Refining Resources

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"Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken. " —Chairman Sheng-ji Yang "Looking God in the Eye" , Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, (itself not a game that follows the actual trope)

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.

Examples of Refining Resources include:

• 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.
• At least the older The Settlers games runs on this trope, first games added complexity by requiring roads to connect workshops.
• Imperialism, similar to Victoria above had resources that needed to be gathered, then in factories refined to better stuff.
• Dwarf Fortress mostly revolves around this, directly or indirectly.
  • Pig Tail Seeds/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.
  • Tame animal/killed wild animal (Butcher's shop) --> animal hide ; Chalk (Kiln) --> quicklime (Ashery) -> milk of lime; hide + milk of lime (Tanner's Shop) --> parchment sheet; wood (Craftsdwarf's Workshop) --> book binding; sheets (Craftsdwarf's Workshop) --> quire (Library ) --> written quire; quire with writing + thread + book binding (Craftsdwarf's Workshop) --> Book.
    • This ignores that workshops themselves may need refined items to build, and the complex process to create the axe used to cut the tree to get the wood in the first place. Forging requires a metal bar and fuel - charcoal (made at Wood Furnace from wood) or coke (made at Smelter from coal), and the Forge itself, that needs an anvil (which can be made... at a forge, so you have to buy at least one). And the metal has to be refined from ore at a smelter, using fuel again, and more coke if you want steel. Ore and coal have to be dug up with picks (made in the same process as axes). 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.
      • Often players gamble on anvils being available later via merchants and don't take one, and instead bring only ready tools to focus on building up all necessary non-metal industry and basic security first - which is likely to be longer than it takes the first caravan to arrive... or the second... Food and drink industry aren't as complicated as clear glass, but things add up. The upside is that by the time you are ready for smithing, you may be able to produce enough of trade goods to pay for your anvil and then some.
      • While you can keep most goods on the floor, proper use of containers saves a lot of space and time, and containers have to be made. Logs/stones can be cut to 4 much lighter blocks that are interchangeable with them as a building material; this uses a job, but you need to gather less of raw resources, it saves time later because blocks are easier to transport and allow 10x more dense storage (in bins), and it gives the carpenter/mason some practice.
    • One shortcut is to not use fuel, but only magma-heated furnaces. Naturally, you'd need to make sure that the creatures who can swim in magma won't have access to your workshops... which involves some extra items made of magma-proof materials. Luckily, most of these can be cut from stone in one job, and you most likely will have some heat-resistant stone long before you'll dig to magma. Also, magma is used to produce obsidian by mixing with water - the process you need to set up, rather than order as a job, and then dig the solid obsidian out - giving you unlimited stone of a fairly high value (thus natural choice for trade goods).
  • Refinement also affects strategy of spending embark points. Low-grade resources are much cheaper. From humble willow logs, you can make light containers and training weapons soon after building a carpenter's shop, even if there are no fitting trees on the map, or they are guarded by giant badgers. If you have thread, you'll have your own cloth, rope, bags and more as needed, so it may be a good idea... unless you want to keep woolly cattle - then as long as you keep a safe pasture, you'll have a steady supply of yarn and milk (which can be turned into cheese). Plants are easier to protect from local fauna, however. Leather will be messy to make on your own, but if you already have it, many items that are fairly expensive in ready form (like quivers and light armor) are but one step away. And so on. You also can spend points on starting skills - there are skills you don't want to learn by trial and error (like medical ones), but skills that you can train may be worth some points too: if dwarves work faster, they'll save time to do some other job - which speeds up development and allows to catch up on making the goods you don't bring with you.
  • Every process is a job that keeps some dwarf occupied, which reflects in optimization. E.g. many jobs go faster if done by trained and/or talented workers, but you won't have 1 dwarf for 1 job for a long, long time - for one, because you'd need to provide materials fast enough - and then there's "cross-training".
• In Minecraft, the Cake has one of the most complicated crafting procedures in the game. The end result is a food item that can almost fully heal you. It requires 3 buckets of milk, 2 sugar, 1 egg and 3 wheat. While some ingredients are, although somewhat uncommon, relatively simple to obtain (i.e. eggs are laid by chickens, sugar is refined at the workbench 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 9 pieces of iron ore with a stone pickaxe, smelt them in a furnace with a fuel source (coal, wood) to get 9 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.
  • Turned Up to Eleven 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 6 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.)
• What about 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 to turn them into...
• 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.
• Deadlock allows you to refine iron into steel and endurium into triidium. Although not required, doing so makes more efficient use of your resources.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 - but 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.
• 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 consumed in your own colonies are Ore -> Tools -> Muskets and Food -> Horses.
• 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.
• LEGO 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.
• Emperor of The Fading Suns - Food and sometimes Exotica are gathered by Farms, Metals, Traces and sometimes Gems by Mines and Energy by Wells, the rest is produced from them. You can purchase stuff, but merchants are kind of cutthroats and also will start trouble if they'll ever accumulate enough of money. You can get extra income early on from selling excess of Trace from mines and sometimes Exotica that farms give whether you want it or not, but you usually get more from refined stuff, thus Electronics and Chemical may be among the first towns (after Farms, because you always need more and more food as you build units, and a lot for Engineers to create all those buildings, and possibly Wells, because oil Energy is used to produce anything else). The first two add 150 Fb of value and Fusorium adds 4455 Fb (!) per turn. However, the Bioplant runs at a loss of 50, and Cyclotron at a loss of 1000 Fb of possible profit... yet while it's possible to buy these resources from the League, with their markup it would be even more expensive - assuming the nearest Agora will have enough for your needs at all.
  • Chemicals plant: 10 Energy + 5 Trace -> 10 Chemicals (rocket weapons, hovercraft, space fighters and a few exotic units)
  • Electronics plant: 10 Energy + 5 Trace -> 10 Electronics (aircraft and most scout or advanced units, including Officers)
  • Ceramsteel plant: 10 Energy + 10 Chemicals + 7 Trace -> 10 Ceramsteel (hovercraft and other advanced vehicles, Powered Armor and most spaceships).
  • Fusorium: 10 Energy + 7 Electronics -> 10 Monopols (hovercraft, Powered Armor and energy weapons, including space defence and armed spaceships).
  • Cyclotron: 10 Energy + 10 Monopols + 7 Gems -> 1 Singularity (jump-capable spaceships).
  • Bioplant: 10 Energy + 10 Exotica + 10 Chemicals -> 10 Biochems (exotic units - mostly proscribed or borderline technologies).
  • Wetware plant: 10 Energy + 10 Ceramsteel + 10 Biochems -> 10 Wetware (ditto).
• When City of Heroes introduced bases for super groups, the mechanism for creating improvements involved extracting or combining "ordinary" salvage to create any of about half a dozen special components, which were then combined using randomly-dropped recipes for the various items with which one could outfit a base. The process was complicated, tedious, and quickly abandoned by the developers for a somewhat simpler, more streamlined scheme that didn't involve any "refining".