Copper and Iron Smelting, Advanced

Pay for the metalworking leap

Going metallic is a fixed, planned expense. From the board:

That $3,500 is before your lot, drills, and working capital. Save it from early contracts; do not finance it with a loan you cannot service.

Stand up the smelter

1. Buy Metalworking License #1 ($2,000) so you are legally allowed to process metals.
2. Place the Smelter ($1,500) beside your Factory Storage — metals must pass through Factory Storage to be counted and routed.
3. Feed copper ore and iron ore into the smelter input.

Route through Factory Storage

Copper and iron are not like limestone — they must travel through Factory Storage to be tracked. If your belt dumps ore straight into the smelter while bypassing storage, the system may not register the input and you get no ingots.

• Belt ore into Factory Storage first.
• Pull from storage into the smelter.
• This also gives you a buffer if one machine stalls.

Switch recipes, not machines

The smelter is multi-recipe. To change output:

1. Open the smelter panel.
2. Switch the recipe to copper ingot or iron ingot.
3. Confirm the input matches the recipe (copper ore for copper ingots, iron ore for iron).

Mixing inputs under the wrong recipe burns ore and yields nothing.

Fix the missing ingot output

If ingots never appear:

• Check the output tile is free — a blocked output stops the smelter silently.
• Confirm the recipe matches the ore fed.
• Confirm ore actually reached Factory Storage, not a dead-end belt.
• Verify the license is active; an expired or missing license halts metal processing.

A missing ingot is almost always a routing or recipe mismatch, not a broken machine.

When to leave Greenpark

Greenpark is copper- and iron-poor. Once you consistently need ingots, look for a lot that actually contains them. A good copper-iron claim lets you skip the long ore haul and feeds the smelter directly.

Why Westmont is not the answer

Westmont is cheap — about $700 for 2000 m² — but it is still a basic-material lot. It will not solve your copper-iron bottleneck; you would just move the same shortage to a bigger plot. Spend the premium on a lot that genuinely contains copper and iron veins.

Bottom line

License, smelter, Factory Storage routing, and correct recipes get you ingots. But the real fix for a copper-iron bottleneck is location — leave Greenpark for a lot that has the veins, and let Westmont's cheap soil go to someone still building basics.