intermediary product. Reaction can only be done in systems with security rating of less than 0.3, making the reaction process either a risky business(for small scale manufacturers) or a profitable, monopolized industry(for large alliances).
    • Tech 1 ships/modules: Gathering(Mining) → Assembly. (Basic Minerals + Tech 1 Blueprints → End products).
    • Rigs: Gathering(Salvaging) → Assembly(Salvaged components → Rigs).
    • Mobile Starbases and Facilities: Gathering(PI) → Assembly(PI) * 4 → Assembly(P4 components → End product).
    • Boosters(Combat Medication): Gathering(Gas Harvesting, PI) → Reaction(Gas + Base Materials → Raw Booster) → Reaction(Raw Booster + Catalyst → Stronger Raw Booster + Catalyst)...(Repeat up to three times, depending on target potency) → Assembly(Raw Booster + Megacyte + Blueprint → Usable Booster).
    • Tech 2 ships/modules: Gathering(Mining, Moon Mining) → Simple Reaction(Moon Minerals → Tier 1 Moon Materials) → Complex Reaction(Tier 1 Moon Materials → Tier 2 Moon Materials) → Assembly(Tier 2 Moon Materials → Tech 2 Components) → Assembly(Tech 2 Components + Tech 2 Blueprint + Tech 1 base module/ship → Tech 2 module/ship).
    • Tech 3 ships: Gathering(Mining, Gas Harvesting, Salvaging) → Reaction(Wormhole Materials → Hybrid Polymers) → Assembly(Hybrid Polymers + Wormhole Salvage → Tech 3 Components) → Assembly(Tech 3 Components + Tech 3 Blueprints → T3 Subsystems/Ship hulls) → Assembly(T3 Subsystems + Ship Hull → Functional T3 ship).
    • Capital Ships: Gathering(Mining) → Assembly(Basic Minerals → Capital Ship Components) → Assembly(Capital Ship Components → Capital Ship). (Process looks simple, but requires THE most hauling effort. Each capital component takes about 2000 times more space than regular modules, and you need more than a hundred of them to make the smallest fighter carrier. Before you start the assembly you also need the blueprints for the components, about twenty sets per race.)
    • ... That's about it.
  • Of course, EVE is an MMO with an utterly massive and extremely realistic player-generated economy, in which players take different jobs at different points in these chains, so you generally don't have to deal with all of this at once.
• Factorio might as well be called "Refining Resources: The Game". It tasks the player with building a massive factory to set up a rocket silo and launch a satellite into orbit (in the Space Age expansion, the rockets are instead used to carry items to space platforms), using only local materials. All building materials are refined from ores and other useful materials; iron, copper, coal, stone, wood, and crude oil. Ores need to be processed into plate metal, which can then be used for a variety of construction tasks. The electrical engine unit for logistics drones, for example, requires a standard engine unit (built from steel refined from iron, iron pipes, and iron gears), lubricant (refined from heavy oil), and circuit boards (using copper wires and iron plates). Factories often have enormous furnace areas for processing ore shipped in via train from distant mines. All buildings are crafted the same way as simpler components, and they are themselves sometimes "refined", for example an Assembling Machine 2 requires an Assembling Machine 1 as an ingredient along with some other components.
  • Naturally taken further, and then even further, in mods for the game, because there's always someone who isn't satisfied with the level of detail in the refining and production processes.
  • In Space Age, Fulgora turns item crafting on its head. The only resource available is scrap, which can be recycled to get a random assortment of items from 12 possibilities. This includes complex high-end items like processing units and low density structures, but basic items such as iron/copper plates, basic electronic circuits and plastic, are missing. To get those, you have to toss those high-end items back into the recycler, which will break them down into their simpler components, essentially traversing the production chain backwards.
• In Fallout 4, the player never seems to have as much adhesive as they need, since it's used in almost every armor and weapon upgrade. Enterprising players will find that corn, mutfruit, tatos, and purified water can be refined into vegetable starch, which can then be refined into adhesive. The vegetables can all be grown, whereas purified water can itself be refined from dirty water.
• Final Fantasy XIV has extensive crafting lists for 8 separate crafting specialties: Carpentry, Blacksmithing, Goldsmithing, Armorsmithing, Cooking (Culinarian), Weaving, Alchemy, and Leatherworking. In addition, there's three gathering specialties: Fishing, Mining and Botanist^note A combination of lumber gathering and plant harvesting. Recipes start off relatively basic, such as blacksmiths taking raw copper ore and turning it into copper weapons, but quickly get more complicated: a level 45 weapon requires gathering mythril ore and cobalt ore, turning it into ingots, and combining it with high grade lumber (crafted from high-grade wood) and some leather or alchemical glue. The whole process of crafting is a slow and steady progression from gathering raw resources, refining those into usable intermediary products, combining those products with other products to make an actual useful item. The process is lessened somewhat by the ability to do everything yourself, as there's no restriction on how many crafting and gathering classes you can have. In fact, with the exception of Cooking^note which uses specific ingredients that are not useful to other crafting classes, it's recommended to level every crafting and gathering class if you decide to pursue crafting^note And even Cooking will benefit from other crafting classes, as high-end cooking tools can be made by Armorers and Blacksmiths, and high-end crafting clothes are made by Leatherworkers and Weavers.
• Flotsam: Advanced resources can be found on the remaining islands — some former mountains, others the tops of flooded structures — but not in the quantities you'll be needing. Neither fish nor seaweed can be eaten without preparation. The building material dry wood has to be obtained from drying the otherwise useless wet wood. From dry wood, firewood can be made, which is a fuel needed to power many other facilities (until they're upgraded to the electrical grid), including those producing drinkable water. Plastic is a primarily a building material, but nearly useless as plastic waste, which has to be converted to floaters to get the most out of it.
• In From the Depths, ship components are made from resources that are simply pulled right out of the ocean in resource zones, though fuel, ammunition, and repair spare parts must be fabricated. Both ammo and spare parts are generated by simple components that turn metal into ammo and scrap into spare parts. Oil to fuel is more involved, requiring a refinery which can be augmented with catalysts and cokers, and requires gas vents to prevent a buildup of dangerous explosive gas.
• The Hearts of Iron games require refining of crude oil into refined fuel. Metal, rare materials, and energy are also "refined" by your industrial capacity into supplies, based on how much of the IC is allocated to producing that resource.
• Imperialism, similar to Victoria above had resources that needed to be gathered, then in factories refined to better stuff.
• Industry Giant is nothing but this. While food resources can be sold immediately, to make any refined products, you first need to build the raw material industry from two different groups, then refine the good to a semi-usable item and then again to make the final product.
• Kerbal Space Program: Ore can be mined from planets, moons, and asteroids and converted into propellant, based on the concept of In-Situ Resource Utilization. Mods like the Modular Kolonization System add more complex refinement chains and the ability to manufacture spacecraft outside your homeworld.
• A Kingdom For Keflings has the basic resources - wood, stone, etc. These can be delivered to certain buildings, where they are converted to improved resources - planks, cut stone, etc. Different building components require different types of resources.
• Kingdom Hearts II has a little of this: towards the endgame, you can now regularly battle Nobodies, which drop Dusk- and Twilight-type synthesis materials. These can then be used to synthesize Mythril materials, which before that point are only in limited supply from treasure chests yet are needed for many (if not most/all) other synthesis items.
• To make Depleted Grimacite items in Kingdom of Loathing, you first need to smith a Chunk of Depleted Grimacite with the Meat-smithing hammer you've been using to make a Depleted Grimacite Hammer.
• Knights and Merchants plays it relatively straight mostly, up to the point you realise your warriors are also some kind of resource. It may not be easily seen by beginner players because they are supplied with some initial resources though. For example, getting an axe chevalier requires a horse, an axe, a leather armor, a wooden shield and a recruit. Axes and shields are made of wood, which is made of logs. In order to get a leather armor, you need a piece of leather, which you get when you kill a pig. In order to get pigs and horses, you need wheat farms. Finally, if you want to get the recruit, you need to pay him in gold, which is made of gold ore being burnt with coal. Every conversion presented here requires separate building and worker, which you need to build or hire...
• Little Witch in the Woods: Some plants and potion ingredients need to be refined by Ellie using an extractor or roaster that she will need to repair/procure during the story.
• The Lord of the Rings Online has 9 different crafting trees. Any individual character is able to do three of these things, but you don't get to pick them directly... instead, you choose a profession, which gives you a particular set of three. Most craft trees are at least somewhat dependent on another one, and it's very likely that at least one of yours will require either raw materials you can't harvest yourself or semi-processed materials that you can't process yourself or both. You may also be able to partially process materials that you then can't use. On top of this most of the crafting skills have "guilds"; progress in the guild allows you to use guild recipes to create some items in bulk lots or make items that non-guild crafters simply can't make at all. You can only be in one guild at a time, even if you have two skills for which there's a guild, and while you can switch guilds you start over at the bottom level of guild reputation each time you do so.
  • All the professions include at least one skill you can't use without getting partially-processed materials from another character and/or at least one skill that produces partially-processed materials you can't use. It takes at least four characters to make a self-sufficient cooperative, and even that will still leave you unable to produce some of the guild items (you need seven characters to cover all the guilds).
• Milky Way Idle: Milking, Foraging, Woodcutting, and Combat provide raw materials for crafting in Cheesesmithing, Crafting, Tailoring, Cooking, and Brewing. Equipment requires the raw materials (milk, hides, and plant materials) to be first processed (into cheeses and fabrics). Both the materials and equipment come in tiers, and the higher-tier equipment requires both the corresponding tier of the crafting material and the previous tier version of the item. This makes crafting the high-tier equipment a lengthy process that requires every material tier. Cooking and Brewing, meanwhile, produce the final product straight from the raw materials.
• In Minecraft, the Cake has one of the most complicated crafting procedures in the game. The end result is a food item that can totally refill your hunger bar and then some. It requires three buckets of milk, two lumps of sugar, an egg and three bushels of wheat. While some ingredients are, although somewhat uncommon, relatively simple to obtain (i.e. eggs are laid by chickens, sugar is refined at the crafting table from sugar cane, which grows near water), others are a bit more complex:
  • Wheat: Grown using dirt, a source of water, a hoe, and seeds. The last one is initially obtained by smashing tall grass.
  • Milk: Mine nine deposits of iron ore with a stone pickaxe, smelt them in a furnace with a fuel source (coal, wood) to get nine iron ingots, craft them into 3 buckets at a workbench, then finally find some cows to obtain 3 buckets of milk.
  • Keep in mind that these steps assume you start with nothing, therefore it does not include the steps taken to gather the materials and craft the prerequisite tools.
  • Exaggerated with certain mods. Industrialcraft is particularly brutal here. Want the top-tier energy storage device? Here's how you do it: Extract rubber from sticky resin, create wire with copper ingots, combine the rubber and the wire to make insulated wires. Make four of those. Now take 4 diamonds and surround them with redstone to make energy crystals, put 8 iron through the furnace again to make it refined iron. Use the 8 iron to craft a machine block, then put the crystals and the insulated wires around the machine block to make the second-tier energy storage device. Now combine 6 insulated copper wire, 1 refined iron, and 2 redstone to make a basic circuit. Make 13 of those. Add 4 redstone, 2 glowstone dust, and 2 lapis lazuli to one of the circuits to make an advanced circuit. Make one of the aforementioned machine blocks again, then craft 3 refined iron, 3 bronze, and 3 tin to make two mixed metal ingots, then put them into a compressor to make alloy. Take 16 coal dust, craft that into 4 carbon fibers, make that into 2 carbon mesh plates. Combine the machine block, the alloy, and the plates to make an advanced machine block. Now, make 6 more of the previously-mentioned energy crystals, then combine 6 lapis lazuli and 2 of the basic circuits on each energy crystal to make it a lapotron crystal. Combine your six lapotron crystals, advanced machine, and advanced circuit with your second-tier storage device to make the top-tier energy storage. If your eyes went cross-eyed reading this, you probably shouldn't play this mod. This, of course, doesn't count all of the stuff you need beforehand, like macerators and compressors and a power supply worthy of this top-tier storage.
• Outpost 2 had a fairly realistic version: mines produce ore, which must be hauled by truck to a smelter to be refined into metals, which are then used to build everything.
• Rock Raiders features the Ore Refinery, which uses Ore to create Building Studs, a building material which substitutes for Ore in construction and is valued at five Ore per Stud. Upgrading the Ore Refinery allows Building Studs to be generated from fewer and fewer Ore pieces, significantly increasing their value in construction.
• This is the core mechanic of Satisfactory. Raw resources like iron, copper, coal and limestone can be extracted infinitely from resource nodes, but need to be converted into other things to be useful. Limestone can be turned into cement, while iron and copper ore can be smelted into iron and copper ingots respectively. Iron ingots can be turned into iron rods, which can be turned into screws, which are in turn used for a wide assortment of things. As the game progresses, more advanced resources require more complex refinement processes - for example, extracting aluminum out of bauxite is a painstaking process that additionally requires water, coal and silica, and needs a chain of at least three machines and a lot of complicated piping to produce the results.
• The Settlers: Most older games run on this trope, the first games added complexity by requiring roads to connect workshops. The player has to produce long chains of resources, and every stage needs special buildings and special tools which require special resources to be made. The entire chain reaches its apex in military and religious production.
• In Sid Meier's Colonization, the economy is built on this trope. In theory you could just sell raw materials to and buy manufactured goods from Europe, but it's much more beneficial in the long term to build your own industrial base in your colonies, especially considering you'll have to fight your mother country in the endgame. Of course, advanced resources mostly are still traded away, but for a greater profit. The only refinements used up by your own colonies are Lumber → ^Hammersused to construct buildings, as well as ships once you build your own Shipyards, Ore → ^Toolsspent by Pioneer jobs or production of ships, cannons and non-basic buildings → ^Musketsneeded to to equip soldiers and dragoons, and ^Foodallows colonies to survive and grow without immigration → ^Horsesneeded to equip dragoons and scouts.
• In Space Engineers you must mine the basic minerals from asteroids, and then process them in the refinery to create Iron Ingots, Silicon Waffers, etc. From there, only 1 resource can be directly used (Uranium ingots as fuel for the Nuclear Reactors) and all the other resources must go to an assembler where they will be processed into either tools, weapons and ammunition (which can be used directly) or block components like the "Computer components" or "Bulletproof Glass". And then, these parts must be used to create the actual ship blocks, like the reactors, turrets, or the refineries/assemblers themselves, which takes quite a lot of time (As an example, building a nuclear reactor can take up to 20 minutes running back and forth, since it requires lots of heavy components. For one, it requires 1200 Reactor Components and the player can only hold 40 at a time, and thats only if he drops everything else in inventroy). Because of this players spend a big chunk of the beginning of a game trying to accelerate this process as much as possible (by building mining ships, conveyor systems, ships equiped to build other ships, etc).
• Stellaris: Part of the economic overhaul in 2.2 was the addition of several advanced resources refined from minerals. Alloys are used to produce starbases and ships, consumer goods are consumed by the population to keep them happy, and “strategic” resources like exotic gases, rare crystals, and volatile motes are needed for advanced buildings and ships. In addition research jobs now consume consumer goods.
• Stronghold and its sequels. To make bread you need a wheat farm to grow the wheat, a mill to turn the wheat into flour, and a baker to turn the flour into bread. Other resources also have their own chains. The resources need to be stored at every stage and can be bought or sold at the market at any stage as well.
  • There are shorter processes, such as meat (hunters kill wild deer, turn them into meat automatically), but to keep happiness up while simultaneously raising the money you're going to need for your army, you'll need all four food groups (hunter → meat, cow farm → cheese [takes longer], orchard → apples [longer still], wheat farm → mill → baker → bread [longest]). And some maps prevent you from gather specific food groups.
• Tropico: basic resource buildings like farms and mines allow you to collect food, wood, or metals. Building an industrial factory allows you to turn those resources into industrial goods, which sell for much more than the base material but require more educated workers and a steady supply of the raw resource and produce more pollution than the resource-gathering building.
  • From Tropico 4 on you can import those raw materials from elsewhere, refine them, and sell them at a profit.
• Valheim:
  • Metals are found as ore or scrap, and need to be smelted into ingots before they can be forged into anything useful. Smelting uses coal, which is made from wood in a kiln, random trash in an incinerator, or finding a fire geyser and killing the surtlings that regularly spawn around it.
  • Yggdrasil's sap can be turned into "refined eitr" in a refiner very much like ore in a smelter, and uses "soft tissue" (brain matter of petrified giant skeletons) as fuel.
  • Barley and flax are turned into flour and linen threads via windmills and automatic spinning wheels.
  • While basic food components can be eaten raw or after basic roasting (and you're limited to that in early game), later in the game you need to use cauldrons, ovens and fermenters to make more complex dishes and meads. One update added Feasts, food that lasts far longer and provides huge bonuses... but requires multiple ingredients (some of the requiring other ingredients), crafting tables and locating one of the game's elusive vendors.
• Victoria: An Empire Under The Sun has 47 different types of resources. A lot of the basic ones are required to create the more advanced ones (culminating in something like 4-5 steps for the most "high tech" stuff like Radios and Tanks). Due to the highly complex market mechanic, and to represent the situation in the time-period depicted, it's not always most profitable to immediately produce the high-tech stuff though, since demand for basic resources like lumber and Iron will be very high at the beginning of the game. Its sequel retains this system, albeit with a smoother market simulation. The "POP Demand Mod" for this game adds even more resources, as well as far more ways to produce them.
• Warframe has this for its crafting system—there are often basic resources gathered en masse or harvested from the open-world sectors, which by themselves have no use. Most have to be refined further (for instance, taking raw ore and turning it into a refined ingot of metal) for use in crafting weapons and equipment. Some particularly advanced pieces of equipment will take several tiers of refinement and often require several days to complete—for instance, building Baruuk requires both basic resources (such as ferrite or alloy plates) and refined resources (such as hespazym alloy, made from hesperon ore combined with other basic resources) to construct Baruuk's separate components, then further requires you to use the components to build Baruuk himself.
• In the X-Universe series, there are three basic resources - foods, ores, and energy. All resources require energy to be produced and refined. For example, to produce a Flail Barrage Missile in a Flail missile fab, you need to set up two mines - one on a silicon asteroid, another on an ore asteroid, a basic bio factory (i.e. a Chelt Aquarium), a foodstuff production factory to refine the bio into food or oil (i.e Rastar Refinery), and then finally, a Solar Power Plant to produce Energy Cells to power the complex, but (non-NPC) solar power plants require Crystals, which on their own require Silicon, Energy, and foodstuffs. Creating a self-sufficient space station capable of producing all of the resources required for the Player Headquarters ship production facilities is one of the end-game goals for many players.
• Zombidle's Item Crafting system relies on villager ghosts, which can be picked up once you get the right item and are used in the highest-level items such as shards, which multiplying DPS or money gained by 3. Three ghost items can be refined into a more concentrated one (ghost->ectoplasm->ectoplasm ball->ectoplasm cube->ectoplasm prism), for a total of 81 ghosts and 1 hour per item. This took a ridiculously long time before upgrades were added that allowed creating multiple items at once and harvesting several ghosts per villager.