Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Gameplay Features team, designer

So basically, ship refining will be drastically different to the station refinery. On the station refinery, you bring in your materials, you wait for quite some time, and then you get the end product. For the ships, it is an active process, so the player that is basically running the refinery ship has to analyze the material that is coming in and then decide on the correct process. So imagine there's a scenario: the player has picked up minerals and metals and has a refinery where there is a furnace. And the furnace will destroy the minerals. So that results in the loss of the minerals. But the metal would be refined, and it would be of great quality. For the purity part, that's not something that we account for in our first iteration. We now go more in the sense of: if you are effective, you have less loss of material.

Dan Trufin · EU PU Gameplay Features team

We'd rather go with the yield rather than purity, because it's easier for us to track, rather than adding a property on each... Let's say you've got gold at 57%, then you mix it with gold at 75%, then you need to average. We'd rather you get less gold out of it. You get pure gold, but it's less gold if you don't do it properly.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So the system is always working towards the highest purity. It's just a question of what the yield is.

Dan Trufin · EU PU Gameplay Features team

Yes. It's similar to how you do station refining right now. What goes out is pure. And you can sell it as an actual gold commodity on the market, rather than selling it as unrefined ore, and then you lose a lot of the profits. So what refining kind of aims to do is close a bit that gameplay loop that we started right now with mining, where we have to go to the station and then you sell. We would like to be able to do all of this in the field, where I get five Prospectors, or a few MOLEs and Prospectors, and one refinery ship, and that refinery ship becomes like the hub where everyone kind of brings... I mined all these rocks, I come to my refinery ship, I dump my sacks. So the sacks on the Prospector become ejectable now. With a tractor beam, the refinery ship is able to pick them up, attach them to their own ports. They are able to scoop all that stuff into their storage, dump the empty sack, the Prospector picks it up, goes back to mining. Now the refinery ship is running, constantly churning. It's constantly running whatever the guys bring, and is trying to not mix the minerals with the metals and kind of separate, and trying to think, well, on this batch I'm going to run this process, because there's a higher chance of yielding, of getting this material that I'm interested in. I might not care about aluminum when I've got Agricium in there. Or I might dispose of some diamonds if I have some Hephaestanite or whatever high price material. So there's going to be this constant choice, like, oh, if I add this catalyst to this furnace or this tank, I get this reaction, I get to extract this and that. So it's going to be a lot of choices for the players. Obviously, as per usual with all of our systems, things can go awfully wrong. And if you add the wrong catalyst, or don't watch the pressure, don't watch the timers and what's supposed to happen for the reaction to happen, things might go boom. Or not only go boom, but you might just lose the material. You might just get a shit ton of slag. Sorry for my use of funny language. But that is what it will be. You'll be really annoyed at that point and you'll use those curse words. So that's pretty much the idea. The goal is to create this gameplay loop where at this point you add the trader, not the trader, the hauler. He's not a trader. He will help this mining operation. He will be coming every, whatever, five minutes, takes whatever was refined by the Starfarer, puts it in his cargo hold, goes, sells to the market, comes back. And that creates an entire operation that an organization can run for hours and just keep churning profit. The difference is the Starfarer might not be able to refine as well as the station does, with 95% yield, but it doesn't matter, because you might get 80% or 60%, it doesn't even matter, because what you're transporting is so much smaller and condensed in value. You don't have to transport unrefined ore ship by ship, and it takes forever. So you're transporting very high yield, going there, selling, ship comes back. And this is where another fun part comes in. You actually get pirates coming in and preying on this chain. They might destroy the Prospector. They might destroy the refinery. They might destroy the hauling ship that is transporting the refined stuff to the station. And this is where you hire mercenaries or get your organization people to come in and protect your operation. Some will have to fly with the transport ship. Some will have to protect the refinery ship. So it creates this entire ecosystem where you have people preying on each other, helping each other, trying to make as much money as possible in as little time as possible, rather than waiting for an entire day for the station to refine stuff.