To refine ore you need to access an orbital refinery and have a quantity of ore available to refine.
This can either be transported there by yourself in your cargo hold or be a quantity that has been deposited there by any remote mining drones that you may be using in the system.
Click on the orbital refinery and you will receive a message on the bottom bar instructing you that unfortunately you are unable to dock at an orbiting refinery but don’t worry as this is normal.
Now you can either click on the orbital refinery again or click on the new red spanner icon on the top bar. Please note that you will need to have a minimum of 10 skill points in refining to use an orbital refinery.
If you are a new player click the skills button on the blue footer bar and spend 10 points in the refining skill.
When you access the refinery, you will have a number of options. For the purpose of this basic guide we will cover simply refining the ore you have with you.
As per the picture below you will see that you have some ORE in your Ships Cargo Hold. We need to move this to the refinery so it can be processed. press the ‘Transfer to Refinery’ button.
The ore will be transferred to the refinery. IF you have enough ore in the refinery to make at least 1 unit of refined ore you will see the Yellow bar offer you the option to ‘Refine Ore’
Let’s Press the Refine Ore Button and refine our ‘Ore’ in to ‘Refined Ore’. Note the newly refined ore stays on the Refinery.
How much Refined ore you get is directly tied to your Refining skill. The higher the skill the more your refinery rate will be. Initially your refined return will not be that high but don’t worry.
OK so we refined the ore and now we need to Transfer the Refined Ore in to our ships Hold so we can take it back to Jonas at Starbase-51.
As per the picture below – Click the Fill hold button and any Refined ore you have on the Refinery will be transferred to your ship.
If for some reason you have not managed to refine at least TWO units of ore you will need to go back to an asteroid field and mine more ore. Initially you will need a minimum of 50 units of ore transferred into the refinery to create an initial 2 units of Refined Ore.