Basic Refinery vs Refinery

[kyron.marenwolf]

So in a vanilla survival game, are there any advantages to running a basic refinery vs a refinery (advanced refinery)? To the best of my ability to tell, the refinery will do everything a basic refinery will do and faster, at the cost of more up front material costs and higher power draw. Is there any reason to keep running a basic refinery once you can make regular ones?

[Inkintx]

I think its a size thing. if your building a spaceship and want a refinery, you should probably use a basic refinery because it take's up less space which you could then use for other stuff, e.g, oxygen, hydrogen, etc. The basic refinery is also lighter.

[JarutheDamaja]

Stay away from basic refinery! It's actually worse. It yields less ingots per ore than the refinery. Plus the refinery can have yield-modules.
Especially in the beginning when handmining, i would recommend to still use the survival kit to refine stone rather than the basic refinery. Basic refinery looses roughly 1/3 of the output.

[SirGouki]

Originally posted by JarutheDamaja:

Stay away from basic refinery! It's actually worse. It yields less ingots per ore than the refinery. Plus the refinery can have yield-modules.

Pretty much, this. The basic refinery is a weaker version of the Refinery. It produces more gravel (although much less than the survival kit), takes longer to process, especially the more pure and higher end ores, and you can't process certain things with it at all (pretty much "end game" metals like gold). The increased power draw is worth it. On top of it, you can use modules on the larger machines, which you can't do on the basic versions. You should also be using the Assembler instead of Basic Assembler for similar reasons.

The only part I don't agree with is using the Survival kit instead of the basic refinery. You get a lot more gravel from the survival kit than you do from the basic refinery, and it takes longer to process the stone, keeping you hand mining longer. You should only use the weaker machinery as a step to get to the better versions, and then never look back (unless you need to make a small outpost on an asteroid or something and you for some reason don't have the materials to make a "good" refinery/assembler). Obviously, this is only referring to stuff for your base, as ships are a different thing all together. I'd still only use a Refinery/Assembler on a ship, and only on a Large Grid ship, depending on the point of the ship.

[Jack Schitt]

The basic refinery has a purpose. When we play a survival game the starter kit refines some items but not all and we come to the point where we want to build something the starter kit won't produce because it won't refine the kind of ore we need. The Basic Refinery does more than the starter kit but it's still limited. The basic one is meant to be used as an affordable way to produce things the starter kit won't, especially if we're using the progression option for the game we might not have the ability to even build an advanced refinery when we want to.

It's a step process the game is designed with. Starter Kit > Basic Refinery > Advanced Refinery.