If you have been mining for a while you will have noticed your Commercial Storage filling up with ore that nothing seems to want. Blueprints ask for Titanium, Tungsten, Zirconium, Refined Ore and the like, and none of those come out of an asteroid. They come out of a Refining Centre, and there are 32 of them scattered around the galaxy.
Only 30 captains have ever used one. If you are not one of them, this is the single biggest gap in most people’s operation.
Where
Look for a Refining Centre at a station. Your raw ore is pulled straight from Commercial Storage, so you do not need to be hauling it around in your hold, and the refined output goes straight back to Commercial Storage when you collect it.
What you actually get
Every raw ore refines into three different materials, not one. The conversion is five raw units into one unit of each of the three, so 300 raw ore gives you 60 of each, 180 units in total.
Thracium gives Iron Ore, Jasper Ore and Refined Ore. Kelsalt gives Iron Ore, Copper Ore and Isotopes. Ravenrock gives Traylon Gas, Technesium and Tessarine Gas. Higher up the ladder, Blissar gives Titanium, Tungsten and Zirconium, which is where your ship hulls come from.
Batch sizes and times
You refine in fixed batches, and rarer ore comes in smaller batches that take longer:
• Common ore, 300 per batch, 10 minutes
• Uncommon ore, 200 per batch, 20 minutes
• Rare ore, 100 per batch, 30 minutes
• Exotic ore, 75 per batch, 40 minutes
Feed it more than one batch and the time scales accordingly, so 600 common ore is two batches and 20 minutes.
You have ten rows, use them
This is the bit most people miss. A Refining Centre gives you ten concurrent rows, not one. There is nothing stopping you loading all ten and walking away. Ten rows of common ore is 3,000 raw turning into 1,800 refined units in ten minutes flat, and you can be off mining while it runs.
Engineering pays you for it
Every batch awards Engineering experience, 10 for common up through 15 for rare and exotic. Engineering then pays you back with a better yield: a 5% output bonus to start, rising by 0.2% for every level you gain. It is slow, but it compounds, and Engineering is also what gates your turrets and harvesters.
Worth knowing
You can collect a finished batch remotely, so you are not tied to standing at the station waiting.