This page is really simple once you get use to using it, but when first starting some people have difficulties navigating within it. This guide will be pretty simple and hopefully will make it easier to understand.
Download file as mp3
What Is A Refinery
Simply it takes normal ore or fragments and turns them into more valuable resources. Ore is turned into refined ore for example. The ore has to be inside the refinery to process it into the new resource. You can move it from your ship to the refinery manually or mining drones can deposit it automatically as they mine an asteroid for you. It is location based, you can only refine ore which is stored at the same orbiting refinery you are located at.
Where To Find An Orbiting Refinery
These can be found in most solar systems that have an asteroid. However this is not the case for all of them. For example in VP you won't find any orbiting refinery's as there simply are not any in that galaxy.
To interact with an orbiting refinery you first need to click on the button for it. This will put you into orbit of the refinery. After orbiting it clicking on the button again will allow you to interact with it. After choosing to interact you will have a conformation screen that looks something like this.
Docking
Sorry Captain, we are unable to dock at this location, as there is no docking ring available. There may be a valid reason we cannot dock here. Perhaps the Galaxy Locator may help.
You can access the Galaxy Locator from the top left Tab 'Game Info'. There are a number of reasons you may not be able to dock here. Normally the indicator is in the Controlling Faction of the Planet. If this is somewhere you docked at in the past it may be time to visit the Forums and Read Dev and ISN posts.You would appear to be trying to interact with an Orbiting Refinery. If this is the case, click the Refine Button Below
Enter Orbiting Refinery (button)
Return to Navigation Screen (button)
Simply hit the "enter orbiting refinery" button to proceed into the actual refinery screen.
The Orbiting Refinery Interface
When you first ender directly under the Assets Tab you will have a line of text that tells you what your current location is. Under that is a exit link followed by some text explaining about the orbiting refinery.
Farpoint 1 Refinery
(link) Exit Refinery
In order to refine Ore, you need to transfer ore into the refinery hopper. Once the ore has been transferred over, click the Refine Ore button below. This will activate the refinery, and convert your ore to Refined Ore.
The amount of Refined Ore that will be returned will depend entirely upon your refining skills. The higher the skill, the better the conversion rate. Your Refined Ore will be placed back into the refinery hopper, allowing you to collect it at your convenience. Starting the refining process will automatically process your entire stock of ore in the refinery hopper!
Under this you have a button to enter into the advanced refinery management. This will not be covered in this guide as this type of refining will come much later and by then you should know what you are doing enough to manage it without a guide.
After this you get into the actual nuts and bolts of refining ore and doing something in the refinery. The first line you'll see is something like this.
Ore in Refinery: 0 | Refining Skill: 637 | Estimated Refine Yield : 0
Insufficient Ore (button
The refining skill will clearly be different for you depending on how many skill points you have put into refining. If you have ore in the refinery already that you can refine the button here is the one you click to refine it. The resulting refined ore will be in the refinery and you will have to move it to your ship or us the transfer option to move it to a commercial storage of your choosing.
The Orbiting Refinery Table
Explaining The Table
This shows the basic table for the refinery if you don't have any ore in the refinery already but have ore in your ship's hold. It is pretty simplistic. Within the table you have two sections.
The first section is for transferring ore in the refinery to your ship or to a commercial storage. This section of the table has the table headers of.
Resource Type.
Amount.
Transfer To Ship Hold.
Transfer To CS.
This is very self explanatory. If you use table commands in this table you will have no problem. If you want to move ore from your ship to the refinery then you want the bottom half of the table. This one has the headers of.
Resource Type.
Amount.
Transfer To Refinery.
Review Stock, tells you info about the particular ore.
In this example I could move 285 normal ore into the refinery and turn it into refined ore. To do that I would simply hit the button to move it to refinery. After that I would hit the first button the page would be a refine ore button. This would then put the refined ore inside the refinery. It would show up in the first part of this table and I could then choose to move the refined ore into my ship or to transport it to a commercial storage with the appropriate buttons.
Overall it is really simple once you get the hang of the layout. You shouldn't have any problems refining ore for your starter missions and refining ore from mining drones as long as you understand the layout of the page.