Can't refine any ores?

[Pinhead Larry]

Title. JUst started a new game after a 7 month hiatus or so, apparently now you have to refine the ore you gather before you can use it to build? Except depite having like 15k iron and 2k titanium in the starting secotr the refinery won't let me refine anything, the fields all stay stuck at 0, I can't fill any of them in and hitting "refine all" doesn't autofill it with anything. I have 20k credits so I should be able to afford to refine SOMETHING, but the game won't let me refine anything for some reason. Anyone know what's going on? Is it bugged?

[Kidd]

Some mining lasers give you raw ore that takes up cargo space in return for having way higher efficiency. Others automatically refine ore as it is mined with lower efficiency. The ones you start with are the latter.

[Pinhead Larry]

Ahhhh ok, dang, might need a big ol tooltip at game start for that in the future. Thanks mate!

[Chaoslink]

Yeah, they'll be marked as R-mining turrets. They'll have between 60-97.5% efficiency usually instead of the 15-20% of the standard mining turret. The difference being that the R miner doesn't give you usable ore and you'll need to refine it when your cargo bay is full with the benefit of getting 4-5x the ore per asteroid.

They're great. Makes mining much less of a pain. Also, use the mining system upgrades. Regular asteroids can have hidden nuggets of rich ore. Some of those really big ore asteroids will have maybe 70-150k ore in it, the average hidden ore might be 30-40k but it can be as high as 300k. Worth looking for.